Yet another anti-israel union
PROFS ENCOURAGED TO TEACH MISINFORMATION ABOUT ISRAEL IN NAME OF ‘ACADEMIC FREEDOM’
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code came out just after I finished my PHD. As a post-doctoral fellow teaching courses in San Diego on the Bible and early Judaism and Christianity, I was invited to give a public lecture discussing the book from a historian’s perspective.
I had been giving public lectures for a few years — graduate students are known to jump at the opportunity to share their knowledge for pennies — and I was experienced enough to know how to navigate the religious sensibilities of audience members and anticipate certain types of questions. But when I launched into a discussion of what I thought was wrong with Brown’s sensationalist positioning of his fictional account as authentic history, I was utterly unprepared for the backlash and heckling I got from several members of the audience.
How did I know that his claims about Jesus, Mary, da Vinci and the Templars weren’t true? Maybe, they said, I was just jealous that he had used his understanding of history to write a bestselling novel, and here I was giving public lectures in community centres for peanuts. What makes my “opinion” about what happened 2,000 years ago better than Brown’s?
Last week, my union, the Carleton University Academic Staff Association, released a series of “Guidelines on Academic Freedom,” ostensibly to help members better understand what we can say in the classroom.
The “guidelines” state that, “Members should interpret academic freedom to mean that speech about topics such as the decades-long conflict in Israel/ Palestinian territories can be appropriate in a broad range of settings because debates about justice and identity shape the contexts in which we teach and in which students learn.” Furthermore, “Members should be aware that what is relevant to their pedagogy, educational objectives and course themes can be interpreted broadly, and that censorship in this regard would violate academic freedom.”
The document’s introduction explains that it was necessary to develop such guidelines in light of the blow-back that some faculty members were receiving for speaking about “colonialism and racism in their classrooms; instructors voicing their concerns about genocide have been accused by students of creating a hostile learning environment.”
In addition to blithely using terms like “colonialism” and “apartheid” to describe the situation in Israel, and referring to the war against Hamas as a “genocide,” one of the many shocking examples contained in the “non-exhaustive list” of items the union considers “to be acceptable speech and of public interest” is “contextualizing the 10/7 attacks as a part of an ongoing history of violent conflict.”
The complete distortion, misinformation and baldly biased premises on which these guidelines are based shouldn’t surprise me after everything I’ve witnessed over the past five months, but somehow, they still do. Under what guise can the union empower professors to teach about issues they have no expertise in?
It’s clear that the authors of these guidelines don’t have specific expertise in this subject area, and don’t properly understand terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “colonialism,” or the ways in which they might accurately be applied to international affairs.
How would these zealous defenders of academic freedom feel if I took my PHD in history to entitle myself to speak with authority in a classroom about subjects in which they are experts and I am not? Should I pontificate on media production and design, global social inequality or post-colonial film studies? All this time, I thought I was supposed to teach students the subjects I am an expert in, and leave other topics to those who studied them. But heck, why should I limit myself to only speak to students in my classroom about what I actually know?
The union’s mandate is “to promote the well-being of the academic community, to defend academic freedom and to promote the individual interests of its members, as well as to maintain the quality and integrity of the university as an academic institution.” The only aspect of this statement that is served by its new “guidelines” is that of promoting the individual interests of some of its members — interests that are patently political.
This is not what a union is for. There is no universe in which my union dues should support directives that authorize physicists or psychologists to teach students that Israel is an illegitimate country or that savage rapes and massacres committed against citizens of a sovereign state need to be contextualized.
Twenty years ago at that community centre in San Diego, I responded to the hecklers by telling them that seven years of work toward a PHD had given me not only deep knowledge of the ancient world, but also an understanding of how to conduct proper research and distinguish fact from fiction, actual events from conspiracy theories and truth from propaganda. And I freely admitted that I was a starving post-doc who would love to have the luxury of time to write historical fiction. Was I jealous that Brown spun some bad historiography into a multi-million dollar enterprise? Sure. But it wasn’t jealousy that drove my critique. Rather, it was a sense of moral responsibility to be as accurate as possible in the information I convey to an audience, and to be as transparent as possible about how I know what I know.
Abdicating that moral responsibility is not “academic freedom,” any more than Israel is a colonial enterprise or an apartheid state committing genocide. Purveying misinformation under the guise of academic freedom is an abuse of academic authority that does nothing to promote the well-being of the academic community or defend academic freedom, and completely undermines the quality and integrity of the university as an academic institution.
UNDER WHAT GUISE CAN THE UNION EMPOWER PROFESSORS TO TEACH ABOUT ISSUES THEY HAVE NO EXPERTISE IN?