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

AuthorSalaita, Steven
PositionCritical essay

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)

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