Lisa Duggan of the ASA tries to attack me

Lisa Duggan, president elect of the American Studies Association who put together an anti-Israel conference last week that made her drool,  seems a bit upset:

On February 23, the right wing Zionist blog Elder of Ziyon leveled accusations tantamount to an “exposé“ of our NYU American Studies conference scheduled for March 1: “ASA’s President Elect Hosting Secret Anti-Israel Conference. ”

This post’s allegations, that the event would feature “obscene “ Israel bashers living in an “echo chamber of their own hate,” quickly rocketed around Twitter, generating more posts and an avalanche of hate mail. Extending the expressions of outrage over the American Studies Association’s support for the academic boycott of Israel (well-known throughout the Zionist blogosphere), this post focused its “exposé” on the supposed “secret” conspiracy unveiled in the post. Letters sent to NYU President John Sexton denounced the limited range of views represented, pronounced the supposed secrecy shameful, and demanded that NYU cancel the conference and fire me (the named ASA president elect).

While I am hardly responsible for hate mail generated by exposing a conference that Duggan explicitly wanted to keep quiet, isn't mail demanding that she be fired considered free speech? After all, Duggan just this week signed a petition that pretends to support free speech. She wouldn't want to be considered a hypocrite, would she?

I posted the conference flyer to the CUNY Revolutionizing American Studies faculty seminar page on Facebook, asking the professors and student members to share it only with colleagues and students.

Her exact words were "PLEASE DO NOT post or circulate the flyer. We are trying to avoid press, protestors and public attention. Feel free to share it with friends, colleagues and grad students though." The Facebook page is open to the public, and the description of the group is to expose the program outside CUNY:

This group is one of the public faces of a conversation taking place within CUNY in the field of American studies, and to a vast array of intellectual, political, social, and cultural issues.

This initiative intends to animate a critical engagement with American Studies at and beyond the CUNY Graduate Center.

So Duggan posted the flyer on a public group but then says that it was not intended for the public. But those in the group could invite "friends." It is quite obvious what her motivations were, even as she furiously tries to spin it.

Admittedly, it is very funny watching her fume.

The Elder of Ziyon, well known for inflammatory posts, interpreted this ordinary limited registration academic conference held in a small space as a sinister conspiracy, and our Event Brite registration page overflowed with requests from Zionist bloggers and pranksters like I.A. Tollah.

See - I'm well-known! And inflammatory!

But don't worry, my efforts were all for naught:

There was no migration to the mainstream and tabloid press, there was no massing of protesters at the event site. The conference proceeded smoothly. We proclaimed it a success.

Except that Duggan has already tried multiple times to spin this conference into making it less exclusionary than it was. She failed miserably in her attempt to compare it to private Zionist groups choosing Zionist speakers. The controversy was written up in JTA (republished worldwide, in places like JNS and Haaretz and Times of Israel) and in Tablet.

And, today, the New York Post wrote an op-ed about this very conference:

NYU’s faculty handbook requires instructors to “show respect for the opinions of others.” Too bad a closed-door university event last weekend did nothing of the kind. Which may explain why organizers took pains to keep it quiet.

The annual event, sponsored by four NYU departments, looks like a thinly disguised session aimed at mobilizing support for the anti-Israel boycott movement.

President John Sexton has previously written to the national American Studies Association to express NYU’s “disappointment, disagreement and opposition to” its embrace of the boycott. But he says that to have required sponsors of the NYU event to represent all sides would be tantamount to censorship. That’s more or less the position taken by Lisa Duggan, an NYU professor who is also the ASA’s president-elect. Prof. Duggan supports the boycott of Israel and moderated a panel at the event.

In an e-mail to The Post, Duggan says: “The conference was not secret. It was just a limited registration academic conference in a small space.” And yet before the conference, she posted a warning on Facebook asking people not to circulate the flyer advertising the event to avoid public attention. That post was later removed.

We are a newspaper, so the last thing we want is to censor people or tell them they have to run their conferences in a certain way. What would be nice is to hear some voices from the other side — say, by a concerned trustee or donor.

In the meantime, NYU gets to have it both ways, officially condemning the boycott while professors and departments use NYU facilities to advance it.

Sorry, Lisa. Tens of thousands more people now know about your pathetic attempts to keep your little Israel-bashing conference a secret.

It's almost as if you are embarrassed by what you stand for.

(h/t David L)