Chronicle Campus Confusion

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published this story on Campus Watch which begins as follows

Professors want own names put on Mideast blacklist
They hope to make it powerless

by Tanya Schevitz

In an effort to counter what they label as a McCarthyesque hunt by a pro-Israel think tank, about 100 professors from across the country have asked to be added to a "Campus Watch" Web site that singled out eight professors because of their views on Palestine and Islam.

Which prompted me to pen this letter to the editor:

I was disappointed by the Chronicle’s story about Campus Watch, an organization which critiques scholarship about the Middle East. With your inflammatory and specious use of the word “blacklist”, and with the unchallenged allegation that Campus Watch is “McCarthyesque”, you not only misrepresented Campus Watch but also whitewashed McCarthy’s shameful legacy.

McCarthy was a United States Senator who misused the power of the federal government. The blacklist was used to put people in jail or deprive them of their livelihood. Campus Watch, on the other hand, is merely a project of individual scholars exercising their first amendment rights and their academic duty to expose and answer flaws and biases in other scholars’ work.

Likewise, if there are flaws in Campus Watch’s criticisms, then it is appropriate for others to critique their critique. That’s what people in an open society do for each other. We challenge each other’s ideas, and we challenge each other to keep doing a better job. Your article misses the point about those professors who hope to make Campus Watch “powerless”. That can only mean they seek to stifle public debate about their own work. One wonders why they want their scholarship to be exempt from public scrutiny. Are they afraid of having their errors and prejudices exposed for what they are?

The Chronicle did not print the letter, which they probably would have done by now, given their normal quick turnaround. Presumably the Chronicle's editors couldn't part with the space to correct their own specious and ignorant use of the English language, because they had many more thoughtful and informative letters to run. Like this work of babble from a confused "America Last!" activist, who is possibly a Nazi, possibly a pacifist, possibly both. And they also chose to kill a few more trees in order to shower us with the latest burst of flatulence from Robert Scheer, whose wife happens to be the paper's second-ranking editor.

Does the Chronicle have a bias that they're trying to protect? I don't know, but in yesterday's paper there was this article, also by Tanya Schevitz, that repaints the violent anti-Israel riot at UC Berkeley last April (police officers were assaulted and students were prevented from going to class), into a "pro-Palestinian event". One wonders what other acts of campus violence the Chronicle would consider to be "pro-Palestinian events"? Last month's riot at Concordia University? July's bombing of the Hebrew University cafeteria?

And then there is this Tanya Schevitz Chronicle article from October 2000, about another website, TeacherReview, that posts information about college teachers. TeacherReview seems to be mainly about anonymous ad hominem attacks, and not about scholarly review as is Campus Watch. But Schevitz gets a quote from the ACLU defending TeacherReview's First Amendment rights. Which is exactly the opposite spin that she put on the Campus Watch story.

Does any of this suggest bias? ignorance? lazy reporting? You be the judge.

My earlier entry on Campus Watch is here

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 02, 2002 03:38 PM