Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Clearly, the most newsworthy story in American collegiate life recently has been the widespread eruption of pro-Palestinian protests over the war between Israel and Hamas. A central demand of pro-Palestinian demonstrators has […]
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The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the world’s major organization devoted to studying this region, has jettisoned academic impartiality and the quest for truth in favor of political partisanship and extremist activism. In 2017, MESA dropped its self-designation as a “non-political learned society” so that it could pursue an anti-Israel agenda. MESA has not yet […]
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Fifty years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a celebratory article with the title: “Doors of Ivy League Colleges Reported Wide Open for Jewish Students.” Reporting that in 1967, “40 percent of the students at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are now Jewish. At Yale, Harvard and Cornell, the Jewish student number between 20 […]
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Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with all their attendant risks and discomforts? The University of Massachusetts Amherst is just one place that can’t make up its mind. For years now it […]
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Today, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005, campuses around the world are treated every year to Israeli Apartheid Week. The plan, orchestrated by an array of student and non-student organizations, and aided by academic departments that host breathtakingly dishonest anti-Israel speakers, is to depict Israel as just like apartheid-era […]
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Decades ago, American professors largely stuck to teaching their subjects and kept their political passions separate from their academic work. Read, for example, Alan Kors’ account of a graduate school experience of his, where a decidedly leftist professor rebuked the class for just writing what they thought he wanted to hear and assigned the students […]
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By David M. Rosen Four anthropology professors stood at the entrance of the ballroom at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver last November, where members of the American Anthropological Association would soon vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, organized by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS). Each professor held up one of a […]
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