December
2:
Daniel Pipes, of Campus Watch,
will speak on "Militant
Islam and the War on Terror."
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: IUB Campus, Jordan Hall 124
What is Campus Watch?
What
is the nature of the analyses of individual scholars published on
the Campus Watch website?
What does the American Association of University Professors
say about Campus Watch?
What is Campus Watch?
Campus Watch, a website created by the Middle East Forum, invites student
complaints about Middle East studies faculty members who they believe
are guilty of analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship,
intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and/or the abuse of power
over students.
According to Campus Watch, “The Middle East studies professorate
is almost monolithically leftist due to a systematic exclusion of those
with conservative or even moderately liberal views. The result is that
Middle East studies lack intellectual diversity.”
Campus Watch investigates student claims, and makes
these known. It also produces analyses of institutions, individual
scholars, topics, events, and trends and makes these known through the
media -
newspaper opeds, radio interviews, television interviews.
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What is the nature of the analyses of individual scholars published on
the Campus Watch website?
Campus Watch criticizes John Esposito of Georgetown University for
stating that Islamist movements "are not necessarily anti-Western, anti-American,
or anti-democratic".
They have criticized University-based Middle East specialists for predicting
the Palestinians would establish a democracy, ushering in a transformation
of the Middle East. For example, Georgetown's Hisham Sharabi is criticized
for having declared in 1983, "The Palestinians, despite their
dispossession and dispersion, exercise today probably one of the few
functioning democracies
in the Third World."
The site also criticizes Ibrahim Abu-Lughod of Northwestern University,
who predicted in 1988: "Under a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and Gaza, which surely will be democratic and secular, Palestinian
Arabs
and Israeli Jews will be bonded in a political order not yet experienced
in the Middle East."
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What does the American Association of University Professors say about
Campus Watch?
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) report, "Academic
Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis", includes
the following statement:
To be sure, the government is not the sole source of efforts to discourage
lawful speech or conduct. Since September 11, 2001, private groups, parading
under the banner of patriotism or acting to further a specific cause,
have been monitoring academic activities and have denounced professorial
departures from what these groups view as acceptable. A private project
called Campus Watch, for example, has subjected professors of Middle
Eastern studies to such scrutiny. Antecedents to these efforts can be
found in the activities of the John Birch Society in the 1960s and of
the Accuracy in Academia movement in the 1980s.
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