Tuesday, October 23, 2007
No in-group enjoys external oversight and comment. Academics are no exception: Inside Higher Ed: A Call to Defend Academic Freedom
Saying that they are fed up with “aggressive incursion of partisan politics into universities’ hiring and tenure practices,” five prominent academics have issued a call to “defend the university” and gathered dozens of backers in what they view as a new way to bolster academic freedom.
The Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University has issued a statement and is asking professors and others to sign on.
“In recent years, universities across the country have been targeted by outside groups seeking to influence what is taught and who can teach. To achieve their political agendas, these groups have defamed scholars, pressured administrators, and tried to bypass or subvert established procedures of academic governance,” the statement says. “As a consequence, faculty have been denied jobs or tenure, and scholars have been denied public platforms from which to share their viewpoints. This violates an important principle of scholarship, the free exchange of ideas, subjecting them to ideological and political tests. These attacks threaten academic freedom and the core mission of institutions of higher education in a democratic society.”...
...Signatories to the statement pledge, among other things, to “speak out against those who attack our colleagues and our universities in order to achieve their political goals” and to “urge university administrators and trustees to defend academic freedom and the norms of academic life, even if it means incurring the displeasure of non-scholarly groups, the media among them.”...
...The statement comes at a time of a series of high profile hiring or tenure cases involving professors who work on the Middle East and whose work has been subject to scrutiny by many non-academics during the process they were under consideration. Among the cases are those of Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist up for tenure at Barnard College; and Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan who saw his candidacy for a job at Yale University derailed.
And this week, David Horowitz and his campus allies are sponsoring “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” a series of events that will among other things say that women’s studies and other left-leaning scholars aren’t doing enough to combat radical Islam — and these events are already setting off controversies on many campuses, where students and professors say that the week is a thinly disguised effort to scare people about Muslims...
So the effort is already showing it has its own political agenda that goes beyond the pure protection of the fragile flowers of academia.
No mention of defending James Russell, or Tim Furnish, or Thomas Klocek? Quelle surprise.
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Here are details of an upcoming conference at Columbia U. I've no particular reason to suspect problems with it (indeed, it's important to note that there might not be any) but at this point I figure it's best to post about it and let others investigate: I don't mant to end up reading in the papers only after the fact, about yet another academic anti-Israel fest:
The Center for International History COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Announces Symbols of Exclusion
A Graduate Student Conference
April 4, 2008
Deadline for abstract submission: December 15, 2007
From the totem to the noose, symbols have been used not only to unify people, but also to signify the exclusion of particular groups from social, ethnic, religious, or national communities. This conference seeks to address the following questions: How have symbols accrued meanings and power, and how have these meanings both created and reflected new social realities? How have various political, cultural, and religious ideologies taken material form? What is the relationship between various symbols and historical memory? How have the meanings of symbols changed in different historical contexts, and how have they been deployed by specific groups? As this conference is presented in conjunction with the Center for International History’s annual theme, “In the Name of Humanity,†we are also interested in the ways in which symbols have been deployed to mark the changing definitions and conceptual boundaries of humanity itself.
We invite submissions from all time periods – ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern – and various geographic regions. Papers on topics that are broadly transnational or global in scope are preferred. Additionally, we encourage interdisciplinary research, and although proposals with a historical perspective are particularly welcome, we will also consider contributions from the fields of anthropology, sociology, literary studies, political science, and economics. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a recent CV as email attachments (Word preferred) by December 15, 2007 and any inquiries to Aimee Genell at the following address: amg2159@columbia.edu.
For more information regarding the conference, please refer to the Centre for International History’s website (beginning December 15): http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cih
Limited funding for travel and assistance in arranging accommodation may be available.
Important dates: Submission deadline: December 15, 2007
Conference: April 4, 2008
Looks like a good venue for presenting a paper about how a symbol can be born in a hoax and a lie, as in the case of the shahidization and de-mythification of the boy Al-Dura, symbol of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.