What the Campus ‘Free Speech’ Crusade Won’t Say

Response to:

What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
Alternet
September 4, 2016
Categories:
False allegations of attacking professors who criticize Israel
False allegations of attacking critics of America's policy in the Middle East
Misc. Corrections
Original text from What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say :
Tanenhaus' observation about the tension between today's capitalism and democratic or republican culture is anathema to the ultra-conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, the Earhart, John Templeton, Koch-Brothers' DonorsTrust (a conduit for donors for grants not made under their own names), and other foundations that sustain conservative think tanks like the AEI and a myriad of campus-targeting organizations—including FIRE, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The David Horowitz Freedom Center (whose "Academic Bill of Rights" would mandate more hiring of conservative faculty and would monitor professors' syllabi for "balance") and Campus Watch (which tracks and condemns liberal professors' comments on the Middle East). These organizations stoke public anger against political correctness as a threat to academic freedom and to the free market economy that they keep insisting enhances it.

Campus Watch Responds:

In yet another iteration of his series of articles ostensibly documenting the nefarious, dark, hidden, yet perfectly public, legal, and easily accessed records of donor groups who support conservative/libertarian nonprofits, Yale political science lecturer Jim Sleeper gets Campus Watch (and much else) all wrong. Again. And he seems to be repeating himself. Repeatedly.

Sleeper claims that CW “tracks and condemns liberal professors’ comments on the Middle East,” as the reprint above shows. Of course, a bit of actual research would show that CW has no interest in the politics of the professors whose work we critique. Rather, we examine their work, be it in published scholarship, teaching, or popular writing or speaking for politicized, biased, or false content that skews their results and serves to mislead their readers or listeners. Sleeper dreams of vanquishing those with whom he disagrees by tossing out inaccurate claims about them. In case anyone is reading his work, for the record, he’s wrong again.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)