American Jewish organizations on Monday slammed a recent report by the National Communication Association’s Task Force on Academic Freedom and Tenure in which Israel is portrayed as a “settler-colonial state” engaged in “genocidal violence,” saying the report peddles “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”In a joint statement, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Academic Engagement Network (AEN) called the suggestion in the academic organization’s report that ‘Zionists’ are engaging alongside white supremacists in efforts to undermine academic freedom “outrageous.”
The report indeed includes antisemitic tropes, positioning pro-Israel voices as rich and powerful opponents of academic freedom:
The Zionist attack on academic freedom takes the form of powerful donors, trustees, and politicians exerting influence on universities to surveil, target, and discipline academics for their research, teaching, and public scholarship on the settler colonial violence in Palestine carried out by Israel.
But as bad as that is, the entire report shows more antipathy to Western civilization than to Israel itself. It engages in logical fallacies, culminating in a report on academic freedom that is against academic freedom itself.
The report is filled with insane statements like this one:
The birth of communication studies in the context of World War II propaganda and the subsequent emergence of the Cold War agenda translates into the hegemonic formations of knowledge within the discipline. These hegemonic formations rooted in the expansive goals of empire reproduce globally the standards of whiteness...
So because a field started in the context of a (supremely moral) war largely fought by white people, the field itself is irredeemably compromised by "whiteness"? If that is true, then the NCA itself must immediately dissolve because it was founded by seventeen white men in 1914.
The report itself changes the definition of academic freedom to be only the freedom to teach a narrow ideological agenda - decolonial, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel. Their proposals include “Disrupt the Whiteness of Tenure,”, “Design frameworks for celebrating practices of transgression”, “Decolonize the hegemonic structures of tenure and promotion”, and “Create research funds for CRT, Palestine, and decolonization.” This isn't academic freedom; it is promoting a single ideology and demoting any other.
The report says "Decolonizing the definition of academic freedom is fundamental… redefining what counts as knowledge." So it acknowledges that it is creating its own, narrow, political definition of academic freedom that excludes other viewpoints - an oxymoron.
The report proposes to force tenure systems to value “transgressive” scholarship, prioritize activist research, and anchor tenure criteria in indigenous and decolonial epistemologies. The entire purpose of tenure is to protect scholars from ideological interference, but this proposal makes ideological conformity a requirement for tenure, which is the opposite of academic freedom.
Even worse, even though academia is overwhelmingly aligned with progressive and left-wing ideologies, the NCA report consistently characterizes any minority viewpoints as “white supremacist,” “far‑right,” “colonial,” “racist,” or “imperialist.” This is a blatant attempt to impose a single viewpoint on all of academia and to denounce any others. It is profoundly anti-knowledge.
Yes, the report promotes antisemitic stereotypes and should be condemned just for that. But the entire report's framework shows exactly what is wrong with academia today: the rejection of any opinion not aligned with the decolonial, progressive, Marxist ideologies with insults , labeling any other opinions as "white supremacist" and "racist."
Based on this report, which the larger NCA Executive Committee approved and praised, the National Communications Association is itself bigoted, closeminded, hypocritical and anti-knowledge. It has proven itself to a model for exactly what an academic association should not be.
(h/t Adam L)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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