Curricular activism and academic freedom: representations of Arabs and Muslims in print and internet media.

IN THIS ARTICLE, I WILL ARGUE that movements to restrict academic freedom--a term I will clarify momentarily--are pernicious independently of their political affiliations, but most concretely identified and usefully contested when we investigate their strategic character, both tacit and explicit. This article will investigate and assess that strategic character. Today a number of small but persistent interest groups endeavor to reorganize university structures and to alter universities' relationships with funding sources. These groups would not be as numerous or effective without their political affiliations, which influence their strategic choices through a tropological representation of Arabs and Muslims. Such groups capitalize on particular forms of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, using those sentiments to rationalize and justify the sort of restrictions they favor. The groups, then, are partly commodities of a nationalistic disposition that existed before 9/11 but one that gained widespread validation afterwards.

I deem pressure groups pernicious independently of their political affiliations because I believe it is useful to remember that ultimately they desiderate a certain material outcome, one that will affect nearly all academics regardless of whatever political affiliation each happens to inhabit. Despite this emphasis on desired outcome, however, it is necessary to examine more closely these groups' motivations and how they transform those motivations into methodologies. As a point of clarification, when I invoke pressure groups I am speaking of specific organizations and of the more general dissatisfaction about so-called faculty radicalism that now seems an integral part of American campus culture. Because specific organizations are easier to quantify and assess, I will focus mainly on them, in particular David Horowitz's enterprises (DiscoverTheNetworks.org, JihadWatch.org, and FrontPageMagazine.com), Campus Watch and its offshoot Islamist Watch, NoIndoctrination.org, and The National Association of Scholars. These organizations are by no means exhaustive, but they adequately represent the strategic purview of academic pressure groups.

WHAT IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

Academic freedom, often the object of slogans and multifarious activism, is neither a fixed nor an intuitive concept. An exchange between Robert Post and Judith Butler in Beshara Doumani's edited collection, Academic Freedom after September 11, is instructive of its complexity. Post conceptualizes academic freedom as the basis of social and professional relationships that supplies a necessary precondition of conducting academic work, not merely as an individual constitutional fight related solely to unfettered speech. Invoking academic freedom's original usage in the early twentieth century, Post notes that "we can scarcely recall that the ideal of academic freedom was formulated precisely to transform basic American understandings of the employment relationship between faculty and their university or college." (1) Butler does not disagree with this premise, but points out that "[a]lthough Post proposes to turn us away from an individualist model of rights toward an institutional model that is pervasively social, the social field he describes is structured by a version of academic freedom that appears impervious to social change." (2) Doumani, for his part, suggests, "When talking about academic freedom, one needs to be specific about the institution and the kind of activity in question and the location of the individual within the institution." (3)

The primary thing we learn from these exchanges is that academic freedom is not static legally and should not be enacted statically by those invested in it either as commentators or practitioners. In popular--and to a slightly lesser degree, professional--discourse, academic freedom is shorthand for the right to free speech and is thus often debated solely within a first amendment context. Post, Butler, and Doumani render academic freedom more dynamic, investing the concept with nuances derived from the structural particularities of American higher education. If we are to think about academic freedom as dictating or maintaining a set of institutional relationships, then its first obligation should be the protection of the fight of faculty to pursue and publish research. This right is compromised when research enters into dialectic with public activism if that dialectic induces controversy. The ability of research to induce controversy is tied into its site of investment vis-a-vis the nation's geopolitical mood. Scholars working on the Middle East or Muslim world, then, more easily become targets of scrutiny than do, say, Medievalists or phonetic linguists. Academic freedom exists partly to ensure that public controversy does not impede one's ability to conduct and present research or to demystify research for broader consumption, and to protect any practitioner of controversial research from arbitrary termination of employment.

As I proceed, I would like to keep this notion of academic freedom in mind because it foregrounds productive assessment of curricular activists who I argue contravene both the letter and spirit of academic freedom. The mere presence of activists who lobby American government officials about both course content and scholarly comportment indicates that the sort of academic freedom theorized by Post and Butler, in which protective mechanisms safeguard and govern professors as university employees, is not a fully realized material precept. The far-reaching effectiveness of these activists in influencing public discourse, and even their limited effectiveness in influencing legislation, likewise indicates that academic freedom is constrained by the vicissitudes of the political marketplace and therefore vulnerable to what most academics would consider unsavory modification. As Butler reminds us, academic freedom is a flexible concept because it necessarily evolves along with public and university cultures.

WHO IS CHALLENGING ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

The groups under discussion here are not monolithic in outlook or method. Nor are they allied with one another, though they do share a broad vision of both American foreign policy and the failures of extant university pedagogy (based on the claim that instructors either undermine or unjustifiably disparage American foreign policy). They also share a set of core positions that allows us to usher them into a particular taxonomical grouping, as curricular activists: they are avidly pro-Israel according to Likudist politics; (4) they are either neoconservatives or sympathetic to neoconservative ideology; they are focused on universities as sites of contestation; they are adamant that a better system in the past has been lost to, or seriously compromised by, shoddy scholarship and coercive instruction; and they are opposed to most anything put forward under the monikers of diversity and multiculturalism (a position that they actually share, for vastly different reasons, with many scholars invested in postcolonial and cultural studies). Their most noteworthy shared feature, however, is their characterization of Arabs and Muslims as exemplars of coercive instruction and curricular irresponsibility. To be more precise, these groups disdain what they perceive as academic indifference to what they consider inveterate Arab and Muslim terrorism; they thereby render Arabs and Muslims metonymical test-cases for evaluating scholarly approaches and political sympathies.

Let us take a look at each of these groups and assess their characterization of Arabs and Muslims in conjunction with their prescription for academic reform. David Horowitz is the best-known curricular activist, in the service of what he likes to term "ideological diversity." Horowitz is remarkably active and can often be found presenting his viewpoints on campuses and in academic trade publications. He has also found an audience in state and federal legislators. His primary goal is to balance a liberal professoriate with more conservatives and thus to inculcate academic discourse with right-of-center perspectives. Portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as embodiments of imminent danger is crucial to his pursuit of this goal. For instance, one of his books is entitled Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, a polemic claiming that irresponsible academics are complicit in the proliferation of Muslim terrorism around the world. (5) Horowitz has argued that "academic radicals and the anti-war campus Left have lent their support to Islamic terrorists, while campaigning against the efforts of democracies like Israel and the United States to defend themselves." (6)

This statement portrays the ethical rationale of many of today's curricular activists. Horowitz's numerous enterprises advance a similar argument, indicating that Horowitz believes terrorism to be the best available rhetorical device for mobilizing others in the service of curricular reform. JihadWatch.org is perhaps an obvious instance of Horowitz's use of that rhetorical device. The site exists "[b]ecause the West is facing a concerted effort by Islamic jihadists, the motives and goals of whom are largely ignored by the Western media, to destroy the West and bring it forcibly to the Islamic world." (7) Unlike JihadWatch.org, DiscoverTheNetworks.org is not devoted exclusively to Arab and Muslim terrorists and their supposed media and professorial apologists. However, its focus illuminates the rhetorical indispensability of terrorism as a motivating agent. The site's front paage displays copies of Unholy Alliance and Campus Support for Terrorism, (8) in addition to a petition calling for opposition to "Islamic Jihadists around the world [who] have declared war on America, Israel and the West."

The site profiles academic indoctrinators according to various categories: "Animal Rights," "Civil Liberties," "Feminist," "Social Justice," and so forth. Matters of relevance to Arabs and Muslims comprise the largest number of categories: "Anti-Israel," "Anti-Patriot Act," "Arab Lobby," "Muslim," "Terrorist." The site locates terrorism in a completely Islamic context: less than thirty of the 200 "terrorists" listed as of this writing appear to be non-Muslim, and most of them are implicated as terrorists because of their ideological sympathies with jihadists (the rest are animal rights activists or members of the Symbionese Liberation Army). (9) The anti-Israel section features over 300 entries, topping even the ill-defined "Radical," "Political," and "AntiWar" categories, and contains under the same rubric wildly divergent figures such as Osama bin Laden and Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan and Gayatri Spivak, and Abu Nidal and Rachel Corrie (though it is unclear how she is a threat to Israel). The most populous category is the equally ill-defined "Muslim," host to nearly 400 names of those who "are radical members of the Islamic faith," (10) many of them also listed under "Anti-Israel" and "Arab Lobby."

FrontPageMagazine.com, published by Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture [CSPC], is similar in that it professes to be comprehensive but emphasizes, perhaps unwittingly, the same type of geographical orientation, using a comparable rhetorical style. An online forum of conservative reportage and commentary, FrontPageMagazine.com is preoccupied with lambasting Israel's critics, promoting neoconservative interests in the Arab World, and disparaging organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] and the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee [ADC]. A survey of the website's archive illustrates that categories such as "Middle East War," "Israel," "Islam," and "AntiSemitism" comprise the lion' s share of backlogged material. FrontPageMagazine.com, therefore, relies substantially on the trope of Arab and Muslim barbarism in order to foster its policy aspirations, particularly its advocacy on behalf of intellectual diversity in higher education. It seems especially invested in its growing Terrorism Awareness Project.

Campus Watch shares a political affinity with Horowitz's institutions, if not a formal confederation. They differ in scope and focus. Whereas the Center for the Study of Popular Culture engages in political fisticuffs related to a variety of issues and rallies its supporters around what it deems liberal academia in general, Campus Watch is devoted exclusively to monitoring academics involved either directly or indirectly with the field of Middle East Studies. Campus Watch has earned notoriety in most quarters of Middle East Studies and in the humanities more broadly, but it has also been effective in entering into public spaces and affecting the discourse around the pedagogy of Islam and the Arab World. Of the group, Joel Beinin, a frequent subject of Campus Watch complaint, observes, Campus Watch "[casts] aspersions on scholars ... because of their national origin, [which] violates the fundamental spirit of American liberties and undermines the distinctive character of the United States as an immigrant society." (11) Two of Campus Watch's founders, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, have "close ties to Israel's ruling circles." (12) Campus Watch relies in no small measure on an extant fear of Arabs and Muslims among a significant portion of the American populace in order to generate what comes to be understood by consumers as an ardently pragmatic outlook. (13) In its view, scholars working in any capacity on the Muslim world or in Arab and Muslim diasporic communities should pursue and identify terrorist threats in the interest of national security. Beinin's assertion that Campus Watch employs a bigoted outlook is apropos of one of its offshoots, Islamist Watch, which features on its front page a list of links to dubious sites like The United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, The Terrorism Research Center, The Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Societies, and Dhimmitude, all of which can be categorized reasonably as Islamophobic.

Like the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, NoIndoctrination.org has a comprehensive mission that surpasses exclusive focus on Islam and the Arab World. The site nevertheless maintains/portrays at least partial reliance on the tropology of Arabs and Muslims as barbarians storming the limpid gates of academe. Like most groups devoted to curricular activism, NoIndoctrination.org claims to be objective and unaffiliated, desiring merely to promote good education without a specific political agenda. Cursory examination of the site's content belies this claim, however. Its front page, for instance, usually features a news flash condemning some form of pedagogical malfeasance based on an objectionably sympathetic view of Arabs and Muslims. (The ethics of transparency dictate that I should mention I once was the subject of a front-page grievance for having criticized NoIndoctrination.org elsewhere.) The website is regulated but allows students to craft synopses of biased instruction, which the webmaster approves and then posts online, affording instructors the opportunity to submit a rebuttal (few take up the offer). An inordinate number of student complaints appear to conceptualize indoctrination as anything either obliquely or empirically critical of Israel or American diplomatic and military involvement in the Muslim world. This sort of conceptualization of classroom indoctrination is noteworthy for two main reasons: 1) it assumes that the state's interpretation of the national interest is normatively veracious, and so competing definitions, particularly those opposing state normativity, necessarily comprise faulty educational material; and 2) it assumes that an instructor's primary task is to supplement or uphold the national interest, a reflection of the success activists such as Horowitz and Pipes have achieved in mainstreaming their conception of responsible pedagogy.

The National Association of Scholars [NAS] is an academic organization inhabited mainly by conservative professors in some way disillusioned with the quality of today's scholarship and instruction, which they consider excessively influenced by trends such as post-structuralism and cultural studies and tainted by enterprises like multiculturalism and re-canonization. Similar to NoIndoctrination.org, the NAS emphasizes displeasure with the pervasiveness of liberalism in academe beyond any specific region or issue. The groups differ considerably, though. The NAS is a legitimate scholarly organization with a refereed journal and newsletter, elections, and an annual conference. However, like NoIndoctrination.org, it too finds in Arabs and Muslims powerful emblems of civilizational decay that have diminished a more idyllic academic past. In a recent NAS newsletter, for example, President Stephen H. Balch observes, "For the first time in seven centuries the West has a 'barbarian problem'. Ideally, this should provide a compelling 'teachable moment'. How better, after all, to understand civilized achievement than by contrasting it with threatening savagery?" (14) Balch elaborates: "Barbarian problems arise when peoples backward in wealth, culture, and technology pose violent threats of a serious, even existential, character to societies far more advanced." (15) He later clarifies: "Today's new barbarians, nurtured in the Middle East's Outback, don't live in tents or forage for pasture. They have just conspicuously failed to keep abreast of the rest of the world, culturally, politically, economically, and technologically." (16)

HOW THESE GROUPS CHALLENGE ACADEMIC FREEDOM

These separate but amicable organizations aim to reshape extant applications of academic freedom. At its most basic level, academic freedom enacts a function coterminous with the first amendment right of free speech. More usefully, it affords professors the opportunity to pursue controversial or dissentient research without the fear of capricious or imperious retribution from either the institution or the state. Academic freedom offers institutional protection from the puissance of the institution itself. It dictates, in short, that one cannot be fired or similarly punished without solid evidence of unproductiveness or misconduct. The groups I have examined here would not necessarily modify the structure of academic freedom, but they would radically alter our understanding of the terminologies that underscore it. In particular they strive to extend notions of misconduct from discernible malfeasance to include failure to exercise moral responsibility. While notions of moral responsibility certainly are not absent from disciplinary proceedings or academic legislation, the sort of moral responsibility supported by curricular activists is different: they conceptualize moral responsibility from within the context of governmental disquisition, a move that would invite corporate politics directly into the proceedings of academic promotion and tenure. Professors, in other words, would not only have their work evaluated for its scholarly probity and disciplinary contribution; they would have their rhetorical choices and political viewpoints assessed vis-a-vis positions that are contemporaneously patriotic.

Curricular activists also endeavor to restrict the funding of area studies and academic units by rendering it contingent on a demonstration of adequate commitment, particularly to the viewpoints considered by the state to be sufficiently allegiant to the national interest. If implemented, this desire would contravene the way academic freedom currently functions because it is explicitly coercive and offers the state a type of access that would erase the constitutional protections that separate scholarly inquiry from extraneous imposition. Because of the United States' current geopolitical commitments, any institutional focus on the Arab and Muslim worlds is affected by activism on behalf of the accession of scholarly work and state interests. Institutional focus on the Arab and Muslim worlds also is embroiled in curricular activism because such a focus usually is the geographical and cultural site targeted by curricular activists as either blatantly unpatriotic or most in need of responsible intervention.

Targeting the academic study of Arabs and Muslims (or targeting academics who happen to be Arab and Muslim) requires an imagining of those peoples commensurate with the goal of altering the terminologies of academic freedom. Balch, of the NAS, exemplifies the type of imagining curricular activists generally employ, though his diction is cruder than that of his companions. The explicit and tacit representation of Arabs and Muslims among the advocates of curricular reform is overwhelmingly negative. It contains three consistent features: 1) it portrays them as incapable of studying their own societies without external, usually state, oversight; 2) it assumes they are threats to American national security ipso facto; and 3) it regards Arab and Muslim communities, both in the West and East, as culturally backwards as a result of having failed to enter into modernity.

Balch's repeated use of the word barbarian is noteworthy because it is a common terminological choice, and thus a strategy, among his peers. In 2005, for instance, Horowitz dubbed an unfriendly audience at Bowling Green State University "barbarians," and during the previous year he boasted of Americans' "higher standard than the barbarians we are fighting" in the Middle East. (17) In a public lecture in London in 2007, Pipes stated, "One: I am for world civilization and I reject the 'clash of civilizations' argument. Two: The problem is not so much a clash of civilizations, but a clash of civilization and modernity." Pipes later delineated his terminology: "Now what do I mean by barbarians? I do not mean people who are of lower economic stature. What I mean by barbarians--and I think all of us mean by barbarians in the past two centuries--are ideological barbarians." (18) The word barbarian, deployed with direct use or some variation of Pipes's definition, can be found all over the internet and blogosphere vis-a-vis celebration of American modernity and lamentation of the multicultural corruption of higher education.

The word, then, achieves a cultural signification that engenders deterministic analysis. In this framework, Arabs and Muslims not only become contact zones for comprehensive activism, they also find themselves confined to narrow representational imperatives. Mahmood Mamdani describes the fallout of such deterministic analysis, a phenomenon he calls "Culture Talk": "Culture Talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics as a consequence of that essence." (19) In so assuredly describing the realms of Islam as barbaric, Horowitz, Pipes, and other curricular activists forge a causal relationship between cultural essentialism and political analysis. This move is problematic for numerous reasons, the most important of which Mamdani articulates:

   There is reason to be hugely skeptical of claims that describe
   civilizations discretely and identify civilizational histories
   with particular geographies and polities. One has to
   distinguish between civilization and power. The very notion
   of an uninterrupted "Western civilization" across linear time is
   an idea that only arises from the vantage point of the power
   we know as the West. This power has both geography and a
   history: that history stretches from 1492 through the centuries
   of the slave trade and colonization to the Cold War and after. (20)

Other problems of describing civilizations in discrete geographical terms in order to alter extant uses of academic freedom include a shift away from unprejudiced standards of scholarly evaluation, the use of a faulty intellection as an evaluative criterion, and the disregard of global migratory patterns. This final point is especially problematic because curricular activists and various culture warriors tend to speak of "American" as contradistinctive of "Muslim," as if there are not six or seven million people who can claim both identities, which endow the category of "American" a distinctly white and Christian normativity. It probably is not surprising, however, that those who perform such a conflation would also undertake activism in support of their deterministic outlook. As Mamdani points out, "Culture Talk does not spring from the tradition of history writing but rather from that of the policy sciences that regularly service political establishments." (21)

Another problem with the logic of curricular activists has to do with the assumptions on which they rely in condemning what they believe to be excessively political scholarship and classroom instruction. Reforming the tenets of academic freedom depends upon acceptance of the notion that objective scholarship and pedagogy are possible: Acknowledging that the political necessarily supplements writing and teaching of all varieties undermines the entire activist enterprise. Curricular activists therefore, strive to maintain the illusion of disinterest by articulating an ethics of volitional participation. Horowitz has claimed, "The University should not be a political place. It's a place where there ought to be reasoned discourse." (22) He thus appears to put forth the dubious proposition that political places cannot produce reasoned discourse. I would argue that the political need not be avoided or repudiated as an aspect of producing scholarship and transmitting research expertise to students. Nor need it be a metaphorical pink elephant that we pretend does not inform academic work. One benefit of acknowledging that much of our work is political is that we can verbalize an honest narrative about what we do for those who derive their understanding of the professoriate from curricular activists: Another benefit is the repossessing of the assumptions deployed by those who accuse professors of being political as their basis of revamping academic freedom.

Claiming ownership of any sort of political outlook is anomalous because the idea of using scholarship to inform political work, and vice-versa, represents a serious departure from traditional academic ethos, which maintains the erstwhile myth of disinterest, a practice that enhances curricular activists' effectiveness. This myth is problematic for four main reasons: 1) it pretends that proper academics can achieve a transcendent eminence that allows them to eschew politics; 2) it assumes that eschewing politics is a good thing; 3) it renders political a coded word that can identify for the elite anything perceived as threatening or undesirable; and 4) it perpetuates the lie that only people of color are political, or, inversely, the lie that professors enamored of Western civilization only impart objective knowledge. In fact, asserting a nonpolitical orientation is a highly political act--I use political here to reflect the same deprecating manner in which the ostensibly nonpolitical use the term. Rather than responding to charges that certain academics are political by denying the existence of politics in academe, it might be more useful to explicate why the politics of research and teaching can be productive if they are practiced in accordance with the existing parameters of academic freedom.

Ultimately, movements to reform academic freedom invent or utilize a certain imagery of the barbaric Muslim--a sort of swarthy, un-modern everyman. It is this strategy that is of primary interest to me because in most analyses of curricular activism, the use of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia is ignored or misunderstood. This is a perilous omission based on the preponderance of this activism. (23) The use of this imagery can be seen as both a rhetorical technique--one that its purveyors imagine to be persuasive, and a reflection of geopolitical commitment.

Underlying the geopolitical commitment, which influences the effectiveness of negative imagery as a rhetorical technique, is a consistent objective performed in the service of Israel, American neo-conservativism, or corporate distension, or of all three simultaneously; using scholarship not in the pursuit of truth but for augmentation of national security. (24)

Most researchers would proclaim that conducting research in order to promote a specific, preordained interest undermines its effectiveness and ethical credibility. In this fundamental way, condemning supposedly unpatriotic research is a dubious act because it forestalls the possibility that honest research might uncover a result that contravenes whatever at that moment is considered patriotic. Even so, in the context of the strategic exigencies of curricular activism, it is necessary to also point out that the philosophical structures of its contestation are flawed as both a moral and intellectual premise. Those philosophical structures are flawed intellectually because they treat national security as a normative, perpetual verity rather than a dynamic construct that is necessarily tendentious and selective. Both national security and patriotism are entities with quantifiable expressions and results, but neither is ingenerate or dispassionate, and so neither can rightly be implemented as the standard for judging research efficacy. Those philosophical structures are flawed morally because allegiance to any form of patriotism resulting in wrongdoing--nearly always the effect of patriotism--is fundamentally immoral. Another moral problem with patriotism and proclamations of national interest is their unavoidable irony: They profess to benefit those who proffer allegiance, but in fact they are hegemonic inventions that rarely benefit the national communities they so meticulously invent: Through patriotism, the national community is an unwitting enabler of its own exploitation. There are grounds on which to challenge curricular activism, then, beyond merely procedural or tactical quibbles.

CONCLUSION: IMAGERY AND ACTIVISM

There are numerous ways to understand curricular activism because it manifests itself multifariously, with varying results. In assessing the utility of negative ethnic imagery, I do not wish to imply or compel others to infer that the relationship between imagery and activism is symbiotic, or that the imagery enables or inspires the activism. I do think it is important though, to be aware that negative ethnic imagery is an integral part of today's curricular activism and to understand how the relationship performs a function in discussions of American higher education. It is impossible to say exactly to what degree negative ethnic imagery is integral to curricular activism however, based on investigation of its preponderance in activist discourse; one can surmise that it is a cardinal strategic device. For example, the longstanding Ward Churchill fiasco, in which the tenured professor at the University of Colorado was finally dismissed in the summer of 2007, relied largely on public condemnation of Churchill for unacceptable expressions of sympathy with the Arab and Muslim enemy. Therefore, of course, numerous other factors that played a role in how the imbroglio unraveled. From the standpoint of public discourse however, those in favor of Churchill's dismissal found ample use of negative ethnic imagery in the service of rhetorical persuasion. (25)

Most curricular activists are allied with the political right in the United States, and it is unclear exactly how their uses of anti-Arab racism influence more centrist and liberal discourses. We can measure a more general type of success through some activists' access to centers of power in state and federal legislative bodies, particularly Horowitz and Pipes. Success also is partly measurable through the frequency with which the discourse of curricular activism is inscribed in both public and professional conversations about the ethics of pedagogy. Indoctrination, at least in the humanities, has become as much a part of our pedagogical lexicon as critical thinking and classroom participation. Indeed, it is nearly impossible these days to have a conversation about critical thinking and classroom participation without being somehow aware of the possibility of being targeted for indoctrinating students, often that concern is raised explicitly in the conversation. In this sense, curricular activism has been successful, despite the fact that it has not yet changed the legal traditions that govern academic freedom (although it has affected particular tenure cases, most infamously that of the political scientist Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University). (26) Sites like NoIndoctrination.org and public forums like Campus Watch and CSPC have empowered students in new ways, and many of them step into college classrooms on guard for what they have been taught to conceptualize as indoctrination (i.e., any material seemingly unpatriotic, and especially any material critical of Israel). Many are prepared, also on the advice of curricular activists, to act on their ensuing displeasure (Horowitz has even encouraged students to dig up the voting records of their instructors). (27) This peculiar form of student empowerment has likewise affected the way college instructors conduct their pedagogy.

Although those on the left of the political spectrum generally undertake different forms of curricular activism (they certainly are not silent or neutral), they tend to uphold with some variation, extant legal and professional definitions of academic freedom. However, in the context of social agency they sometimes share one relevant quality with their counterparts on the right. AntiArab racism on the American left contributes, through direct exegesis or by ignoring the racism of its political enemies, to a national mood that curricular activists both invoke and reflect. (28)

Curricular activism and anti-Arab racism should be contested simultaneously, because neither phenomenon exists or is practiced in isolation. Protecting Israel and the United States from criticism in teaching and research may not be the professed point of curricular activism, but it is one of its calculated outcomes. Promulgating negative imagery of Arabs and Muslims is one of its deliberate rhetorical devices. It would be unwise to assess the pernicious goals of curricular activism outside of the social circumstances and geopolitical engagements that endow it force and meaning.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Robert Post, "The Structure of Academic Freedom," in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006), 62.

(2.) Judith Butler, "Academic Norms, Contemporary Challenges: A Reply to Robert Post on Academic Freedom," in Academic Freedom after September 11, 108.

(3.) Beshara Doumani, "Between Coercion and Privatization: Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century," in Academic Freedom after September 11, 39.

(4.) Joel Beinin, in fact, refers to Campus Watch and its cohorts as "the American Likud." See further, "The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East," in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006), 237-66.

(5.) See further David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004).

(6.) David Horowitz, "Joel Beinin: Apologist for Terrorism," FrontPageMagazine, 19 May 2006, http://www.Frontpagemag.com/Articles/ Read.aspx?GUID=681F93A4-4EFA-4327-8153-A9961EAB2ACE (10 August2007).

(7.) This passage is taken from the site's front page: www.jihadwatch.org. The site is particularly perturbed by what it deems as Palestinian and Iraqi terrorism, giving it a perhaps unintentionally distinct focus on Arabs and thus an orientation in hard-line Zionism.

(8.) See further David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, eds., Campus Support for Terrorism (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2004).

(9.) About Antonio Negri, for instance, the site notes peremptorily that part of his book (with Michael Hardt) Empire's "appeal on campus lay in the radical glamour of Negri's terrorist past."

(10.) The list of objectionable Muslims can be found at http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catId=50&type=ind.

(11.) Joel Beinin, "The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East," in Academic Freedom after September 11, 252-53.

(12.) Ibid., 237.

(13.) See, for instance, the December, 2004, Cornell University survey in which 44 percent of American respondents polled nationally said they believed the US government should curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans. Findings available at: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec04/Muslim.Poll.bpf.html. A March 2006, ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 46% of Americans harbor a negative view of Islam. Findings available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2006/03/08/AR2006030802221.html.

(14.) Stephen H. Balch, "On Missing a Teachable Moment," NAS Update 16, no. 1 (2007): 3.

(15.) Ibid., 3.

(16.) Ibid., 3.

(17.) David Horowitz, "Liberals Hand Terrorists a Victory," Front Page Magazine, 17 May 2004, <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx? GUID={1408BBB2-A30D-4A6B-84EAAB1D1A85E7BA}>(14August 2007).

(18.) The text of Pipes's speech can be found at: <http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/34876.html>.

(19.) Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 17.

(20.) Ibid., 32-33.

(21.) Ibid., 27.

(22.) Sara Hebel, "Patrolling Professors' Politics," Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 February 2004, sec. A.

(23.) Robert L. Ivie's analysis of Horowitz and Ward Churchill, for example, does an excellent job of analyzing external pressures on academic freedom but does not enter into a sustained discussion of geopolitics and images of Arabs and Muslims. See further Robert L. Ivie, "Academic Freedom and Antiwar Dissent in a Democratic Idiom," College Literature 33, no. 4 (2006): 76-92. The same is true of Robert L. Williams's recent analysis. See further Robert L. Williams, "Academic Freedom in Higher Education within a Conservative Sociopolitical Culture," Innovative Higher Education 31, no. 1 (2006): 5-25.

(24.) Martin Kramer, for instance, has written, "[but] in the 1990s, as in the 1980s, the academics refused to study those very Muslims whose radical interpretations of Islam put them on a collision course with America. Bin Laden was a case in point. The academics were so preoccupied with 'Muslim Martin Luthers' that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America. Bin Laden's actions, statements, and videos were an embarrassment to academics who had assured Americans that "political Islam" was retreating from confrontation. If they mentioned bin Laden at all, it was to dismiss his influence. 'Focusing on Osama bin Laden,' wrote Esposito in 1998, 'risk[s] catapulting one of many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting both the diverse international sources (state and nonstate, nonMuslim and Muslim) of terrorism as well as the significance of a single individual.' Potential sources of terrorism may have been diverse, but there could be no doubt by 1998 which source had the most 'potential impact' on America, and which source was most likely to seize 'center stage.'" Kramer's underlying point is that the main purpose of studying the Middle East is to uncover terrorist threats. The passage is drawn from an excerpt of Kramer's book Ivory Towers on Sand, available on his website at: http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/IslamObscured.htm. Kramer, along with colleague Daniel Pipes, was a prominent supporter of House Resolution 3077 in 2003, which included a provision to withhold funding from area studies that did not adequately support government policy.

(25.) In FrontPageMagazine.org, for instance, Michelle Malkin writes, "In August 2003, loony professor Ward Churchill spoke in Seattle before a crowd of moonbats and advised them on how to conduct acts of terrorism." See further: <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx? GUID={47A98D85-8507471A-8848-249916878454}>. On the same site, Don Feder observes, "Should Ward Churchill be fired? The question is almost irrelevant. As the saying goes, Churchill is symptomatic of a raging disease--the academic Left (a redundancy, really) which loathes America, lionizes the killers of Americans, and longs for the demise of our republic." See further: <www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16972>.

(26.) Finkelstein, an avid critic of Israel and a public intellectual, was denied tenure by DePaul in the summer of 2007 despite a stellar record of publication. His tenure case attracted a tremendous interest among curricular activists, who leveled unprecedented pressure on DePaul to reject his bid, thus transforming Finkelstein's case into a public affair. Finkelstein was ultimately denied tenure based on a dubious standard of collegiality; he failed, according to the university, to uphold the Catholic institution's tradition of Vincentian respect. Finkelstein's colleague, Mehrene Larudee, another critic of American foreign policy, was simultaneously denied tenure. As of this writing, Nadia Abu El Haj, a Palestinian American archeologist who has conducted groundbreaking work that has invoked the ire of curricular activists, currently is embroiled in a highly public bid for tenure at Barnard College.

(27.) Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative group heavily influenced by Horowitz, has on its website a handbook with sections such as "Collecting Complaints," "Other Methods of Documenting and Combating Abuse," and "Abuses of Academic Freedom." The booklet is available at: <http://cms.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/files/pdf/ SAF%20handbook%20FINAL%202.pdf>. The detailed instructions from Horowitz to students for gathering instructors' voting records, which generated a fair amount of condemnation, appears as of this writing to have been removed from the SAF website.

(28.) See further Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What It Means for Politics Today (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto, 2006). See also The Uncultured Wars: Political Essays (in manuscript; forthcoming).

Steven Salaita is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg. He also serves as Executive Director of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).