Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

Shampa Biswas delivered the August 2007 convocation address at Whitman College, where she is Global Studies director and associate professor of politics. During this jargon-laden harangue against America and the West, she mischaracterized Campus Watch so egregiously that it is clear she did no research on CW to ensure that, whatever her opinion of CW, she might at least get her facts straight.

Early in her address she said:

A founder and director of the Middle East Forum and a former member of the board of the very influential U.S. Institute of Peace, Daniel Pipes has founded the organization Campus Watch, whose explicit purpose is to compile dossiers and publicly malign on their website "unpatriotic" academics who oppose U.S. or Israeli foreign policy, especially with regard to the Middle East.

Since Biswas's words were delivered almost five years after CW removed dossiers (which were on the site for two weeks during September, 2002), even a brief search of CW could have prevented this embarrassing mistake.

Not being satisfied with one error, however, Biswas commits others. She claims that CW's "explicit purpose" is to "publicly malign" academics deemed "unpatriotic," a charge that is mendacious and absurd on several levels.

CW explicit purpose is to critique professors and programs rigorously with empirically sound research. We malign no one, much less state that maligning professors is our "explicit purpose." Her use of quotations marks around "unpatriotic" implies that she is quoting directly from the CW site. Yet nowhere in our mission statement does the word "unpatriotic" appear. Biswas simply made it up, whole cloth.

Moreover, we do not base our critiques on a scholar's position on U.S. or Israeli foreign policy, but on the objectivity of their research and teaching. We oppose agit-prop and politicized scholarship from all quarters.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)