Yuck (to put it mildly).

For what it's worth "Emergency Funding" for clubs at Brandeis basically means going to the Student Union and asking for funds for your event. (That is funds that weren't originally allocated to the club at the start of the Semester).

(An update to the above:
Professor Finkelstein to visit Brandeis after F-board approval

When jimmy carter appeared in received a standing ovation.

One student in the article linked by "Jaws" says that it will be right to have Finkelstein at Brandeis as long as he doesn't engage in "hate speech."

I see a problem here. This is a sign of a slippery slope regarding what constitutes hate speech and what doesn't. And the confusion will become worse now that a new category has emerged: speech that doesn’t qualify as hateful but that contributes to hatred nonetheless. By that I mean speech that pushes the envelope, that’s profoundly biased, but that stays within the bounds of normal political and academic discourse. As anti-Zionism becomes more mainstream, we’re going to see a lot more of this.

Is Jimmy Carter's book hate speech? No. But it will do greater harm than David Duke or Noam Chomsky could ever dream of doing. There’s Walt and Mearsheimer’s article, which first appeared in The London Review of Books. The authors are now coming out with a book version. Then there’s Richard Cohen and Tony Judt, well regarded writers published in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books respectively, well outside the ghetto of leftwing journals. But this trend isn’t limited to serious commentary. The novel Alexandria Link is just a middlebrow thriller, but it will also do a lot of harm: http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-02-18-1.html . Same with Steven Spielberg's film Munich. Some of these works will plainly state anti-Israel views. Others will merely take such views for granted, making them seem totally natural to the general public.

In other words, the worst challenge we face now is speech that leads to hatred or contempt—but in increments. Each novel, film, television program, or article alone will be perfectly respectable and unassailable, especially when authored by someone with prestigious or at least solid credentials. But the accumulation of such works could lead to a political culture in which views about Israel (and the Jews) that were unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago could gradually become normal.

The problem is that it’s hard to fight back, because any attempt to do so would strike the public as an act of censorship. You would be accused of trying to suppress someone else’s constitutional right of “free speech.”

And then there are those who say that the answer to bad speech is “more speech.” But that doesn’t always help. Noxious views can become dominant if they reflect the fashionable politics of a superficially educated audience. When this happens, “more speech” ends up being defensive speech, a rearguard action that may slow but not stop the spread of anti-Zionist bigotry.

The problem is that there’s a fine line between free speech and propaganda, or perhaps no line at all. It’s true that people who are harshly critical of Israel and rue its existence have the right to be heard. It is not great when rightwing Zionists try to intimidate them or ruin their reputations. But it’s also not great when anti-Semites or ideological anti-Zionists use the same tactics or worse to intimidate or discredit those defend Israel. Where do you draw the line?

How do you stop demagoguery without quashing legitimate speech? Trying to decide which is which will become more difficult than ever. That’s the slippery slope again. The ideal solution would be to have a well-educated public that can be counted on to make sound judgments. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have that, especially in the universities and the mainstream media.

[edit: fixed link -S]

I just noticed that the link to the article about the novel The Alexandria Link doesn't work for some reason.

Anyway, just Google it. It's by Steve Berry, and the author of the review to which I linked is Orson Scott Card. I found the review at www.ornery.org.

the link works if you take the period off the end

Oh, ok, thanks.

So, here it is again, without the period:

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-02-18-1.html

As a follow up to Joanne's comment, for what it's worth, Brandeis does have a speech code (hence the reference to "hate speech" in the article)

(Disclaimer: I'm a Brandeis alumnus, and despite my differences in politics with the school, loved the time I spent there and received a great education).

In away, there's something very ironic in this case. The same groups of students who are spearheading Finkelstein's visit to the campus, happen to be from the same groups that demagogued Daniel Pipes when he came to speak at Brandeis in Fall '03. (I think there may be a post or two on this blog about that whole to do).

One of the goals of a university is to instill into its students the ability to think critically. That way, they'll be able to separate propaganda from fact (and vice versa).
I'm pleased to say that my education at Brandeis empowered me with this skill.