Keep the Academics Far Away

THE International Freedom Center is still set to be housed near the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center. Gov. Pataki has asked the IFC to “guarantee” that its lectures, discussions and displays will never disparage America nor offend the 9/11 families. IFC assurances on this point are worthless: It has already handed primary responsibility for those programs to the higher education establishment. And higher educators are no longer able to ensure the integrity of curricula and debate on their own campuses — most egregiously so when the subject is this nation and terrorist attacks against it.

In April, the IFC designated nine universities to provide initial programs, with the goal of “[making] the Center a . . . ‘Public Square’ on hallowed ground.” “The character of a university,” the IFC intoned, “allows for this form of ‘sacred space’ . . . in which sensitive, controversial and provocative subjects can be candidly explored, yet in a manner that does not generate political distraction.”

In a July letter intended to ease fears, IFC chairs Tom Bernstein and Paula Grant Berry again invoked universities’ “time-tested mechanisms for ensuring the appropriateness of programs they offer.”

Yet the April release gave away the show when it quoted New York University President John Sexton extolling today’s campuses “as ‘modern sanctuaries [committed to] free, unbridled and ideologically unconstrained discourse.’ “ Hello. Campuses today are indeed “sanctuaries” — but almost exclusively for scholars of liberal-left-radical persuasion. Their “unconstrained discourse” is overwhelming that of rank ideologues — neo-Marxists, multiculturalists who have rejected an American identity, militant feminists and (especially strident these days) anti-American and anti-Israel ideologues. The majority of professors and administrators are no doubt capable of organizing non-politicized, distinguished programs. But these “moderates” are regularly overshadowed and intimidated by their more radical colleagues.

And campus ideologues will surely assert their right to air their partisan views at Ground Zero, a bully pulpit extraordinaire if ever there was one. No doubt they are salivating at the prospect of shaping the content and tone of the “debate” in a facility that will literally overshadow the 9/11 memorial. Picture visitors to Ground Zero moving from the memorial to IFC lecture halls. And then imagine the perorations of the following (a barest sampling) of influential radical professors, who hale from the very universities to which the IFC has assigned programming:

• Historian Tony Judt of New York University, who has famously and venomously inveighed against Israel’s mere existence. He calls the Jewish state the “leading threat to world peace,” and America “the one place where Israeli propaganda has succeeded.”
• Rashid Khalidi, professor of Middle East Studies at Columbia, has condoned the murder of armed Israelis. After 9/11, he criticized the media for what he called “hysteria about suicide bombers.”
• AbdouMaliq Simone, assistant director of the International Affairs Program at New School University, advocates “an alternative to a Western ‘way of life’” and “[bringing] America to Islam.” Although he rejects violent Islamism, he portrays this country as “hostile and dangerous to Islam,” and of 9/11 he ambivalently speculated about how “the ‘terrorists’ . . . must have found America . . . stultifying, living as they often did in vacuous suburbs with strip malls, Chuck E. Cheese and sports bars.”
• Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian, recently commented that American action in Iraq is “the first step in Bush’s plan to transform our country into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition.” When students disagreed, Gilmore threatened lawsuits to stop them from stating their views online.
• Oxford Professor Yahya Michaux is a convert to radical Islam known for his extremist Islamist views.
• Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, is a mainstay of “Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq,” a distinctly anti-American group. He has written prolifically against U.S. military action in Iraq.

In face of 9/11 or when other Western democracies are attacked, academics of this ilk reflexively evoke the real or invented failings of the West as justification for the attacks. Few in their ranks unequivocally denounce the terrorists responsible for 9/11, or the extremist Islamist ideology that spawned them. Indeed, so disconnected from reality are such ideologues that some of them spout our enemies’ views, while we are at war. Surely these are the poorest candidates possible to celebrate the valor of the police, firefighters and others who lost their lives trying to save innocent victims at the Twin Towers. Nor will they be able to provide at Ground Zero what John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., describes as “a strong positive answer to the terrorists that they will not prevail.” The academy’s ideological cancers should not be allowed to infect Ground Zero. New York’s leaders would do far better by adopting the (gloriously politically incorrect) approach proposed in these pages by Adam Brodsky: Because the terrorists targeted freedom and America’s way of life on 9/11, Ground Zero “should make a political statement — not that America is flawed, but rather that it’s a rare force for good.”

May the American people rise up and demand such a celebration, which — count on it — would indeed touch millions of hearts.

[This article ran in the New York Post on August 22, 2005.]