[Peace] Academic freedom - Chicago 10/12

[C. G. Estabrook]

The article below is from the student newspaper at the U. of Chicago. 
It concerns the talks held there last Friday in regard to the campaign 
against Norman Finkelstein.  Selections from the talks will be broadcast 
on upcoming WEFT shows (90.1 FM):
	News from Neptune, Saturdays, 10-11am
	From Bard to Verse, Saturdays, noon-1pm
	Window on the World, Sundays, 5-6pm

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	Scholars call for “freedom” in academia
	By Kimberly Sutton
	Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

Rockefeller Chapel was filled to capacity Friday as around 1,500 
gathered for the much-anticipated convening of several prominent 
scholars whose views on politics and American policy have propelled them 
to the forefront of a recent debate about freedom and censorship in the 
academic world.

Tariq Ali, editor of New Left Review and Verso Books, moderated the 
conference at which Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Norman Finkelstein, 
and several others delivered addresses decrying recent developments that 
have, in the speakers’ views, imperiled the freedom of academics to 
produce candid scholarship free from the pressures of external interests.

The most prominent of these interests confronted during Friday’s panel 
presentations was the Israel lobby, which several of the speakers 
criticized for having an alleged chilling effect on academic discourse 
over its influence on American foreign policy.

“This is where we stand, and this is what we are going to defend,” Ali 
said in his opening remarks, responding to the recent tenure denials of 
DePaul University professors Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee. Nearly all 
of the speakers Friday made at least passing mention of the controversy 
that embroiled Finkelstein earlier this year.

Finkelstein, whose work criticizes the United States’s relationship with 
the Israel lobby, was thrust into the national spotlight this June when 
DePaul denied him tenure. He mounted a vocal campaign against the 
university’s administration, vowing to go on a hunger strike to bring 
attention to the situation. The ordeal ended after Finkelstein resigned 
and negotiated an undisclosed settlement. Some observers have said that 
Larudee, a major Finkelstein supporter, was denied tenure because of her 
association with him.

In his speech, John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the U 
of C, attempted to dismantle DePaul’s case against Finkelstein. 
Mearsheimer came out as an ardent supporter of Finkelstein’s tenure bid 
during the proceedings earlier this year and recently co-authored a 
controversial book examining the Israel lobby.

He also addressed the politics of Finkelstein’s denial, painting 
academia as the only space where Israel is “treated as a normal country, 
where past and present actions are critically assessed,” and the place 
where public opinion on the matter is most accurately reflected.

In Mearsheimer’s speech, as well as in panel responses to audience 
questions, the U of C was held up as an example of an institution that 
embraced the flourishing of unrestricted discourse.

For his part, Finkelstein defended his creative rights as a scholar, 
conceding only that his writing style could be considered inflammatory. 
But he defended his right to use polemics when merited by the situation, 
citing Marx’s appellation of his fellow economists, and denied 
allegations of faulty scholarship.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, addressed the packed cathedral via video conference because 
of family circumstances that prevented him from traveling to Chicago. 
Chomsky outlined a constellation of forces gathering against academic 
freedom with the aim of justifying controversial American policies and 
accused institutions that bend to external political pressure of 
“conformist subservience to those in power.”

Chomsky, along with fellow panelist Akeel Bilgrami of Columbia 
University, highlighted Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s allegedly 
politicized and disparate treatments of controversial visiting heads of 
state. Bollinger largely praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf 
during his visit to the university, but vocally criticized Iranian 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he spoke earlier this month.

Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, 
spoke of academia’s duty to defend the scholarly freedom of professors 
who depend on it for a living. He contrasted the present situation with 
an earlier era when a requisite for the public intellectual was 
independent scholarship and identified the top threat to academic 
integrity as self-censorship for fear of job security.

According to Judt, the Israel lobby is an especially dangerous one 
because it seeks to further its own ends while attempting to silence 
discussion by denying its own existence. This, Judt argued, is 
fundamentally contrary to the elementary principle of free academic 
discourse.

Neve Gordon, of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, and Columbia 
University’s Akeel Bilgrami also appeared at the Rockefeller symposium.

http://maroon.uchicago.edu/online_edition/news/2007/10/16/scholars-call-for-%e2%80%9cfreedom%e2%80%9d-in-academia/

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