Friday, May 10, 2019




DePaul Professor’s Pro-Israel, Anti-Palestinian Views Condemned by Faculty

Unmentioned reason why they censured him rather than fire him:  He is black.  He has what might be called "skin protection"

Opinions expressed by DePaul University Prof. Jason Hill that Israel has the right to annex the West Bank and the United States should pay Israel “financial reparations,” were condemned in a 21-10 vote by the DePaul Faculty Council on May 1.

As reported in the student-run newspaper The DePaulia, “The resolution passed by the Faculty Council does not specifically condemn Jason Hill, it condemns the contents of his article in The @FDRLST.”

In an April 16 commentary for The Federalist, Prof. Hill said Israel has a right to annex the entire West Bank; that America should pay Israel “political and financial reparations” because of U.S. support over the years for the Palestinian Authority; and that America should fund “Israel’s military defense in any manner Israel deems necessary for its survival and unrivaled military status in the Middle East.” 

The vote by the Faculty Council followed two weeks of complaints by some students at the university who launched a petition demanding that Hill be censured. The students described Hill’s views as “racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist, and Islamophobic.”

The Faculty Council’s resolution against Prof. Hill partly states,  

“That DePaul University’s Faculty Council affirms Professor Hill’s right to publish and express his opinions consistent with the Faculty Handbook, the AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and the Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression.

“That the Faculty Council nevertheless affirms that Professor Hill’s article failed to exercise adequate concern for accuracy, restraint, or respect for the opinions of others, as per the AAUP guidelines. As such, this article represents an abuse of his academic freedom.

“That Faculty Council condemns in the strongest possible terms both the tone and content of Professor Hill’s article, and affirms the claims that it expresses positions that are factually inaccurate, advocate war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and give voice to racism with respect to the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Arabs generally.”

In the evening after the vote, Hill was interviewed on FNC’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Aside from defending Israel, I made the point that Israel was the only democracy amidst a bunch of illiberal and primitive regimes that do not respect the inalienability of human rights and individual rights," he said.

"And I think students took offense and, individual faculty and people at large took offense at me defending Israel,” said Hill, “and defending my right to defend Israel's right to defend itself against the war that was launched against it in 1967 by Jordan.”

In a previous interview with CNSNews.com, Dr. Hill stated, “I’m not apologizing. … In a case like this, you don’t yield one inch.”

Jason Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University and the author of several books, including Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Identity: When We Should Not Get Along.

In a 2014 interview, Hill described himself as both liberal and conservative but added, “I voted for Obama, I voted for John Kerry, and I voted for Al Gore, so I’ve always voted for the liberal party.”

SOURCE 






SPME Statement on DePaul Faculty Council’s Censure of Jason Hill’s Article

SPME condemns the recent Faculty Council of DePaul University’s vote to censure an article by Prof. Jason Hill, advocating the Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Regardless of how one feels about Hill’s policy recommendations, his treatment at the hands of his colleagues was at once deeply unfair, counterproductive, and anti-intellectual. The censure, despite its insistence on respecting academic freedom, surrendered to demands of the public-shaming squads that increasingly dominate campus politics, especially when it concerns discussion of Israel and the Palestinians. Far from a blow for academic freedom and decency, this Faculty-Council initiative represents one more brick in a cognitive edifice that systematically excludes a wide range of both opinion and fact by branding it hate speech, or merely “views not representative of the student body… not valuable contribution to the University.” Worse, the move was done at the demand of student groups who practice some of the most virulent hate speech, and advocate for groups who regularly deploy genocidal hate speech. For progressive forces that treasure tolerance and inclusion, this censure was a massive own-goal.

SPME critiques:

* The Abuse of Procedures in order to force the censure through. The chair of the Faculty Council, Scott Paeth, wrote and proposed the censure. Rather than therefore recusing himself, he violated the parliamentary rules to rush it through with minimal discussion. Since one of the avowed goals of the censure motion was to advance “conversations that advance social justice,” it hardly seems fitting for a democratic, academic institution to set such a poor example for how to act fairly.

* The designation of an opinion as unacceptable because it offends some people’s sensibilities. The resolution invokes AAUP Principles about “respect for the opinon of others,” and censures Hill for his “the real harm his words have caused to students and other members of our community.” The word “real” here is most problematic, since the “harm” spoken of was the hurt feelings of students who claim the article “made it difficult for Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims and other marginalized groups to feel safe on campus and freely register for classes,” and that “his comments create unsafe and uncomfortable spaces.” Anyone who treasures freedom, like the scholar, has learned to have a thick skin.

* The failure to educate the student body about the rules and manners of academia (i.e., the place of free speech). Actors with intellectual integrity would have responded student complaints about their hurt feelings from their outraged reading of text, a lesson in 1) how to read carefully without imposing meaning on the text (exegesis not eisegesis), and b) how to deal constructively and with dignity to criticism, even harsh criticism. That would have shown the commitment to academic freedom and worthy conversations the faculty council’s statement claims to hold dear. That would have been the lesson learned from the Andrew Pessin case at Connecticut College in 2015 – were there a learning curve among today’s “woke” faculty.

* The invocation of factual inaccuracy and poor scholarship to attack this opinion piece. The Faculty Council resolution characterized Hill’s work as “factually incorrect,” “shoddy research,” that does “liv up to his responsibilities as member of the academic community.” Scott Paeth’s blogpost claims Hill had abandoned even “any pretense of allegiance to the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its history, the status of international law, principles of human rights, or even principles of sound argumentation.” As far as he, and apparently other signers of the letter, are concerned, Hill’s piece is not just nasty, it was wrong, intellectually deficient, deserving censure. This approach, also leveled at Amy Wax at University Pennsylvania law school colleagues, confuses a paradigmatic take (post-colonial analysis) for reality; and rejects even thinking about, much less discussing the importance of the (abundant) anomalous evidence and alternative approaches. Indeed, people who contributed to the substitution of advocacy for scholarship in the first place, then accuse their critics of bad scholarship.

Behind Hill’s assertions about Palestinian political culture, including its “abysmal and inferior” standing by any progressive standards, lies a mountain of deeply disturbing “hard” evidence, most often ignored by the news media. Hill’s opponents seem to have adopted a post-colonial, Palestinian narrative, as a depiction of factual reality and those who disagree, as dishonest reprobates. This confusion of a paradigmatic “take” as “objective reality”, of “opinion as facts,” not only makes it impossible to think clearly about the real world, but such an anti-intellectual approach can only survive where authoritarians marginalize those who insist on paying attention to the anomalies.

* The final call for repentance. The petition ends with a call to Prof. Hill to repent of his ways and undergo reeducation:

That Faculty Council urges Professor Hill to seriously reconsider his positions on these issues, to take cognizance of the perspectives of other scholars on these issues, as well as the real harm his words have caused to students and other members of our community, and to refrain from abusing his freedom as a scholar in writing on controversial issues in the future

Given outrage of students, here affirmed by the faculty, Prof. Hill, like many before him, has been stigmatized, publicly shamed – “Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” – and effectively banished from polite academic company. Their career trajectories are cut off, their audience of colleagues drastically reduced. The censure resolution assumes the moral superiority of its own side (those good faculty who do worry about students’ feelings), and considers Hill a miscreant in need of re-education before the scholarly community will let him back in their good graces. Few statements better illustrate how hollow the much-protested concern for freedom of speech.

This incident is hardly isolated. Staged moral emergencies, in which students stampede faculties into taking their side, are a highly effective and widespread practice. At work here, as elsewhere on Western campuses, is a curious combination of a modern and post-modern discourse which ironically produces a pre-modern result, quite the opposite of the stated goal. On the one hand, faculty speaking a modern, objectivist, discourse (“facts” “accuracy” “scholarship”), and students wielding a post-modern discourse (“hurt feelings” “safe-spaces” “outrage”), both proclaiming profound commitment to stopping hate speech and promoting social justice, ends up undermining diversity: in the name of “inclusivity”, of “amplifying marginal voices,” a coalition of well-intentioned upholders of tolerance and mutual acceptance accept as moral guides and leaders, a pre-modern group that shows no concern or respect for those who disagree with them – indeed make them feel very unsafe – dedicated to a tribal (zero-sum) definition of justice in which the “evil enemy” is punished indeed eliminated). We end up with the tribal group accusing their designated enemies of the very things that the political movements they support openly espouse: hate speech, racism, genocidal rantings, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. And so, the very people who read hate speech into the work of a defender of Israel, promote a discourse radically rooted in a genocidal hatred of Israel and any Jew or non-Jew who supports her.

Given the above, SPME urges the faculty of DePaul to:

* Repeal this censure if only on procedural grounds.

* Make a statement about civility rather than rebarbarization, especially the importance of being able to take criticism with composure, and not giving in to social-media driven public shaming campaigns that seek to marginalize and exclude.

* Hold a serious discussion on the Middle East that excludes extreme voices from both sides, according to the same guidelines. Explore the substantive claims of Hill’s argument about the Palestinian leadership, and the difference between a legal approach to “occupation” (Paeth et al.) and an appreciation of the very troubling political issues (Hill et al.)

Via SPME






Teacher ‘forced’ to edit yearbook photos of students with Trump clothing

A high school yearbook adviser who was suspended after photos of two students were altered to remove President Donald Trump’s name from their clothing is suing the district, saying she was made a scapegoat.

Teacher Susan Parsons says in her legal case, filed on Monday, that officials in New Jersey’s Wall Township School District requested the changes in 2017 but then set her up to “take the blame”.

The district, according to Ms Parsons’ claim, created a hostile work environment that led to harassment and death threats against her and violated her rights by barring her from speaking to the media.

Ms Parsons is seeking unspecified damages and asking that the district policy that prevented her from telling her story in the media be struck down as unconstitutional.

“What happened to her is really just egregious,” said her lawyer Christopher Eibeler.

Superintendent Cheryl Dyer said on Tuesday she could not comment on specifics because neither the district nor its counsel had seen the civil claim.

But she said that at the time, she conducted a thorough investigation. If there is a hearing, she said, information on what took place will be made public.

US President Donald Trump's campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” has become a symbol of division. Picture: Butch Dill/AP Photo
US President Donald Trump's campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” has become a symbol of division. Picture: Butch Dill/AP PhotoSource:AP

“I’m confident that when the full facts come to light, all of the actions of this office and the board of education will be found to be wholly appropriate,” Ms Dyer said.

Ms Parsons claims she received hate mail and threatening phone calls and voicemails as the controversy turned into a national story.

In her claim, she says the district routinely forced her to edit yearbook photos to alter anything that could be controversial, including words on T-shirts, hand gestures and students not wearing shirts on a school trip.

One student wore a sweater vest with Mr Trump’s name on it. Another student wore a T-shirt carrying the words “Trump Make America Great Again.”

School officials have said one photo was altered even though the shirt the student was wearing didn’t violate the school’s dress code. The other photo was re-sized to match others and apparently wasn’t altered for the purpose of removing Mr Trump’s name.

A Trump quote submitted by a third student, the freshman class president, apparently was accidentally omitted by a student.

A school secretary who had final say over the pages as a proxy for the principal told her to edit the T-shirt photo, Ms Parsons says.


SOURCE 


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