It’s rare that I get an e-mail accusing me of being a Nazi, much less an expletive-laden one, but those were the words that stared back at me as I stopped by my office to check my e-mail after a particularly long day of teaching. The message immediately following that one had a subject line that read “anti-Semitic leftist professors.”
I was at the end of my first semester of teaching Middle Eastern history at a large research university in the South. Like any new faculty member, my anxieties revolved primarily around not breaking the PowerPoint projector, not being mistaken yet again for a graduate student instead of a professor, and not spilling spinach dip on the dean at one of the innumerable faculty mixers held at the beginning of the academic year. Hatemail wasn’t on the list.
Since neither of the letters specified exactly what I had done to place myself in the ranks of someone who, as one of the letters put it, “shoveled Jews into the ovens at Dachau,” it took me a couple of days of inquiries and some Google searching to figure out what was going on.
Two weeks earlier, I had spoken on a panel about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It was on the closing night of a weeklong Palestinian film festival called “Life Under Occupation,” sponsored jointly by a few human-rights groups on the campus and a Palestinian advocacy group for which I am the faculty adviser. The group is a university-approved student organization that aims to educate and raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Similar organizations are found on many American campuses.
The students had been trying without success forclose to a year to find a faculty adviser. Some of the people who had been asked to serve as the group’s adviser were just too busy. Others apparently were nervous about having their names associated with a Palestinian group, even one dedicated to a just and peaceful resolution to the conflict for both Jews and Palestinians.
At the time, I confess I thought those people to be slightly paranoid. I’m now a little more understanding.
I wish I could say I became a target because of my passionate feats of oratorical brilliance and advocacy on the panel. In fact, overtired and underprepared, I said a few words about the humanitarian costs of the occupation on Palestinians and the necessity of a just political solution. Then I went home to catch up on some sleep.
A student in the audience who is the head of a pro-Israel group on the campus was apparently more impressed with my performance than I was. She wrote an article that appeared on a right-wing Web site, identifying me as someone who condoned terrorism and objecting to my use of the term “occupation” to describe Israel’s military presence in the West Bank.
That’s when the e-mails began arriving. I know now I was naïve not to have expected something like this. Being a scholar of anything having to do with Islam, the Middle East, or the Arab world has become, in the post-9/11 era, a full-contact sport.
Charging Middle East scholars with “anti-Semitism,” “liberal bias,” and “support for terrorism” has become (in fashion parlance) the new black of right-wing political discourse. Entire Web sites are devoted to exposing academics with expertise on the Middle East as dangerous radicals who pose a threat to the young minds of America. I have seen many of my professors, colleagues, and friends over the past few years placed on such blacklists.
The message to those of us who believe there must be room for ethical and reasoned debate on American involvement in Iraq, on the Israeli occupation, and on the war on terror has never been clearer: “We are watching you. And we’re going to take you down.” I never thought I would be immune to it. I just thought I would have a little more time before it happened to me.
I’m luckier than many other young scholars who have found themselves in this situation. My departmental colleagues have been supportive, both personally and professionally. They reassure me that they will back me up when I get called into the dean’s office someday because angry alumni and donors write letters asking why my institution allows student groups that “promote terrorism” to operate on the campus.
My supporters also let me know when faculty members in other departments — people whom I’ve never met, seen, or spoken to — write letters urging the department to help purge the campus of dangerous viewpoints and the faculty members who espouse them.
But my colleagues have also pointed out that, as an untenured faculty member, I am vulnerable. Just don’t do anything “stupid” in your classes, they caution, and you’ll probably be all right.
It’s good advice, of course. But I have to ask myself, What does it mean?
I do stupid things in my class all the time. I suspect every new teacher does. I forget to put the week’s readings on the Web in time for the students to read them. There’s always one student every semester whose name I continually get wrong. I snap at a student who is repeatedly disruptive in class instead of calling him into my office for a calm, rational talking-to about his behavior.
Still, I get my colleagues’ message. Somewhere between teaching students to try to think critically about the world and their place in it, and giving students a reading, delivering a lecture, or asking them to discuss issues that might land me in the middle of a public witchhunt, there’s a line that can’t be crossed. The problem is that no one can tell me where that line is.
Plenty of resources out there tell untenured professors how to teach, how to get grants, and how to balance the pedagogical side of their career with the imperative to publish. But there’s nothing that explains how to negotiate the road to tenure in a climate that is increasingly hostile to the meat and potatoes of a liberal-arts education — classroom exposure to, and engagement with, alternative ideas.
So I stand in front of my class. I think about the articles I won’t write and the book I won’t publish if I inadvertently take a wrong step and have to spend all of my time defending my integrity as a scholar and a teacher to the university administration. I think of my partner having to deal, day after day, with a grumpy, depressed, and anxious spouse. I think of the career that I dreamed about during endless years of graduate school and dissertation writing that might be destroyed. It is in that moment that I choose between educating my students and saving my own hide. And it is in that moment that those who want to stifle debate on campus win. They don’t need to get me fired to shut me up. I’m already doing it to myself.
And I know I’m not alone. I talk all the time with untenured friends and colleagues about how our attempts to be cautious in the classroom too often translate into self-censorship. We also share our feelings of anger and frustration that the political agendas of a few well-placed, well-organized people can dictate how we do a job that we’ve spent years training for.
Yet in those feelings of anger and frustration I find reason to hope.
Because it means that, despite the uncertainty and anxiety that come with teaching controversial subjects in an inhospitable intellectual climate, we haven’t given up on the idea that it’s still our job to teach our students that the world is a messy and complicated place; a place that is not easily reducible to simple political platitudes or clichés about “us” and “them.” When that struggle becomes less important than getting tenure or leading a comfortable life, I know it will be time to start looking for another line of work.
Leah Bowman is the pseudonym of an assistant professor who teaches Middle East history at a research university in the South.
