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!

News: Israel and Academic Freedom – Inside Higher Ed

The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association, the largest interdisciplinary society of scholars studying the Middle East and North Africa, has protested the expressed intention of Ben Gurion University to discipline one of it’s faculty members for an opinion expressed in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.

Neve Gordon has no illusions about the ability of Palestinian terrorists to harm Israelis. In 1986, while serving as a paratrooper on Israel’s border with Lebanon, he suffered severe injuries from hand grenades and bullets.
These days, Gordon is under a very different kind of attack — one that he and other Israeli academics say endangers the state of academic freedom in their country. Gordon is the chair of politics at Ben-Gurion University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and publishes widely in Israel and the United States — with much of his writing critical of his country’s government. Ten days ago, he published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he called Israel an “apartheid state” and called for an international boycott of Israel to push the creation of a Palestinian state.
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But in a move that stunned and outraged many Israeli academics (including many who disagree with Gordon’s analysis), the university also said it was looking for legal ways to discipline him. Scholars like Gordon have long criticized Israel’s policies — from their home country, the United States and elsewhere — without being disciplined, so the reaction to this essay is seen as significant far beyond Gordon’s op-ed.
via News: Israel and Academic Freedom – Inside Higher Ed.