EXCLUSIVE: INSIDE BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY’S FACULTY LISTSERV
According to its mission statement, Brandeis University was founded to “embody its highest ethical and cultural values and to express its gratitude to the United States through the traditional Jewish commitment to education.” The school pledges that its faculty will “bring newly minted knowledge straight from the field or lab to the graduate and undergraduate classrooms.”
But newly uncovered emails distributed to an official university faculty listserv, comprised of a number of well-known Brandeis professors, show the narrow agenda of the professoriate. That agenda was on full display when 87 professors signed onto a petition protesting the honorary degree slated for women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples,” the petition stated.
But that was just the beginning. A secret Brandeis faculty listserv tells the rest of the story.
This listserv, entitled “Concerned,” was created in 2002. It began “out of concern about possible war with Iraq.” It contains 92 subscribers, including professors from outside of the university. Participants express their fear and disdain on issues ranging from United States foreign and domestic policy, the “American system,” and “the Israelists,” to “President ‘Obomber’” and “ Hillary ‘Obliterate Iran!’ Clinton.”
“Houston, we have a problem,” warned Mary Baine Campbell, a Brandeis English professor. “Ayaan Hirsi Ali claims to have had a difficult early life, and it may be true. However, she’s an ignorant, ultra-right-wing extremist, abusively, shockingly vocal in her hatred for Muslim culture and Muslims, a purveyor of the dangerous and imaginary concept, born of European distaste for the influx of immigrants from its former colonies, ‘Islamofascism’ – which has died on the vine even of the new European right wing. To call her a ‘woman’s rights activist’ is like calling Squeaky Fromm an environmentalist.”
“To honor someone at graduation who is notorious for inciting hate, defending violence and insulting the bearers of one of the world’s most populous faiths, including many students and faculty, not to mention parents, is not ‘hosting.’ It’s complicity in defamation,” she added.
Other professors seemed to be on the same wavelength — left even of far-left politicians like President Barack Obama. Professor Donald Hindley, who too signed the petition against Hirsi Ali, frequently derides President “Obomber,” while William Flesch, a professor of English, claims Obama “has shown himself so far unable to resist the imperialist POV of the Congress, the defense industry and his own administration” with regards to Iran.
Professor Emeritus Bob Lange wonders if Elizabeth Warren will stand against allegedly hawkish foreign policy, questioning if she “has the needed values, experience, and courage to be the president to stand up [to] the American powers that want to keep us on our violent criminal path.”
Members of the listserv move beyond disdain for American politicians and into outright anti-Israel rhetoric. When three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Hamas operatives, Professor Hindley expressed his apathy about Palestinian terror and their disdain for Israel, attacking “The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government.” Hindley’s controversial attitude towards Jews was particularly inflammatory in a 2007 listserv email with the subject line, “Plant a Tree, Bury a Palestinian.”
“Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses,” he contested. “In that way, we combine great trees with our own holocaustic ethnic cleansing.”
The listserv doesn’t restrict itself to foreign policy. It also offers a safe space for the most extreme perspectives on issues like climate change. “At a time when we are literally facing the possible end of human life on this planet unless we ACT within the next two decades (yes, it is that dire!!), Brandeis University should be a shining light for others,” warned Sabine Von Mering, Associate Professor of German and Women’s and Gender Studies. “Brandeis MUST be at the forefront of divestment, because Climate Change is a SOCIAL JUSTICE issue: Poor and indigenous people around the planet are frontline victims of climate change. They need all of us to act now.”
There is little room for dissent, as “Concerned” co-creator Gordon Fellman explained in a 2009 email: “it is rude to post a recipe for pork roast on a vegetarian listserv or an orthodox Jewish one, or right wing harangues on the concerned list.”
Daniel Mael is a student at Brandeis University. He is also a reporter for TruthRevolt.org and a contributor to the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
keelie Said:
Amen, my Father was a lawyer and he always said the why to learn ” the law” was to practice. I attended a “teacher school” you can not begin to comprehend the idiocy I endured.
@ dweller:
Yes – as a now retired engineer, I’ve been aware of this for many years. I call it, “The Curse of Credentialism” and it’s undermining the whole idea of meaningful education. Of course the biggest problem is that many corporations have bought into it without questioning it in any way. For one thing, it absolves the corporations of having to offer any kind of training within the corporate entity. I call this type of training, “mentoring”. It’s something that you of course know about, something that has been around for centuries if not millenia, and it has produced high quality workers of all descriptions.
@ keelie:
It’s something of a toss-up.
UC Berkeley used to be the jewel-in-the-crown of California education. Now, however, the entire Calif university system is shot to shit.
But I’m afraid the whole idea of university enrollment has come to mean less the acquisition of understanding & expertise than simply a means of securing credentials. A university degree these days means essentially that you’ve jumped through all the right hoops to warrant being awarded the degree which says to society that you’re “safe” to be entrusted with a measure of the power with which the social structure will operate.
dweller Said:
Academia is a racquet not unlike the Mafia.
@ dweller:
It appears that the academic world is impregnable, but as we both know, every person or institution has is weak points; its vulnerabilities. The objective should be to find these vulnerabilities and take advantage of them. Perhaps a good start is to advertise in such a way that parents will have serious doubts about sending their children to such places, or, going further, parents will refuse to allow their children to take courses given by certain “professors” who will have their names (and schools) published on a “black list”. A good place to start would be Berkeley, although I get the feeling that the parents of the children who attend this institution are worse than the academics who deliver their sermons.
@ keelie:
Not as long as those making the statements have academic TENURE
— the brass ring of university existence.
No way of dislodging such types, short of conviction of felony.
And in some instances, even that has been found to survive a move for dismissal.
@ honeybee:
Yes, that and the fact that the painter used only three colours… and very creatively too.
Reincarnation? A point for discussion, but not in this forum.
@ keelie:
After listening to the PBS program I believe it to be Da Vinci. The proof is in the tiny details.
@ keelie:
who know, perhaps there is reincarnation, Darlin.
@ honeybee:
Certainly looks like Da Vinci, but there were were many artists around at that time, who had a similar style. Hell, I learned to draw in Renaissance style (but I didn’t paint that picture).
keelie Said:
Heaven no Darlin, The girl is probably the illegitimate daughter of Duke of Milan. She was married at 13/14 to one of her fathers military commanders and died 4mo later of complications due to pregnancy. I though you would appreciate it. What’s you’re guess, Da Vinci?
@ honeybee:
Beautiful… You’re not implying that this is a portrait of that foul woman named above – Mary Baine Campbell – are you?
Bert Said:
Note how Summer, Levin, Feinstein, Boxer, Spielberg, et al have NOT spoken up for Israel.
Brandeis has long been a cesspool of political degeneracy and anti Jewish hatred. It is a monument to advanced moral rot among the American Jewish elites. I want to believe that it is only a fringe group of degenerates among American Jews. But with 2/3 of U.S. Jews voting to RE-ELECT Obama in 2012 we have a moral cancer that is metastasizing. Where will all this end?
@ bernard ross:
No,,,, you’re not that flexible anymore !!!!!!!!!!!!! Yankee Boy
gosh, lets see, on the one hand the honor killers, throat slitters, head choppers, suicide bombers, plane hijackers, apostate slaughters, christian crucifiers, school gilrl kidnappers and enslavers, pedophile cultists……and on the other hand the Nobel prize winners who daily make advances for the world in science, tech and meds.
HMMMMMM?
go figure. maybe a degree at brandeis would help me figure out this puzzle.
@ keelie:
I don’t know if you receive US TV , this program can be found on PBS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Girl_in_Profile_in_Renaissance_Dress
There’s definitely more than a little insanity in statements like the above, as well as enormously impenetrable conceit. And there doesn’t appear to be any consequences to those making them.
Shame on parents who blindly send their offspring to be “educated” in such a place.
Yeah, right; sure they do. So then, whyncha take it up with Beijing? The CHINESE GOVT is the world’s biggest polluter — 6,018 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. (Not that even that is going to alter the planetary climate.) Are 1.4 billion Chinese “poor & indigenous” enough to suit you, Ms Shallow?
When Mt St Helens [Washington State] blew high-wide-&-handsome in 1980, it released energies exceeding 1600 times the combined power of the two nuclear explosions which ended the Pacific War in 1945.
The notion that puny man is actually capable of altering the climate of the planet (for good OR ill) smacks of a certain backhanded hubris on the order of a snail or cockroach determinedly climbing the hind leg of a lady elephant
— with rape on his mind.
Problem’s at Brandeis, not in Houston. The only thing ignorant about Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that — like Prof Campbell, no doubt — she happens to be pro-abortion & pro-homosexualist (probably because, given her history, she associates the opposition to those things w/ Islam). Aside from that, however, she’s right on the money; not at all ‘ignorant.’
It was Louis Brandeis himself who noted that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Ms Hirsi Ali doesn’t need it — but Brandeis U. does.
Oh; so THAT’s why Brandeis didn’t have room for Hirsi Ali
— but DID have room for a swine like Bill Ayers.
When Ayaan Hirsi Ali first came stateside, she addressed a packed auditorium at Scripps College [Claremont, CA]. Some heckling harpy shrieked from the audience, ‘Who the hell gives you the right to talk about Islam?’ An undergrad shot back, ‘The 1st Amendment!‘
It’s a sorry commentary on USA higher ed that an undergraduate student proves a more trustworthy guardian of the liberal tradition than a college president.