Last night I did a post on a Yale case demonstrating the influence of pro-Israel money in academia. Here's a related situation. Roger Cohen of the IHT makes the following important point in a letter to Marty Peretz on the TNR site:
I gave a talk last week to several hundred
people in the Iranian Studies Department at Stanford. There are few
such departments left in the country, yet another sign of the
lamentable effects of three decades of non-communication.
Well, Israel Studies departments are growing like gangbusters, as Mitchell Bard, the Israel lobbyist reports. I wonder why?
[T]he American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) created the Israel
Scholar Development Fund to encourage young scholars to enter the
field, to bring the best Israeli scholars as visitors to American
campuses, and to advise donors how to ensure that universities do not
misuse their investments….
The hope is that once a university and its donors see how valuable it is to have an Israeli scholar on campus, they will want to have one on a regular or permanent basis. In just the last two years, centers and chairs have been established at Brandeis, the University of Maryland, UCLA, and Yeshiva University. Centers also exist at Columbia, University of Denver, and NYU, bringing the total (including American and Emory) to nine. Most of these remain one-person operations, but several are expanding. In addition, 15 Israel studies chairs have been created.
