ACADEMIC "FREEDOM" TO BE ANTI-SEMITIC AT UC BERKELEY

California’s Betrayal of Academic Freedom
... Until this year, ... [political] indoctrination was explicitly recognized by the UC administration as academically unacceptable. Thus rule APM 0-10 of UC Berkeley’s Academic Personnel Manual, written by UC President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1934 stated quite clearly:

“The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts….Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.”

Unfortunately, these noble words have been honored more in the breach than in the observance for a long time in the UC system. But the mere fact of their existence was annoying to faculty ideologues at Berkeley. Consequently, at the behest of former UC president Richard Atkinson, they were summarily removed this year by a tiny minority of the UC community in a 43-3 vote of the faculty Senate, which took place on July 30. 2003. The academic freedom clause was replaced by another, which essentially said that professors can teach anything they want in the classroom. This is a momentous and ominous event in the life of American universities, and therefore the academic context in which it occurred needs to be understood.

Two incidents precipitated the change in UC policy on academic freedom. The first was the complaint of a student at UC Berkeley that her Middle Eastern studies lecturer had told students that the notorious Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was true. The Protocols describes a Jewish plot to control the world and was a document used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of Jews. The student’s complaint was dismissed by university authorities. An official of the UC Academic Senate defended the professor’s preposterous and bigoted statement as coming under the protection of “academic freedom,” and explained the view that was eventually codified in the Academic Personnel Manual as APM 0-15:

“I too had assumed these “Protocols” are a fraud but I am hardly an expert on the subject. [B]ut quite frankly there are many theories in social science I think are pure nonsense that have currency; I guess that is part of the messiness of academic freedom…and we each have our favorite ‘excesses.’”

It hardly needs to be emphasized that traditionally academic freedom had nothing to do with the propagation of proven forgeries like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as though they were true.

The second incident involved a required freshman English writing class conducted by instructor Snehal Shingavi. Shingavi is the head of the International Socialist Organization, a group that describes itself as “Leninist” and calls for violent revolution. He is also head of Students for Justice in Palestine. Shingavi organized an anti-American demonstration on September 11, 2001 after the World Trade Center attacks and has been arrested for leading illegal and violent demonstrations on campus. Shingavi’s course was called “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,” and was listed in the catalogue along with the warning “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” This sentence led to public ridicule and outrage. It was removed from the catalogue by university officials, but the course itself was allowed to continue.

When UC President Atkinson introduced the idea of altering the existing academic freedom code he specially mentioned the Shingavi course as an instance of why the existing code (which explicitly disapproved of such courses) was no longer useful in addressing contemporary questions. It was “outdated.” Atkinson’s statement was the university’s formal capitulation to the political forces that have taken over the university. The new guidelines leave the university’s standards in this matter to the Academic Senate, and limit the criterion for what is acceptable in the classroom to academic “competence.” This competence, however, is certified by the credentialing system before the professor enters a classroom. In other words the revision of the guidelines for academic freedom in the UC system is a direct and explicit surrender of the academic curriculum to the political ideologues on the UC faculties. It is an announcement that UC administrators now sanction the political abuse of California’s system of higher education by radical activists who have seized its faculties and who are bent on its exploiting its curriculum for the most extreme agendas of the radical left.