The Fayetteville Fahd Fiasco

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | August 2, 2024 | Robert Steinbuch

[karpov]

I’m a law professor and also a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Late last year, I began a series on the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, from which this article is derived. The coverage launched when the Honors College at UA Fayetteville announced a panel on the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists that featured as the only presenters two anti-Israel professors from the King Fahd Center.

While the school canceled the one-sided discourse shortly after it was publicized, the broader question remains: How does Arkansas’s flagship public university have a subsidiary named after an autocratic monarch? And does that center provide students with a true educational experience or, rather, an unbalanced view of the area of the world it purports to cover?

This issue is particularly salient given today’s virtue-signaling, name-banning cultural revolution, which forces schools across America to de-name buildings and programs styled after historical figures on the basis of contemporary moral standards. Indeed, a committee at UA Fayetteville unsuccessfully proposed removing a statue of former U.S. senator J. William Fulbright from campus and de-naming the Fulbright Arts and Sciences College because of the Arkansas Democrat’s last-century congressional voting record. (Fulbright was also an old-white-male Southerner at one point—no greater embodiment of evil seemingly exists for the Left today—but that wasn’t the reason, stated at least, for the attempted purge.)

But, somehow, we haven’t observed a similar uproar over the campus center named after a modern-day patrilineal royal who, until rather recently, prohibited women from driving and appearing unaccompanied in public in a still-repressive country that murdered and dismembered a journalist and that Amnesty International currently characterizes as embracing “inherently discriminatory systems” for women. Where is the outrage? Where is that de-naming commission?

[nopardons]

BTTT

[Brian Griffin]

“How does Arkansas’s flagship public university have a subsidiary named after an autocratic monarch?”

$$,$$$,$$$

[BipolarBob]

The Muslims have had a building really close to the football stadium for decades. “Islamic studies or relations” or something like that. Nice expensive building with security cameras everywhere on it.

[Brian Griffin]

J. William Fulbright: A Featured Biography

Elected to the Senate in 1944, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas is perhaps best known for the Fulbright Scholars Act of 1946, which created scholarships for Americans to study abroad and for foreign scholars to study in the United States. A long-time opponent of civil rights measures, in 1956 Fulbright signed the Southern Manifesto, a statement that called for resistance to forced integration of public schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decisions. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fulbright, who holds the record as the longest-serving chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959-1974), managed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave President Lyndon Johnson sweeping powers to respond to military provocation in South Vietnam. Later, troubled over the gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam, Fulbright held televised “educational” hearings on the crisis, which brought him national attention. In those hearings, Fulbright publicly challenged the “old myths and new realities” of American foreign policy and warned against “the arrogance of power.”

https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Fulbright.htm

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Up the street and around the corner from where a naked as a jay bird Bill Clinton climbed a tree on Dickson Street! Wonder if they will ever make a statue in honor of that!

[packagingguy]

It should be renamed the King Farouk Center.

(King Farouk was the playboy king of Egypt who’s partying got so out of hand the military staged a coup)

[marktwain]

King Fahd was an ally of the United States, who opposed the oil embargo in 1973. He was one of the more reliably pro-western Muslim monarchs. He also funded the spread of Islam around the world, with the attendant horrors which have resulted.

[fella]

Those petrol-dollars sure do buy a lot of influence in academia.

On a side note it’s located across the street from Razorback Stadium. One of the biggest influencers in the state.