Campus Watch Responds:
Some writers equate criticism with censorship and creating a climate of fear. Others charge that critical essays are nothing more than a smear job. Esther Kaplan does both when she writes:
Two assistant professors, Joseph Massad and Nadia Abu El-Haj, were publicly smeared by another right-wing outfit, Campus Watch, as they underwent tenure review.
It was Said--not, say, Campus Watch, with its hit list of faculty labeled as apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam--who created a “climate of fear in academia” and whose “aggressive tone” was tantamount to “academic terrorism.”
As for a “faculty hit list,” it doesn’t exist. In September of 2002, for a period of less than two weeks, CW listed dossiers of professors who had in fact issued apologias for violent acts--a tendency that has by no means passed. Having served their purpose, they were removed, and have not been up since. A cursory glance at CW’s site would have revealed as much.
How they created a “climate of fear” and the like is something Kaplan doesn’t explain or prove, because of course they didn’t. Fear in academe, in fact, stems more from knowing that off-campus groups and individuals have the temerity to critique works (and actions) that professors had for years assumed went unnoticed by the masses, and to then bring those critiques to a broad audience.
It’s a small world after all.
(Posted by Winfield Myers)