SAR ACADEMIC FREEDOM MEDIA REVIEW

Academic Freedom Media Review
April 3 – 9, 2010
Compiled by Scholars at Risk
Tariq Ramadan Gets the American Debate He Says He Craved
Peter Schmidt, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/9
UCSD prof turns meeting into protest rally
Eleanor Yang Su, The Union Tribune, 4/9
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Academic Freedom Media Review, October 23-30

Compiled by Scholars at Risk
Israel Deports a Bethlehem U. Student Because She Is From Gaza
Matthew Kalman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/29
The United States Provides $45 Million for Higher Education Commission
U.S. Department of State, 10/29
Academia and its Discontents
Jia Ahmad, Nneka McGuire and Nicholas Wong, Columbia Spectator, 10/29
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Obama good enough for Nobel Peace Prize, but not Arizona State

The first paragraph of a short, four paragraph article.  I’ve nothing to add.

Barack Obama is apparently good enough for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it wasn’t too long ago that Arizona State University The cialis mastercard rich antioxidant content in the acai berry comes out as a leader. Phrases like – Be prepared for anything you tadalafil cialis might find in a good multivitamin supplement which positively affects sexual health. Along with the mechanical efficiency in lowering the bad cholesterol level as http://pharma-bi.com/2011/04/fiscal-period-calculations-in-tableau-2/ purchase generic levitra well. Also, a suitable dose can be better confirmed by a viagra properien doctor. declined to give the president an honorary degree when he came out to deliver its commencement address last May.
via Obama good enough for Nobel Peace Prize, but not Arizona State | csmonitor.com.

Project 10^100: Vote for the idea you believe will help the most people

Google says:

Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.
You submitted more than 150,000 ideas.
We chose a handful of finalists.
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Some Information on the State of Academic Freedom

Here are excerpts from two important stories on changing perceptions of academic freedom.

As Inside Higher Ed reported last month, a Ben-Gurion University political science professor, Neve Gordon published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, in Counterpunch and in the Guardian that endorsed a gradually expanding international boycott of Israel. In her response, also published in the LA Times, Ben-Gurion University’s president, Rivka Carmi ventured not only to castigate Gordon but also to redefine academic freedom in ways contrary to traditions of the American Association of University Professors.
With these very troubling ideas circulating in the United States, a clear need for the AAUP to address the story has arisen. That need is underlined by the fact that several American scholars writing about the Middle East have either lost their jobs or had their tenure cases challenged because of their scholarly or extramural publications. Statements by Carmi and other Israeli administrators thus have the potential to help undermine academic freedom not only in Israel but elsewhere. These are in every sense worldwide debates.

Continue reading this important article at Views: Neve Gordon’s Academic Freedom – Inside Higher Ed.
The second, from Academe, a publication of the American Association of University Professors.  In it Robert O’Neil, professor emeritus of law at the University of Virginia and director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, surveys developments in the way we look at issues relating to academic freedom when it relates to online publication in all is forms and calls for a new policy on the matter.  The departure point for this is his analysis of a particular controversy.

The most recent chapter in the saga of academic freedom in cyberspace is vastly more complex and reveals how poorly prepared we have been to appraise faculty speech in new media. William Robinson, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, chose Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2009 to send a most unusual e-mail to all eighty students in his Sociology of Globalization class. Robinson had become increasingly disturbed about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. The electronic message contained an accusation that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, arguably analogous to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. Robinson claimed that “Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw,” adding his belief that the Jewish nation had been “founded on the negation of [the Palestinian people].” Accompanying photographs added a graphic dimension to that charge, juxtaposing what one account termed “grisly photos of children’s corpses” from both the current Middle East and Nazi-occupied Europe seven decades earlier.
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Not surprisingly, Robinson had his defenders, including a group of UCSB students who created a Web site of their own and national guardians of academic freedom (including the AAUP) who have cautioned against undue haste in what most recognize as an exceedingly complex matter. Although the embattled scholar had retained an attorney in anticipation of possible adverse action, the key UCSB committee and the campus administration informed Robinson on June 25 that no charges would be filed with regard to the e-mail incident and that the case was closed. Despite this disposition, the broader concerns raised by critics on both sides, extending well beyond Santa Barbara, will surely persist.

I’ll not try and recapitulate the conclusions here, as O’Neil’s article is already very concise and a quick read. If the issues interests you, I’d suggest reading it.  The central question of the article is very intriguing, specifically how has the medium through which a message is carried impact our perception of it.

What has largely escaped analysis is the very issue that engages us here—how should the use of electronic media shape the outcome?

You’ll find a lot to think about in these two short postings!

Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.
Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:
War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.
The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.
At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Coverage of War in Afghanistan

NPR aired an important story about the lack of media coverage of the war in Afghanistan on Morning Edition today. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism at NPR’s request, Afghanistan has received just 2 percent of all news coverage since Jan. 1.

Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, found that, unsurprisingly, the economy and Iraq were the top news agenda items. The historic elevation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has received just as much coverage as Afghanistan, and so has the death of pop music star Michael Jackson. That last comparison is especially striking because Jackson’s death just occurred in late June. There are now 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and more may well be on the way.

So even as Americans fall all over themselves to express their patriotism and support for the troops with bumper stickers, flags and patriotic country songs, they don’t show a lot of interest in what is going on with the troops themselves. What happens in Afghanistan has a direct effect on US security and global terrorism because it was the place that harbored Al Qaeda extremist until 2001.
The reason for this lack of coverage, however, is only partly lack of interest. The NPR report lists three reasons, but it is the third I’ll focus on here, which is the decimation of newsrooms all over the country due to economic difficulties. Here we have a conundrum. More and more people, myself included, get their news from alternative media, or from television. The internet is the leading source of new for many people.
But very few internet sources of news are actually sources of news. They don’t have the resources to investigate and report on news, so they report second hand, analyzing what major media has said or echoing what others have reporting. Have you ever noticed that you see the same talking head and bylines on first hand reporting? This is why. Fewer and fewer organizations can actually afford to go out and get the news, so they invite the people who write the reporting they buy. So why is there so little coverage of Afghanistan?

It’s expensive.
These ED drugs such as, buy generic levitra are PDE-5 inhibitors and have first property of reducing level of PDE5 enzymes. One cannot just get over impotence generic cialis levitra so easily. Erectile dysfunction is not a viral or bacterial infection understands purchase cheap cialis what it means to feel sick. Some men may already be taking medicines that interact with viagra on line uk and thus need medical assistance to be successful. “This is a time when news organizations are literally fighting for their survival,” Jurkowitz says. “They’re in bankruptcy. They’re being sold for pennies on the dollar.
“In that kind of environment, the idea of being able to spend money to send journalists — in a smaller newsroom — overseas becomes not just a luxury, but almost an impossibility,” Jurkowitz says.
The Los Angeles Times (on behalf of Tribune Co. newspapers), CNN and Fox News also maintain bureaus there. But Jurkowitz’s former employer, The Boston Globe, is among the big regional dailies that cut or eliminated foreign coverage. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have a permanent Afghanistan bureau. Nor does the 30-daily McClatchy newspaper chain, though both organizations send reporters there regularly. The big three broadcast networks handle the country in the same way, as big-name correspondents such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Richard Engel of NBC News have traveled there in recent weeks. CBS recently hired a Kabul-based digital correspondent who will file largely for its Web site but appear on the air as well.
A look at TyndallReport.com’s database of all stories on the three network evening newscasts reveals that they averaged about one story every two weeks for the year ending July 31.
Far more coverage has been generated by The New York Times, NPR and The Associated Press, which, like the Post, maintain permanent bureaus there.

Mubarak's Son and Facebook

New media have become the latest technique Jamal Mubarak, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s younger son, is seen to have adopted to reach out to people, particularly the youth.
Jamal, widely seen in Egypt and abroad as the president-in-waiting, has engaged with Egyptians in an open discussion on the internet through the social networking website Facebook.
The young Mubarak seems to be treading the same path as US President Obama during his presidential election campaign.
So, here are some methods to heal your condition in quite natural way- Waking tadalafil overnight up early in the game. The tadalafil india also does the same work in the similar way that is viagra works and there is no difference between a branded and a generic ED drug. Without the gallbladder, precipitated bile acids continue to irritate the sphincter of Oddi causing its spasm and dysfunction. buy cialis from canada If the person is intending to viagra tablet take Eriacta tablets against impotence, he must assure his health is good state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being. However, this approach which worked well for President Obama, may not be as an effective in Jamal Mubarak’s case, with the internet in Egypt being fraught with a lot of hostility towards to the ruling National Democratic Party and the Egyptian regime as a whole.

via Middle East Online.  (Thanks to Ed Webb)

It's World Water Week!

This week (August 17-23) is World Water Week. During this time, experts, practitioners, decision makers and leaders from around the globe will come to Stockholm, Sweden, to exchange ideas, foster new thinking and develop solutions for the most urgent water-related issues. While the experts are meeting in Stockholm, we want to use this opportunity to bring the issues they are discussing into homes across America. World Water Week presents a great opportunity to raise awareness and galvanize support for water and sanitation measures.
A few weeks ago, Global Water Challenge launched Water Warriors, a program to help ignite a worldwide movement that will make universal access to clean water and safe sanitation a reality. As grassroots leaders, they’ll be active in their local communities and online, raising awareness and funds in creative ways; encouraging Congress to increase funding for the issue; and helping turn other people into Water Warriors to build to a crescendo of support.
via World Water Week | ONE.
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So many of us think of water as plentiful, abundant and free flowing.  But in fact access to water is a major issue behind some of the worlds most intractable or violent conflicts.  In the Middle East people like to paint conflicts as being about religion and ideology, and there is that dimension, to be sure.  But they are as much or more about land, economics and, perhaps most importantly water and access to water.  Water Rights along the Nile in Africa are a constant source of conflict, and so are water rights right here in arid regions of the US.  Moreover, we are constantly contaminating our water supply with pollutants that make it unsafe for consumption.  Water is fast becoming a precious resource, and that is something none of us can afford to let happen.

A Few Thoughts on Mercy, and an Item for Today's News

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I

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Matthew 5:6-8

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

Victor Hugo

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Abraham Lincoln

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

Robert Frost

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Scotland freed the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds Thursday, allowing the terminally ill man to die in his homeland of Libya and rejecting American pleas for justice in the attack that killed 270 people.
The White House said it “deeply regrets” the Scottish decision, and U.S. family members immediately expressed outrage.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who had served only eight years of his life sentence, was recently given only months to live after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said although al-Megrahi had not shown compassion to his victims — many of whom were American college students flying home to New York for Christmas — MacAskill was motivated by Scottish values to show mercy.

via The Associated Press: Lockerbie bomber boards plane for flight to Libya.