http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/free-speech-101-article-1.1514797
Once again, Brooklyn College is ensnared in an anti-Israel mess
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2013, 4:10 AM
Brooklyn College President Karen Gould has a lot to learn about transparency and fairness.
Brooklyn College President Karen Gould once more has an obligation to explain what her school stands for without beating a cowardly retreat into unresponsive bleating about academic freedom.
Early this year, the college played host to a lecture by a speaker whose long-term goal is to end Israel as a Jewish state and whose short-term tactics include portraying Israel as a racist regime to undermine the country’s very legitimacy.
A student organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, staged the lecture, with the co-sponsorship of the college’s political science department. School security improperly evicted four Jewish students, Israel supporters, from the audience.
To their discredit, neither Gould nor Political Science Chair Paisley Currah offered a remotely coherent explanation for the department’s role as co-sponsor. Despite repeated requests, neither produced a list of other speakers co-sponsored by the department. Such a list would have enabled New Yorkers to judge whether an academic stronghold at a publicly-funded school has an an ideological bias.
Now, Currah’s department is again pushing talks by anti-Israel speakers — Josh Ruebner and Ben White — who view the very establishment of the Jewish state as illegitimately and immorally oppressing Arabs. And Gould and Currah can’t get their stories straight about what role the college is playing and under what standards.
Like all institutions of higher education, Brooklyn College must protect the rights of students to propagate their views, even those that are wildly controversial. But the college also has a duty not to play favorites with those views.
After the controversy early this year, Brooklyn College drafted a manual defining what it is to co-sponsor, support and sponsor a speech. How’d that work out? Gould’s office and Currrah are fighting over whether the poli-sci department is “co-sponsoring” or “supporting” this week’s talks, with both sides saying the department doesn’t endorse the events.
Gould’s office and Currah did finally agree on the same laughable roster of previous speakers, after months of requests for it.
In an email exchange with this Editorial Board, Currah said there were a “variety of speakers we have co-sponsored in the past , including pro-Israel speakers like Elliot Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, and Leonard Garment.” He also said that “our department has never refused a request from a student group or an academic department to co-sponsor a talk,” suggesting that poli-sci had supported a pretty full range of ideas.
Pressed further, Currah revealed that Dershowitz lectured in 1974 and Garment in 1998 — which only serves to highlight how scarce the department’s pro-Israel speakers have been. Abrams spoke this year. Count him a lone voice in the wilderness.
As for the full list of co-sponsorships, Currah sent what appeared to be 10 events. Five were presentations on gay, lesbian and transgender issues. The others included talks by Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, Glenn Greenwald and Abrams. There was also a Shirley Chisholm Day and an Anita Hill Conference.
Here’s the scorecard: three lectures by pro-Israel figures, who may or may not have talked about Israel, over nearly four decades. Three lectures by virulently anti-Israel advocates in the space of 10 months. That is not balance.