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COULD BE, back a year and a half ago, when Judy Genshaft was being recruited for the presidency of the University of South Florida, they simply forgot to mention it. You know: that Palestinian computer scientist fellow over in the College of Engineering. The one who had certain, oh, issues, let's call them. Issues that occasionally required the attention of campus, municipal, state, federal, and foreign law enforcement officers. Issues that, just maybe, involved mysterious international money transfers and big explosions going off at crowded bus stops. Probably would have been helpful to know about such stuff in advance.
Whatever. Judy Genshaft took the job. And she had every reason to think it a plum. Already a distinguished educational psychologist and college administrator, she now would assume leadership of the second largest university in the southeastern United States at the very moment when it seemed finally ready to start mattering. USF's undergraduate divisions were turning away qualified applicants. Its graduate programs were achieving unprecedented recognition. The future looked bright. Fourteen months later, Genshaft having made an unusually speedy personal mark on her campus, the university's future still looked bright.
Then, on September 26, two weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, that Palestinian computer scientist fellow showed up on national television, and everything went straight to hell. There was Sami Al-Arian on the Fox News Channel's "O'Reilly Factor," identified as a "University of South Florida professor," stammering about rough treatment by the show's host. Who, characteristically sharkish, was plowing forward with questions about, well, some things in the professor's past. Like that Al-Arian had once arranged an adjunct faculty position at USF for a man who later turned out to be secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And that Al-Arian himself had been captured on videotape delivering a speech on the righteousness of jihad, "Victory to Islam!" and "Death to Israel!" and so forth. Al-Arian wanted these words understood "in context" and claimed to have been "shocked" when his former colleague emerged as one of the world's leading terrorists. But Bill O'Reilly was unimpressed and told his viewers there was "something wrong down there at the University of South Florida."
Consequently, something really was wrong down there--the very next day. USF's telephone and computer systems were jammed with hundreds of angry calls and e-mail messages. The College of Engineering received an apparently credible death threat against Al-Arian, the first of 12, forcing the school to close. And, given the consensus of Tampa-area police departments that they would otherwise confront a grave public safety risk, university administrators--with his concurrence--placed Al-Arian on a paid leave of absence.
But things didn't work out. Almost immediately, Al-Arian started complaining about his exile. Hardly a week went by before he ignored its terms, at least as the university understood them, popping up on campus for a meeting with Muslim students. And hardly a day went by thereafter when Al-Arian and his friends failed to tell some reporter that USF's efforts to protect him from assassination were in fact, instead, an assault on free expression--a penalty for his advocacy of controversial ideas. All of which intensified the very crisis the university had been trying to quell. By mid-December, school administrators, under attack from two directions, were spending half their time dealing with a single professor's sudden notoriety. And relevant law enforcement agencies were still unable to offer any guarantee--should that professor be allowed to resume teaching--that the safety of students, faculty, or staff would be secure. In short, a continuing fiasco.
So on December 19, the USF Board of Trustees voted 12-1 to recommend that Sami Al-Arian be fired--for activities "outside the scope of his employment" constituting "adverse impact on the legitimate interests of the university." Judy Genshaft then informed Al-Arian that she intended to follow this advice.
It is no exaggeration to say that Genshaft has since been crucified, coast to coast, as a traitor to the academy and a threat to the First Amendment.
Her faculty senate has formally refused to offer support for any pending action against Al-Arian. USF's faculty union has formally rebuked Genshaft for her willingness to "censor academic speech." Union president and professor of philosophy Roy Weatherford calls Genshaft's behavior "manifestly repugnant to the academic profession and the world community." And the world community hasn't contradicted him. Muslim groups have accused Genshaft of bigotry. The ACLU has warned it might sue. The American Association of University Professors has notified Genshaft that it is "maintaining a close watch" lest she make any further encroachments on "academic freedom."
And the media have been brutal. Editorial pages in the immediate Tampa-St. Petersburg area are a notable exception, of course. But what do they know? The rest of American journalism has the matter firmly in hand: Judy Genshaft wears the black hat, simple as that. Genshaft's complaints against Sami Al-Arian are "groundless," according to the New York Times. And her willingness to pursue those complaints, the Times continues, represents a "betrayal" of academic protocol so grave as to "dishonor the ideals of public universities" generally.
Actually, no. Actually, Judy Genshaft has conducted herself more than honorably in the Sami Al-Arian affair. Actually, she has demonstrated what is, in the modern world of university administration, a virtually unexampled degree of high-minded courage--risking reputational suicide in her national news debut so as to safeguard precisely those "ideals" she stands accused of violating. Judy Genshaft's accusers are ill-informed. At best.
Their ritual invocation of the First Amendment, for instance. What nonsense. Supreme Court cases dating to Pickering v. Board of Education in 1968 make clear that when a public employee's interest in public debate about public matters is "outweighed by any injury the speech could cause" to his employer's performance of public duties, then the First Amendment does not apply. This is true even when the employee in question is a tenured faculty member, like Sami Al-Arian, at a state university, like USF. So long as the school reasonably fears the professor's speech will disrupt its essential operations, it may move against him. And the First Amendment will stand aside.
Evidence of Sami Al-Arian's disruption is overwhelming, of course--quite apart from the death threats. USF's alumni are enraged. Donations are drying up. The school's lawyers and telephone operators are overwhelmed. With no end in sight. All because of outside hostility Al-Arian alone has engendered. No university ever wants to make academic decisions in response to external pressure like this. When it feels forced to, however, the fact remains, like it or not, that the Constitution is undisturbed.
Then there is the question of Sami Al-Arian's identity. Judy Genshaft's critics proceed from the assumption that suspicions about Al-Arian's connection to terrorism are tenuous--at best. Roy Weatherford, the philosophy professor, a specialist in epistemology, says that were it true Al-Arian had terrorist associations, then they could "line him up and shoot him for all I care." But Weatherford hasn't seen the proof. So Weatherford, no doubt by virtue of his investigations into the limits of human knowledge, figures his ignorance of a thing means that thing cannot exist--that he is free to write off this terrorism business as a total fantasy projected by "right-wing yahoos."
Perhaps he has skipped a step somewhere? Perhaps, indeed, he has skipped over Sami Al-Arian's history entirely. Which history is rather unsettling, as even an abbreviated summary should make plain.
Al-Arian arrived at USF in 1986 and promptly founded two (now defunct) organizations: an off-campus "charity" called the Islamic Committee for Palestine and a "think tank" called the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, which eventually became affiliated with the university. ICP and WISE had overlapping senior officers. There was Bashir Nafi, now known to be among the original founders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There was Khalil Shikaki, brother of that terrorist group's then secretary general. And there was Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who would soon relocate to Syria and succeed Shikaki's brother as jihadist-in-chief.
ICP, in particular, barely attempted to conceal its nature. An ICP magazine, Al-Mujahid, baldly announced itself a "publication produced by the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine" and ran the group's logo on its front page. Attending a rally in Cleveland around this time, Al-Arian was introduced as head of "the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine." They "like to call it the Islamic Committee for Palestine here for security reasons," his host explained. But it's a means to "donate to the Islamic Jihad." So "if you write a check, write it for the Islamic Committee for Palestine: ICP."
There is a handwritten letter Al-Arian wrote in 1995 asking for financial contributions "so that operations such as these can continue"--referring to a recent bombing in Israel that had killed 22 civilians. And there is a great deal more such evidence publicly available about Al-Arian's past. But isn't this enough?
More than enough, we think, to settle any doubt about what genuine guardianship of academic freedom entails in the present circumstance. It is a species of insanity for USF faculty members, in the name of academic freedom, to link themselves with Sami Al-Arian. Does Roy Weatherford really mean to suggest that the City of Intellection will be leveled unless he and his colleagues can sit down in the cafeteria with a man who raises money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Is the desirability of murdering Jewish people the sort of "idea" university tenure is designed to protect? And what if the great unwashed become persuaded, however mistakenly, that university tenure does have something to do with the likes of Sami Al-Arian? What possible benefit does Weatherford imagine will then accrue to the cause of academic freedom at state-funded institutions?
He might want to think about these questions a tiny bit harder. He and the rest of Judy Genshaft's hecklers might want to think about, dare we say it, the distinction between good and evil, as well. "If Mr. Al-Arian were a moderate receiving threats from militant Muslims, there is little doubt that the university would stand up for him," snorts the New York Times. Isn't that the point, though? Free thought demands protection from exposure to, and pollution by, an antithetical force like organized terror. Judy Genshaft understands. How come nobody else does?
--David Tell |
