Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

The anonymous author of the "Road to Academia" blog makes several untrue assertions about Campus Watch (CW) in a March 27, 2010, post:

One of its activities is to collect dossiers of Professors (submitted by students) they view to be harmful to the field. They have been criticised of trying to politicize ME Studies, and promote their own anti-Arab, pro-Israeli political views on as the academic standard within the field.

Given that one of CW's primary goals is to combat politicization in Middle East studies--an issue this blogger himself acknowledges in another post--the charge that we're part of the problem doesn't make sense.

As we've noted so often, CW does not maintain dossiers on professors. Dossiers were posted at our launch--in September, 2002--and stayed on the site for two weeks after which, having served their purpose, they were removed. We make no apology for inviting students to share their impressions of Middle East studies professors. If this blogger considers such free expression so objectionable, then he should immediately desist from publishing his own opinions as a London School of Economics student.

We've also pointed out repeatedly that our critiques of Middle East studies are neither "anti-Arab" nor "pro-Israeli." We critique tendentious, politicized, and sloppy scholarship with an aim to improving the field.

To bolster his allegations against CW, the blogger quotes (without providing a title or link) Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's notorious The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. But it turns out the quote at hand--as Daniel Pipes has demonstrated at his blog and as the author himself acknowledges--is factually incorrect. And this certainly isn't a first. CW director Winfield Myers recently penned a correction to the latest in a long line of error-prone attempts on the part of Walt and Mearsheimer to smear CW.

Had the "Road to Academia" blogger done more research, he could have avoided the usual litany of disproven accusations against CW. Instead, he simply parrots the talking points of Walt, Mearsheimer, and other CW opponents.

(Posted by Cinnamon Stillwell)