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JTA: U.S. college heads visit Israel, seek collaboration opportunities

By Alison Weir | July 5, 2012

Once again, Israel is recruiting university presidents and chancellors. I wonder how these academics can justify not meeting with Palestinians, who have suffered diverse academic assaults from Israel  – from ethnic/religious discrimination to their schools being shelled and students killed – while they’re over there. Think of the astronomical wealth of the Israel Lobby, which can fund a multitude of such trips.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A delegation of U.S. university presidents is in Israel to explore opportunities for academic and research collaboration.

The seminar, which ends July 9, is sponsored by Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee.

A president of a historically Black college and university, Spelman College President Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, is participating in the program the first time.

The delegation was scheduled to meet with senior Israeli government and academic officials and leaders of civil society across the social and political spectrum, and to travel to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders. They were scheduled to network with their counterparts at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute, among others.

The group was also set to travel to Sderot, to view the city that has been under fire from rockets from Gaza.

“As chancellor of a top American public research university with a strong international presence and aspirations to build on our existing global relationships, it is important that that I have a deep understanding of Israel and its neighbors,” said seminar delegation chair, University of California Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.

Some may recall that Katehi was part of scandals at the University of Illinois awhile back in which rich, well-connected students were getting admissions preferences over better qualified applicants, and at Davis, where police pepper sprayed peaceful students.

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Delegation includes:

•       Seminar Chair: Linda P.B. Katehi, Chancellor, University of California, Davis

•       Louis Agnese, Jr., President, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX

•       Lawrence Biondi, President, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO

•       Karen Haynes, President, California State University San Marcos

•       Elliot Hirshman, President, San Diego State University

•       Dorothy Leland, Chancellor, University of California, Merced

•       Harvey Perlman, Chancellor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

•       Beverly Tatum, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA

•       Randy Woodson, Chancellor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

Targeting academics for pro-Israel propaganda began in the 1940s, if not earlier:

With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”[77] [78]

……Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition.[80]

– The History of US-Israel Relations Part One: How the “special relationship” was created

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Regarding the UC Davis pepper spray incident, Robert May, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of California at Davis, writes:

UC Davis vs. UVA: or What a President Has to do to Get Fired These Days

I think there is an interesting contrast between the University of Virginia situation and that of Linda Katehi, chancellor here at UC Davis.  We now know from the Reynoso report  (discussed here) of Katehi’s complicity in the violent act against the innocent students, and her mendacity about her role in the pepper spraying incident; for this she does deserve to be, and ought to be, fired from her position.  Yet nary a word to this effect has been heard from the UC Board of Regents nor the President of UC.  The campus Academic Senate did finally censure Katehi, but stopped short of calling for her to be fired, which had been recommended by the Senate’s committee that had looked into the incident.  As we head off this week to our summer vacations, it is apparently business as usual in the Chancellor’s office.

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July 5, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US: No justice for terminated scholar

Failure of North Carolina courts to remedy suppression of academic freedom part of troubling nationwide trend

By Rima Najjar Kapitan | Aletho News | June 23, 2012

The North Carolina Supreme Court decided in conference on June 13 to deny a Petition for Discretionary Review filed last December by film scholar Terri Ginsberg. The Petition asked the Court to reconsider a North Carolina Court of Appeals decision affirming a November 2010 lower court dismissal of Dr. Ginsberg’s lawsuit against North Carolina State University (NCSU). In October 2009, Dr. Ginsberg filed a complaint alleging violation of her right to academic freedom under the North Carolina constitution. Dr. Ginsberg had been denied a tenure-track position because of the University’s discomfort with her scholarly speech and writing critical of Israeli policy and Zionism and favoring Palestinian rights and self-determination. The Court’s Order to deny Dr. Ginsberg’s Petition offers neither an opinion nor a reason for the decision.

Dr. Ginsberg’s Petition was supported by an Open Letter sponsored by several national and international human rights organizations and delivered on February 7, 2012 to both the North Carolina Supreme Court and NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson. As of its closure on June 22, the Open Letter had accrued 1274 signatures. Dr. Ginsberg states in both of these documents that by ignoring her voluminous evidence of an academic freedom violation, the Court of Appeals set a dangerous precedent by which academic employers have been given carte blanche to suppress the politically unpopular speech of their faculty, to the detriment of North Carolina students and to public discourse generally.

Dr. Ginsberg’s appeal was rejected despite direct and circumstantial evidence that NCSU took employment actions against her for unconstitutional reasons. During depositions held in June 2010, NCSU’s witnesses, including Prof. Marsha Orgeron, director of the Film Studies Program, and Prof. Akram Khater, director of the Middle East Studies Program, admitted to having reacted negatively to Ginsberg’s supportive statements at a screening of a Palestinian film, Ticket to Jerusalem, during which she thanked the audience for attending and thereby supporting the airing of Palestinian liberation perspectives such as the views displayed in the film. Profs. Orgeron and Khater stated that Dr. Ginsberg’s comments caused them to worry that members of the audience would perceive the Film Studies and Middle East Studies programs as “biased.” Shortly thereafter, Dr. Ginsberg was forced to resign from the Middle East screening series that she had helped curate; NCSU then chose not to interview or hire her for a tenure-track position for which she had previously been ranked as the top candidate. She was rejected despite NCSU’s admission that she was more qualified than the candidate NCSU eventually hired, because her scholarship had “too much focus on Jewish/Israel,” in the words of one search committee member. The Film Studies Program did not purchase Palestinian films for her Spring 2008 course on Israeli–Palestinian conflict cinema, and she was shunned from further extra-curricular and departmental activities until her termination that May.

The Court’s dismissal is particularly troubling in the wake of Arizona’s recent outlawing of Chicano/a studies curricula in that state’s educational system, and as pro-Zionist groups in California are attempting to force California State University–Northridge to forbid mathematics professor David Klein from posting to his faculty website information about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in support of human rights for Palestinians.

Dr. Ginsberg says she has not given up on her quest for justice from North Carolina State University and encourages supporters to e-mail letters of protest to Chancellor Woodson (see sample letter) requesting that she be permitted a long-overdue campus grievance hearing (mail to: chancellor@ncsu.edu). Dr. Ginsberg also plans to approach BDS about issuing a boycott of NCSU. For more information about Dr. Ginsberg’s case, please visit the website Ginsberg vs. NCSU.

For more information, contact:
Rima Najjar Kapitan, Esq.
Kapitan Law Office, Ltd.
+1 (312) 566-9590
rima@kapitanlaw.net

June 24, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments