Israeli academics are being watched. Vigilantes check what they say or write – and, if they are judged “anti-Israel,” incite donors to the universities and colleges where they teach to act against them. Students are encouraged to spy on their teachers and to report what they say.

Academics on the left are the targets. They are vilified as “Israel’s academic fifth column” and “our inner scourge.” They are called “traitors” and are accused of “treasonous betrayal” and of wanting “to suck up to and be accepted by the enemy.” (full article…)

“We need to ask you some questions,” she said. She took me aside. I was so nervous. She clarified my name and email, then she asked me about my time in Beirut. I told her it was a study program, organized by a translation service.She frowned. “Why do you like Arabs?” I didn’t know what to say. Is it a crime in Israel to love Arabs? Is it a crime to study Palestinian art?

“Palestinian art?” she said, “like what?” “Lots of stuff,” I said, ” Plays, movies, books; everywhere, all over the world.” (full article…)

The public response called for a principled defense of academic freedom by President Carmi. Instead, she made herself part of the public outcry against Gordon. Worse still, Carmi has sought to narrow academic freedom and undermine the protections it offers, calling Gordon’s column an effort “to advocate a personal opinion, which is really demagoguery cloaked in academic theory.” The notion that a political scientist cannot combine academic arguments with conclusions, theory with advocacy, strikes at the heart of the principle that academics have the right to advise the public and seek an impact on public policy. (more…)

A decision by the University of Wyoming to name a new center for international students for former Vice President Dick Cheney is drawing criticism from people who say Cheney’s support for the Iraq war and harsh interrogation techniques should disqualify him from the distinction.

The former vice president and wife Lynne are expected to attend Thursday’s dedication of the new Cheney International Center on the Laramie campus. (more…)

Unwavering support for Israeli policy has eroded dramatically both on American college campuses and within the United States as a whole, according to a group of American university professors who on Sunday concluded an academic exchange program here, sponsored by the Yitzhak Rabin Center. (more…)

As’ad AbuKhalil, Lebanese politics professor at California State University, said Iranian opponents of Ahmadinejad — if they come out on top — would still likely promote a nationalist agenda that Riyadh sees as a threat to its interests. Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi was prime minister under the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The site of public demonstrations by the thousands against their leaders …troubles all Arab leaders,” AbuKhalil said, pointing to the lack of popular democracy on a par with that of Iran in most of the Arab countries. “Arab regimes may also fear that if the Iranian regime feels cornered and pressured, it may lash out, and Saudi Arabia may be the first to feel the wrath of the regime,” he said. (more…)

“The Carmel Academic Center in Haifa shut down the concentration in accounting within its Department of Business Administration because a majority of the students applying were Palestinian citizens of Israel. This was revealed in a news item reported on Israeli news Channel 10 on 24 May (in Hebrew only).” (more…)

Some academics say that while the growing gap between theory and policy may have costs for policy, it has produced better social science theory, and that this is more important than whether such scholarship is relevant. Also, to some extent, the gap is an inevitable result of the growth and specialization of knowledge. Few people can keep up with their subfields, much less all of social science. But the danger is that academic theorizing will say more and more about less and less. (more…)

Clark University canceled a campus talk scheduled for later this month by controversial Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein, saying his presence “would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding,” and would conflict with a similar event scheduled around the same time. (more…)

“You have more freedom to express support for Israeli war crimes than to speak about the Palestinian civilian victims in the war on Gaza,” As’ad Abu Khalil, professor of political science at California State University, told AlArabiya.net. “There is a general climate that is very sympathetic and solidly dogmatic in favor of Zionism then it is to Palestinians and its supporters,” he said, adding that as people start pay attention to Israeli crimes Zionists are clamping down on any dissent by exerting “horrendous forms of pressure on school administrations … Academic freedom is not equally distributed here in the U.S.,” he said. “There is a tremendous illogical moral and ethical asymmetry on college campuses.” (more…)

While we decry Israeli war crimes and violations of human rights, and condemn the massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza which has caused hundreds of deaths, as educators in California institutions of higher learning, we are especially appalled at the destruction of educational institutions and student casualties. (more…)

I have been trying to avoid writing this review, not because of the book’s subject matter (this is not a profound book any sense of the word) but because it has been done so many times before and has by now become quite dated in the ephemeral world of controversy. But I finally read the book more than two years after downloading the original working paper of the same title from the Kennedy School of Government’s website—and at least a year since the book itself was published. I had put off reading the expanded argument because I was already familiar with both the working paper and the version published in the London Review of Books—plus, I was aware that Mearsheimer and Walt had based their arguments entirely on secondary research and I am already very familiar with the topic.

First, let me just address a minor issues: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (henceforth M/W) must be congratulated for their attempts at initiating a serious debate about this absurdly sensitive issue (at least in the United States). Considering their argument is neither new to anyone familiar with the subject, the book’s only real contribution is its success at reaching a wide audience. Had similar arguments been published by less reknowned academics and pundits (which they have been), “the Lobby” would surely have buried them in a mountain of obsolescence, ignored and forgotten without concern (which they have). But M/W cannot be dismissed as ideologues and so, the likes of Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz and other apologists for Israeli/U.S. crimes immediately went on the offensive by attempting to undermine the credibility and authority of the authors when faced with hard facts from a wide array of scholars. (more…)

Is it possible for someone who matter-of-factly supports crimes against humanity to be a good historian? A startling and provocative question, no doubt, but one that inevitably arises upon consideration of the remarkable career of Israeli scholar Benny Morris. A professor in the Middle East Studies department at Ben-Gurion University, Morris is well-known as one of the most important of the “New Historians,” a group that upended traditional Zionist historiography of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the first edition of his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), Morris conclusively demonstrated, through the mining of newly released Israeli government archives, that the refugees from the 1948 war had, overwhelmingly, fled or been expelled by Israeli forces rather than left as a result of encouragement by Arab leaders, as a previous generation of Israeli propagandists had claimed.

After the release of that book and in subsequent years, with the publication of Israel’s Border Wars (1997) followed by a general history of the conflict, Righteous Victims (1999), Morris was generally lauded by liberals as a historian willing to expose uncomfortable truths about the Israeli past. This Morris, the seemingly liberal Morris, rose to fame at the time of the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo period that followed, when both support for Palestinian resistance to occupation and new hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict gained traction around the world. (more…)

It seems the U.S. State Department has reversed the decision to deny the seven Gaza students Fulbright Grants. And while this is good news in principle, it should not be praised out of context—or too early.

The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s department of civilian affairs, Major Peter Lerner (whom I dealt with regularly when arranging coordination in and out of Gaza), says that each of the the Palestinian students will face security check before being allowed to leave Gaza.

Fine. This sounds very reasonable… but I am skeptical that these students will actually be granted permission to leave. Since June 2007, approximately 670 students have been unable to pursue higher education abroad due to the total closure of the territory by the Israeli military. (more…)

What better way to punish Hamas than by punishing Gazan students?

The American State Department recently withdrew the Fulbright Grants for Gazan students hoping to pursue higher education opportunities in the United States. And on what grounds?

Well, it seems that because Israel isn’t letting them out anyway, it’s better not to waste money on students condemned to a future of imprisonment. The politics of accomodation work yet again, but this time the hopes of seven talented students have been drastically crushed by this moral cowardice.

True, the money can be used elsewhere, but why not take a moral stand against the collective punishment of Gaza? First, there is no guarantee of Israel policy regarding Gaza and simply assuming that Israel will never allow these students to leave the Strip is tantamount to supporting Israeli oppression in the first place. (more…)

In September 2004, Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, found himself having to admit that his latest book, All Deliberate Speed, contained six paragraphs lifted verbatim from a book by Yale professor Jack Balkin, What “Brown v. Board of Education” Should Have Said. Equally surprising was the fact that Ogletree hadn’t known about the plagiarism, which occurred in a passage about the history of desegregation efforts, until he was told of it by Balkin himself.

“I accept full responsibility for this error,” Ogletree said in a statement. But some readers of that statement might have gotten a different impression: Ogletree attributed the plagiarism to two research assistants: “Material from Professor Jack Balkin’s book … was inserted … by one of my assistants for the purpose of being reviewed, researched, and summarized by another research assistant with proper attribution … Unfortunately, the second assistant, under the pressure of meeting a deadline, inadvertently deleted this attribution and edited the text as though it had been written by me. The second assistant then sent a revised draft to the publisher.” (more…)