The oldest scholarly group studying U.S. history and culture is getting sued for “covertly pack[ing]” its organization with anti-Israel professors.
Before 2012, no candidate chosen to head the American Studies Association had been associated with the Israeli boycott movement, according to The College Fix. For the past five years, ALL nominees were vocal supporters of the movement.
Some of the defendants in the case have a well-documented history of anti-Israel remarks. One of them, Steven Salaita, had a job offer rescinded after the discovery of these tweets:
“Zionists, take responsibility: if your dream of an ethnocratic Israel is worth the murder of children, just f***ing own it already,” said the professor. In another tweet, Salaita said “at this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?
Salaita sued the University of Illinois for retracting his job offer, getting $600,000 out of the settlement.
Another defendant, Rutgers University women’s studies professor Jasbir Puar, is accused of making sure that “only signed supporters of USACBI [which advocates for both the academic and cultural boycott of Israel] were nominated for American Studies Association President.”
Alex Lubin, an American University professor whom Puar nominated for ASA’s national council, apparently wrote in one of the released emails that “we were nominated in order to build momentum for BDS even though the question of BDS in American Studies Association may or may not emerge while we’re on the council.”
Puar accused Israel of committing “field assassinations of young Palestinian men,” and then invoked the anti-Semitic trope that “the bodies were mined for organs for scientific research.”
But not every ASA member knew about the collusion between the group and the anti-Israel lobby. Puar allegedly kept it hidden from the organization’s general membership. John Stephens, executive director of the ASA, denied knowing about it, but then did a simple Internet search and discovered for himself that the names on an anti-Israel boycott proposal matched up with the names of several ASA officers who passed the group’s 2013 boycott of all Israeli schools, which ⅔ of the ASA’s voting members approved.
But the ASA did receive backlash for this decision. In just a month, over 80 US colleges condemned the vote and several colleges withdrew from the organization entirely. Israel does not seem to be the only issue on which the ASA is biased. Its current president, Kandice Chuh, “teaches courses in critical theory, aesthetics, race and intersectionality, queer theory, and decolonial studies,” subjects typically associated with the political left. Elizabeth Duggan and David Roediger, ASA presidents from 2014 to 2016, are apparently interested in and/or have authored books on “whiteness.”
If you’re a young millennial or old zoomer — that’s Generation Z — SpongeBob SquarePants probably brings to mind days of childhood bliss, a time unmuddied by politics. But that’s not the case for University of Washington professor Holly Barker, who recently published a nearly 10,000-word study called “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” reported Campus Reform.
Now, if you remember, SpongeBob takes place in Bikini Bottom, and Holly’s upset that this is apparently a reference to Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Islands coral reef used by America during the Cold War for nuclear testing. Indigenous people were moved during the testing and radiation ultimately rendered it uninhabitable.
Holly complains about SpongeBob’s supposed “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs,” saying “the detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends.”
Yeah, uh, that would be because it’s a kids show.
But here’s the thing: Holly isn’t just mad that the show doesn’t hit children on the head with the full historical context of a place from which it takes half its name and I’m not sure what else. She calls the characters living in this setting an “occupation,” terms it “symbolic violence,” and says “SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”
A protester tried to shut down a Northeastern Illinois University event featuring former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, according to Campus Reform.
“You’re a Nazi!” “No, you’re a Nazi!” That’s pretty much how the discourse has devolved. And then when force is used to address a disruption, as it should be, they complain about it being a bit uncomfortable. But what’s really funny is that Sean Spicer wasn’t the only somewhat controversial speaker at Northeastern Illinois.
That’s right — Donna Brazile was also there. You remember Donna, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman who shared debate questions with Hillary Clinton? And yet Donna wasn’t the one getting protested and cussed out.
Also in recent campus news, the head of Freedom University, a school which apparently operates out of an undisclosed location in Georgia, gave a speech at St. Olaf College in Minnseota. Director Laura Soltis said nation states “should not exist” and called citizenship “completely arbitrary.”
Remember Jeff Klinzman? You know, the Iowa professor who responded to a tweet from Donald Trump calling Antifa out for attacking people with baseball bats by saying “yeah, I know who I’d clock with a bat” and who outright told ABC9 “I am Antifa”? He parted ways with the school in late August, but is now planning on suing Kirkland Community College and is still taking a paycheck, reported Campus Reform.
Klinzman had some other pretty disturbing stuff on social media, liking several Antifa-related Facebook pages and quoting a poem reading “kill them all, and bury them deep in the ground, before millions more are tortured to death” when talking about Evangelical Christians who, according to him, “fill [him] with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.”
Now, it’s weird because Kirkland Community College said it made a “decision to remove Mr. Klinzman from the classroom,” citing safety concerns, but then said “We have spoken with Mr. Klinzman this afternoon about this matter and have accepted his resignation.”
And this little incongruity here — how did someone who was removed from the classroom also resign? – is part of the professor’s planned lawsuit against the school. Klinzman said that he believes his First Amendment rights were violated and that the college communicated to him that he could resign or it would fire him. An email from the college showed that Klinzman did, in fact, resign, but he did so on the condition that he still earns his full salary of $3,624 for the 16-week semester.
