Blunt censorship. Clark University has cancelled a talk later this month by Norman Finkelstein, saying it will shed more heat than light. This on the same week that Joseph Massad is said to have gotten tenure at Columbia. So reports Mishal Al-Johar, who adds:
At the University of Texas at Austin, we have been begging the pro-Israel crowd to present a speaker with Norman Finkelstein, and they continue to put us off.
One more reason for the BDS campaign against Israel. They boycott pro-Palestine speakers, so let's boycott theirs.
At our campus, I tried for some time to get co-sponsors for a panel or lecture or debate with Dr. Norman Finkelstein. The other groups always declined. When he was finally brought to campus to speak through a co-sponsorship of groups that were not part of the opposing ones I had contacted initially, they complained they were not allowed an opportunity to provide a rebuttal speaker.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Oh, and as an aside, the excuse from the leader of Hillel for declining co-sponsorship was that, "Alan Dershowitz doesn't like him."
Clark University is not alone. I remember that City University's Grad School cancelled a session to discuss the Walt Mearsheimer book on grounds that the issue was "too controversial." Every day in every way I am persuaded that the leaning towers of academe have crumbled. No wonder I can't find an "honest" university to take over the collections of the Kurdish Library. When I asked a harvard academic where to find one he suggested I begin looking on Mars!
Vera, I KNEW your name was familiar, but I just could not place it. It is a pleasure to share comment space with you.
The extent to which the American universities, the last bastions of free speech towards fertilizing
informed citizens so core to any true democracy, has been eroded is really horrifying. Things sure have changed since the Civil Rights Era and the Nam Era–all due to the ivied taboo–criticism of Israel. What a big dummy Uncle Sam has become, a zombie for Likudthink.