Attention all college students:
this man wants you to snitch on your "liberal" professors.
That man is Daniel Pipes, the founder of Campus Watch, a conservative thinktank with, according to its
website, is, "a project of the Middle East Forum, [that] reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them." The Washington Post ran a
front-page story on this group, today, highlighting the group's main avenue of achieving its goals: intimidating scholars into falling in line with its worldview.
Prior to the attacks of 9/11, Middle East studies were a languishing curriculum. That, of course, has changed. Interest in this area of study has skyrocketed, and the academic world has been quickly filling up its ranks with specialists in that field. As that has happened, groups like Campus Watch have emerged, correlating "in a flood of abusive e-mail and calls for tightening congressional control over the funding of Middle East studies programs", as noted by professors and academics.
Barbara Petzen, outreach coordinator at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, denounced a "right-wing thought police that is sending spies into classrooms to report on what teachers are saying in class." Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, said his campus has become the target of a McCarthyist "witch hunt."
"Middle East studies have not served us well," countered Daniel Pipes, who founded Campus Watch a year ago as an offshoot of the Middle East Forum, a private think tank dedicated to "promoting American interests in the Middle East." He said mainstream academics had failed to adequately explain the threat posed by Islamic terrorism and were prone to overlook political repression in Arab countries.
"Americans need to know what terms like 'jihad' mean, and why we are being attacked," he said. "This is at the very heart of our foreign and domestic policy."
Those worried about such inquisitions being made by groups like Campus Watch have, in my opinion, rightly dubbed this a new wave of McCarthy-esqe thought policing. Similiar groups existed during the era of the Red Scare, probing the activities of suspected communists. The academic world was especially scrutinized. In fact, one of my professors in my sophomore year of undergrad study had been blacklisted under McCarthyism.
In response to this accusation, Pipes is blithely dismissive. "We are like the toaster specialists who want to see how the toaster works," he says.
In that metaphorical sense, they are also like a toaster user who desires only one type of toast, and seeks to eradicate all other forms of toast. Groups like these hide behind the rather euphamistic front of "improving" or "correcting" the alleged misconceptions in our academic system engendered by alleged liberal bias. At their heart, however, these groups do not seek to turn the system towards a lack of bias; rather their agenda is to force the pendulum to swing to the opposite end of the spectrum: they seek to instill a conservative bias into the academic world.
If you have any wonder that this is their intent, you need only read the words of Martin Kramer, an ally of Pipes':
"Academic colleagues, get used to it," wrote Martin Kramer...[in] Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. "You are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will be scrutinized. Your websites will be visited late at night."
Kramer claims these remarks were tongue-in-cheek, and scoffs at those academics who have cried McCarthyism in response to his words, saying that those academics have made their career out of criticizing the government, and need to be less quick to jump to that conclusion.
Given the strength of his words, and the agenda of groups like Campus Watch, and given that much of what once came to pass is now happening again, (i.e. McCarthyism in the 1950s and Ashcroft's Patriot Act, now) academics have much cause to be concerned.
