Campus Watch Responds:
Jim Sleeper, a political science lecturer at Yale, is fascinated (one might say obsessed) with donations that legally support conservative and libertarian organizations. He’s also fond of repeating himself in articles in which he presents information available via IRS Form 990, which nonprofit 501 (c) 3 organizations must make public, with the breathless enthusiasm of a gossip writer who’s uncovered a hitherto undiscovered Hollywood affair.
These include his claim, quoted above in full, that Campus Watch “tracks and condemns liberal professors’ comments on the Middle East.” In fact, as Sleeper should have learned in his somnambulating through the nonprofit world, CW in no way “condemns” anyone’s comments based on the politics of the commentator. We critique sloppy, false, tendentious, politicized, or propagandistic scholarship, teaching, and public lectures by any academic concerned with the Middle East regardless of their politics. Be they liberals, conservatives, libertarians, or moderates, we are unconcerned with the voting record or party affiliation of anyone we examine.
Not that Sleeper will notice, or care. After all, there are public records to make public, known facts to make known. It’s a wonder a man with Sleeper’s curiosity finds time to . . . rest.
(Posted by Winfield Myers)