Nov. 29, 2009
According to a recent report in Ha'aretz, students at Tel Aviv University are complaining bitterly about leftist professors
According to a recent report in Ha'aretz, students at Tel Aviv University are complaining bitterly about leftist professors. The students are
said to be hurt by the professors' positions, "but are afraid to express
contrary views, lest this harm their grades."
So wrote Prof. Nira Hativa, head of the university's center for
advancement of teaching. She added that in many end-of-year feedback
forms, students complained about professors who "attack the state of Israel, the IDF, the Zionist movement
and even worse than that."
She also added that the complaints allege that "Leftist professors, as
distinct from rightist ones, feel absolutely free to express their
political views, even when there is no relevance whatsoever to the
subject they teach."
The head of the university's student union tells of similar student
complaints, and the talkbacks to this news item - whatever their
credibility - also told about students who are afraid to argue with such
professors.
THIS NEWS item did not surprise me. A small group of anti-Zionist,
anti-Israel faculty members has turned Tel Aviv University into a podium
from which to broadcast their political propaganda.
Two notable instances: a group of 30 professors signed a pro-Iranian
petition last year warning against Israeli and American designs and
"adventurism" against the Islamic Republic, without even mentioning its
president's threat to wipe Israel off the map and his Holocaust-denying
outbursts.
The second example was a conference held by the Tel Aviv Law School in
which the subject was the alleged mistreatment of "political prisoners"
(i.e. convicted Palestinian terrorists) that invited, as guest speaker, a
released prisoner sentenced to 27 years in jail for throwing a bomb
into a Jewish civilian bus.
This is not academic freedom. This is using academic podiums to deliver
Israel-bashing propaganda.
When I taught at Columbia University, I could see how TAU guest professors would stoke the flames of anti-Israel rhetoric; one of them insisted that the university show the film Jenin, Jenin,
which charges Israel with perpetrating a famously imaginary massacre.
The usual defense of these TAU excesses is that all professors are
entitled to academic freedom.
This is inherently true in principle.
Academic freedom, a special niche of the freedom of speech principle
enshrined in Israeli law, should incorporate marginal and iconoclastic
views. This is especially true in a society like Israel which suffers
from a constant state of emergency and stress.
But academic freedom, like all human rights, is not unlimited.
Austrian
and German courts rightly decided that Holocaust denial is not protected
speech;
Jean Paul Sartre went further, believing that all anti-Semitic expressions are unprotected by the right to freedom of speech.
A call to boycott Israel, such as was made by a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University's
political science department, is certainly unprotected, in a similar
way to the Supreme Court's ruling that a party which seeks the
destruction of Israel cannot run in the Knesset elections.
But there is one further point: academics cannot seek shelter behind
their much-touted freedom, while denying the students' right to express
their own opinions. If what is alleged in Ha'aretz is true, then
these TAU professors are violating the law.
Article 5 of the Student's Rights Law states this explicitly: "Every
student has the freedom to express his views and opinions as to the
contents of the syllabus and the values incorporated therein."
In other words, the students, too, have a measure of academic freedom.
If the allegations made by the students - probably mainly in TAU's
social sciences departments - are true, the university is violating the
students' lawful rights.
|