Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Response to:

The Conservatives Behind the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade
by Jim Sleeper
The American Prospect
October 19, 2016

Categories:
False allegations of attacking professors who criticize Israel
False allegations of attacking critics of America's policy in the Middle East
Misc. Corrections

Original text from The Conservatives Behind the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade:

[Note: the following is an excerpt] Its [the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education] major grants come from the ultra-conservative Earhart, John Templeton, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations; the Scaife family foundations; the Koch-linked Donors Trust, and funders that sustain a myriad of conservative campus-targeting organizations that include FIRE, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (whose "Academic Bill of Rights" would mandate more hiring of conservative faculty and would monitor professors' syllabi for "balance") and Campus Watch (which tracks and condemns liberal professors' comments on the Middle East).

Campus Watch Responds:

Jim Sleeper, a political science lecturer at Yale, is fascinated (one might say obsessed) with donations that legally support conservative and libertarian organizations. He's also fond of repeating himself in articles in which he presents information available via IRS Form 990, which nonprofit 501 (c) 3 organizations must make public, with the breathless enthusiasm of a gossip writer who's uncovered a hitherto undiscovered Hollywood affair.

These include his claim, quoted above in full, that Campus Watch "tracks and condemns liberal professors' comments on the Middle East." In fact, as Sleeper should have learned in his somnambulating through the nonprofit world, CW in no way "condemns" anyone's comments based on the politics of the commentator. We critique sloppy, false, tendentious, politicized, or propagandistic scholarship, teaching, and public lectures by any academic concerned with the Middle East regardless of their politics. Be they liberals, conservatives, libertarians, or moderates, we are unconcerned with the voting record or party affiliation of anyone we examine.

Not that Sleeper will notice, or care. After all, there are public records to make public, known facts to make known. It's a wonder a man with Sleeper's curiosity finds time to . . . rest.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)