On May 21, I attended a panel discussion in Isla Vista organized by a student group calling itself “Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB.” I had heard that the meeting would discuss an e-mail sent by Professor W. Robinson about the recent violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to the students in his upper division course Sociology 130: Sociology of Globalization. The e-mail included parallel depiction of Holocaust victims and of Palestinian victims of Israeli violence in and around Gaza. The material made no mention of the rocket attacks out of Gaza on the Israeli village of Sderot over many months prior to the Israeli assault on Gaza.
The faculty panel consisted of Richard Falk (international relations, Princeton, retired), Harold Marcuse (history, UCSB), Lisa Hajjar (law & society, UCSB) and Geoff Raymond (sociology, UCSB), all of them known to me in various ways, including their strong anti-Israeli stances. Just before the panel began its presentation, I challenged the total one-sidedness of the panel and proposed that the composition be diversified right then and there or to defer the meeting to a later date. The chair ruled that the meeting would continue as planned and further discussion of my proposal would be deferred until AFTER the panel’s presentation: Effectively, my proposal was rejected.
At that point I asked to make a few comments. I was given one minute, and began to explain my qualifications relevant to this panel discussion, including the fact that I was UCSB’s first Nobel Laureate. Despite applause for me and shouts of “let him speak,” the microphone was taken out of my hand. For comparison, the panel members had approximately 20 minutes each available. No member of the panel protested my exclusion.
All four members of the panel held the opinion that Professor Robinson’s e-mail to students was unobjectionable and protected by his academic freedom. They added many comments. For example:
Falk said students should be congratulated for ignoring administration and/or academic senate restrictions during times such as those of the Gaza crisis.
Marcuse remarked that he had come close to using the same e-mail material in one of his holocaust courses.
Hajjar first stated that professors had unlimited academic freedom, then retreated to a position of nearly unlimited collective academic freedom of faculty members. She also stated that students had no academic freedom but did have some (unspecified) rights. They must learn to confront tough material, presumably including the controversial e-mail.
Raymond claimed the e-mail, including the controversial photographs, did not constitute a significant intrusion of irrelevant material, because it could be read and the images viewed in just a few minutes within a one-hour lecture.
What I had wanted to say, but was not allowed to say, were primarily two points:
1. The e-mail images of two groups of twenty corpses or body parts of alleged Holocaust victims and of killed, alleged Gaza Palestinians, without authentication and without appropriate discussion led by Professor Robinson, had, in my view, the effect of unacceptably demonizing today’s Israelis and dishonoring the memory of the six million Jews and others murdered during the Holocaust in the 1940s.
2. The e-mail material also violated, in my view, the explicit academic senate injunction against introducing significant material unrelated to the course. In the present case, the emphasis of Sociology 130 on sociological aspects of globalization, especially in Latin America, was partly replaced by a discussion-free condemnation of Israel for alleged genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.
After adjournment, some 20 or 30 people drifted toward me to chat and to thank me. They included an Arab lady with her teenage daughter and the two UCSB students who had lodged the complaint against Professor Robinson.
All in all, it was not a good day for academic freedom or academic rights at UCSB. Fortunately, such days are very rare. Let us commit ourselves to keeping them that way.
"The material made no mention of the rocket attacks out of Gaza on the Israeli village of Sderot over many months prior to the Israeli assault on Gaza." It also made no mention of grenade and petrol bomb attacks by Jewish ZOB and Pole resistances fighters that initiated the Warsaw Uprising, which likely resulted in some of the pictures in the photoessay of captives in Warsaw being rounded up as suspected ZOB members. You know, kinda like what happened in Gaza when IDF stormed in looking for Hamas. Wow, I guess in that regard we can think of Hamas in… Read more »
Nice try, kopiiYeah, and don’t forget the ZOB suicide bombers who went on trolleys and blew up innocent Polish passengers… oh wait… sorry, got them confused with Hamas for a second!! Meanwhile, back in the real world, those who want to read the actual text of Robinson’s wannabe Chomsky routine should look here: http://sb4af.wordpress.com/robinson-case/the-original-email-at-issue/ Call me old-fashioned, but *my* academic standards do not include subjecting one’s captive student audience to this type of biased, inflammatory ranting. I realize that in Sociology the line between teaching and "activism" is… well, *virtually nonexistent*, but anyone who steps back for a second should… Read more »
"All four members of the panel held the opinion that Professor Robinson’s e-mail to students was unobjectionable and protected by his academic freedom." This just is not accurate. Lisa Hajjar, at the beginning of her presentation, said she would not have used that photo essay when teaching. She said her rule when teaching was to only invoke Nazis when talking about real Nazis. Later on, her remarks were about her willingness to defend a professor’s academic freedom even in cases where she did not agree with the academic and would not have done the same thing. I don’t recall Geoff… Read more »
Professor Kohn: Have you no decency, sir?Professor Kohn, You do not know me. And my "anti-Israeli" stance cannot possibly be well known to you because I do not have one. This is the sort of accusation that has no place in an open discussion; it is meant to have the effect of asking a person when he stopped supporting racism. Once the charge has been hurled, very little can be done to undo the damage, whatever the actual facts may be. Here’s what you don’t know Professor Kohn: I have spent much of my adult life in conversation with my… Read more »
facts not straight and why we really need academic FREEDOM and freedom of speechDr. Kohn, As a person who attended the forum, your facts are not correct, and I agree with Prof. Raymond’s response, setting these facts straight. Also, your charged letter fails to address what academic freedom is really about and why Prof. Bill Robinson is so valuable to our University community: “As defined by the American Association of University Professors, academic freedom includes the right of faculty to openly discuss all subjects in the classroom free from institutional censorship, discipline or other forms of restrictive interference in teaching,… Read more »
Robinson is "so valuable"?Explain to me, please, the scholarly value and pedagogical utility of the following… ——— Robinson wrote: "If Martin Luther King were alive on this day of January 19, 2009, there is no doubt that he would be condemning the Israeli aggression against Gaza along with U.S. military and political support for Israeli war crimes, or that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians. I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of… Read more »