Saturday, April 14, 2007

FREE SPEECH AT BROWN U BY PERMISSION OF MUSLIMS ONLY

A controversy over free-speech restrictions on college campuses continues to grow after Jewish student leaders at Brown University canceled an appearance by a pro-Israel speaker because a Muslim chaplain called her controversial. Jewish students had asked the student board of Brown's chapter of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life to co-sponsor a Nov. 30 speech by Nonie Darwish, an Arab who had become pro-Israel and author of "Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror." Earlier this month, however, after tentatively agreeing to sponsor the event, the board nixed the event after Brown's Muslim chaplain, Rumee Ahmed, raised objections.

Born in Cairo and raised in Gaza, Darwish is the daughter of an Egyptian intelligence officer killed by Israeli soldiers. She says she was indoctrinated from childhood to hate Israel but changed her views after befriending Jews who yearned for peace and after her brother's life was saved by Jewish doctors at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital. She since has converted to Christianity and attends an evangelical church. The California-based Darwish now speaks around the United States on the difficulties women face under Islam and on the Muslim jihad against Israel.

According to Serena Eisenberg, director of Brown's Hillel, Jewish students wanted to bring Darwish to speak about rights in the Middle East, and by default in Israel. They enlisted Hillel and Brown's Sarah Doyle Women's Center as sponsors. But Ahmed reportedly said Darwish's views were offensive to Muslims, who Ahmed claims live in fear at the university. Then "the Muslim Students Association and the Muslim chaplain and the Chaplain's Office expressed concern about bringing Nonie to campus, so the women's group withdrew their sponsorship," Eisenberg told JTA on Monday. Neither Ahmed nor Gail Cohee, director of the Women's Center, would return phone calls from JTA.

Once the Women's Center withdrew its sponsorship, the Hillel students considered whether they wanted to be the lone sponsors of an event that could prove controversial, Eisenberg said. According to Yael Richardson, the Hillel chapter's student president, the board was lobbied by Ahmed and via e-mail by Brown's head chaplain, the Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson. Cooper Nelson "told us to think about the implications of what this would do with our religious communities on campus," Richardson said. "She encouraged us to think carefully about whether we wanted to fund the event."

After researching Darwish's writings and past statements, the five members of the board decided against bringing her to campus so as not to jeopardize their "lovely" relationship with Muslim counterparts, Richardson said. Eisenberg said there also were scheduling issues. Richardson said she's proud of the decision, which earned Hillel a scathing rebuke from the New York Post and led to the resignation of one student Hillel official.

In an e-mail message to Jewish student leaders obtained by JTA, Eisenberg urged students to consider whether the event was "of such benefit as to outweigh the rifts we are certain to cause in the Muslim community and perhaps among Jewish students and others on campus who question whether Hillel should be bring [sic] Arab speakers to campus who speak poorly of Islam." But she says she wanted the decision to come directly from the students.

"Did the Muslim Students Association and the administration exert some influence? Yes," Eisenberg said. "Did our board cave? No. They made a thoughtful decision about constructive dialogue and about moving forward." However, the cancellation comes after Brown's Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life supported Palestinian Solidarity Week earlier this month "over my objections," Eisenberg said.

That event was sponsored by the parents of Rachel Corrie, an American student and pro-Palestinian volunteer who was run over and killed as she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from searching for arms-smuggling tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Since her death in 2003, Corrie has become an icon for pro-Palestinian groups on college campuses such as the International Solidarity Movement. Cooper Nelson, the head chaplain, did not return repeated calls from JTA.

Brown officials did offer a response, and suggested that Darwish may speak at the university at some point. "The Brown University community values the contributions of affiliated student religious groups and supports open discussion among people of all faiths and religious beliefs. Administrative officials at Brown are working with student groups to discuss alternative ideas for sponsoring a Nonie Darwish presentation on campus," Brown's vice president for public affairs and university relations, Michael Chapman, said in a release.

The decision to cancel the Darwish event angered several pro-Israel students involved in planning it and prompted Yoni Bedine, a Brown student and Hillel staff member responsible for Israel programming, to resign. "I think the failure here was a failure of Jewish leadership," he told JTA. "I think it sends a really bad message to potential future Jewish leaders. I think it was a catastrophic decision in terms of the precedents that it sets."

Darwish is the latest in a series of controversial speakers on the Middle East who have had their appearances canceled amid complaints from opposition groups. Recently Columbia University's chaplain's office revoked as many as 115 invitations hours before a speech by Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist turned evangelical Christian and author of the book, "Why I Left Jihad."

Last month, Tony Judt, a New York University academic who advocates replacing Israel with a binational state of Arabs and Jews, had an appearance canceled at the Polish Consulate in New York following phone calls from two prominent Jewish leaders. The following week, a French Embassy office in New York scrapped a party in honor of author Carmen Callil after complaints that she equated Jewish suffering under France's Vichy government with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. In those cases, questions raised by Jewish opponents led the hosts to cancel the events. But at Brown, the decision was taken by Jewish students themselves, apparently out of concern that the speaker could harm Muslim-Jewish dialogue.

Darwish denied that she was controversial, and her Brown supporters say they carefully vetted her writings to ensure there was nothing inflammatory. "I never speak against the Koran, I speak against terrorism," Darwish said. "Books don't commit terrorism, people do." She has had only one other speaking engagement canceled because of fears of controversy, said Darwish, who claims there's a concerted campaign of intimidation aimed at Muslims who speak out about their own culture. "Any Arab who speaks differently from the status quo is immediately just branded as traitor, and they want to shut us up," she told JTA. "We left the Middle East thinking we're coming to America, our freedom of speech is protected. And then the radicals follow us here and shut us up."

Bedine insists he wanted Darwish's talk to be constructive. But others say the sensitivity argument is being carried too far - and often is applied in only one direction. Bedine says he wouldn't have dreamed of asking Muslim students to cancel speakers at Palestinian Solidarity Week, though Jewish students found some of them controversial. "We're here to be challenged and hear the full spectrum of views," Bedine said. "In free speech, toes get stepped on."

Source





Wikipedia references a needless source of anxiety

By Eric Rauchway, a professor of history at the University of California. The good prof puts a lot of faith in the Marxist Juergen Habermas and misplaced faith in the Green/Left magazine "Nature" as well (See here about that) but he is right in highlighting a big change in knowledge management

The history department at Middlebury College in Vermont, the US, has banned students' citation of Wikipedia, saying the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit "suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation". What's at stake here isn't error. It's how we in the professional knowledge business greet our new overlords: the plain people of the internet. Right now, we're lobbing fibs at them of just the kind the internet is good at puncturing and, indeed, of just the kind the losing side used the last time our civilisation endured a revolution in the ownership of knowledge.

Wikipedia's founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales agrees with the Middlebury historians. "Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested: students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn't be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either." All encyclopedias stand several degrees of separation away from the events on which they report.

But by "barring Wikipedia citations without mentioning other encyclopedias", as Middlebury American studies professor Jason Mittell says, "it would seem that their problem is with the Wiki, not the pedia".

Yet in pitting Wikipedia against the Britannica, British journal Nature found: "The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested the difference in accuracy was not particularly great. The average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
Wikipedia lets anyone write or edit it, which makes it vulnerable to vandalism. But Wikipedia relies on this openness to defend itself. Its (mostly) upstanding citizens don't take kindly to rotten kids ruining their encyclopedia and they quickly stop it.

In contrast to this reliance on openness, consider Britannica. Nature critiqued Britannica by conducting a peer-reviewed comparison of the reference works, acting as academics are supposed to: by getting expert opinion, then getting other experts to go over the conclusions. Britannica's response was to buy ad space in The New York Times lambasting Nature.

People with money, reputation and control over public information have historically used their power to retain control over the means of producing knowledge, as philosopher Jurgen Habermas noted. During the Middle Ages, the only public things were the symbols of authority, displayed to the people by kings and the church, who told them what to think and do. As market towns arose, so did a new public culture. Now information didn't just move down from above; it moved horizontally and, by the 17th century, vigorously, in print journals, coffee houses and taverns where political and literary discourse flourished. As Habermas noted, the rise of public opinion annoyed the experts: "The conflict about lay judgment, about the public as a critical authority, was most severe . where hitherto a circle of connoisseurs had combined social privileges with a specialised competence."

But, once public, knowledge became so cheap to make and spread that it demanded attention. Everyone who was anyone was reading and listening. And, throughout the period of liberalisation in the West, the great and good, the ambitious and the worthy, learned to reckon with "the sense of the people".

The rise of the modern state and the expensive apparatus of modern media undid this revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Al Gore noted, borrowing from Habermas, it meant a refeudalisation of the public sphere.

Now the internet is de-feudalising it again. There's no point romanticising what's going on, de-feudalisation doesn't mean democratisation. Like the coffee-house culture, the internet's public sphere is noticeably male, crude and given to the concerns of the rich middle class. But it's not subject to the control of press barons, either.

Professors can no more undo the public sphere of the internet than the embattled experts of the early modern era could undo the coffee houses. That doesn't mean our days are numbered (although Britannica's may be). As Habermas noted, deft politicians learned to use "the knowledge of the millions".

And scholars still have a role to play in the world of Wikipedia. It needs us: Wikipedia articles need to cite reliable sources that use "process and approval between document creation and publication". In other words, academic work: Wikipedia is on our side.

Source




NASTY BRITISH SCHOOL

Run by a tinpot Hitler with all the flexibility of a brick

A school has banned a grade A pupil from its end-of-year prom because her parents would not force her to attend extra revision classes. Kayleigh Baker, 16, a prefect at Hurworth School, in the Prime Minister's Sedgefield constituency, is a model student with a 100 per cent attendance record and a series of outstanding annual reports. Last year, she achieved A grades in two GCSE examinations that she had sat a year early and is expected to achieve top marks in nine subjects this summer.

Her invitation to next month's prom has been withrawn after a dispute between her parents and the school's senior management about its demand that Year 11 pupils should attend compulsory after-school revision sessions. The annual event, which will be held in an 18th century country manor house, is the highlight of the school's social calendar and for many pupils represents the climax of their school career.

Dean Judson, the head teacher, has also barred Kayleigh from the netball team and from going on any school trips. He allowed her to attend a recent achievement ceremony, at which she collected five awards.

Kay and Ellis Baker say that their daughter is a talented and diligent student who does not need the extra burden of two weekly, hour-long revision lessons at the end of the school day. They believe that they have the backing of the Department for Education and Skills, which told them in a letter: "All study support (out of school hours) activities are entirely voluntary and there should be no compulsion on young people to attend."

One of Hurworth's governors has resigned in protest at its "severe and extremely punitive" treatment of Kayleigh, who hopes to become a lawyer, but yesterday the school, near Darlington, Co Durham, showed no sign of backing down. Eamonn Farrar, its chief executive, said: "We know what's best for the children and that is why we make them go to these lessons." If one pupil were allowed to miss the sessions, others would soon follow suit, he said. "In life, if you don't do something you are asked to, then you can't expect anything in return. Children who don't conform to the school rules cannot expect to go to the school prom."

The 636-pupil school, for children aged 11-16, has won praise from Ofsted inspectors for its "very good leadership and teaching", which has led to a significant recent improvement in its GCSE results. The proportion of pupils achieving five or more A*-C grades rose from 39 per cent in 1998 to 93 per cent last year. Mr Farrar denied that the introduction of compulsory after-school lessons was prompted by an unhealthy obsession with school performance tables. "If I said I run these classes because of the league tables, that would be immoral. We don't play the league table game - we just celebrate when we top them."

Kayleigh, described in a recent school report as "an inspiration to others with impeccable behaviour and a totally focused attitude", said that she was deeply disappointed by the school's decision. Her dress, handmade for her in China last year, was inspired by the gown worn by Kate Hudson in the Hollywood film How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Kayleigh had a companion to go with and said that she had been "looking forward to the prom all year". Boys wear black tie and the girls full-length gowns, and many will be travelling to the Hardwick Hall Hotel, near Sedgefield, by limousine. "Everybody has been talking about it, getting excited. My friends are talking about their dresses and asking each other where they got their shoes from, and I can't join in," she said. "I've been excluded from everything fun at school, everything that I enjoy. It's cruel and I feel like I'm being punished when I haven't done anything wrong."

Kayleigh said that, by passing her religious studies GCSE a year early, she already had five free periods in her timeta-ble that were allocated for revision. As a result, she did not need the after-school sessions. Her father, a health and safety consultant, said: "All children that age need balance. Kayleigh is studious and conscientious. We made a decision about her welfare and the school has punished her for it." Mrs Baker said that her daughter had been so upset that she had lost a stone in weight.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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