http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/does_academic_freedom_have_lim.html
In March 2007, an academic conference entitled “Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism” took place at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), sponsored by eight university departments. Four professors and one graduate student, none of them scholars of Israel or Zionism though all of them self-proclaimed anti-Zionists, delivered papers demonizing the Jewish state, denigrating its founding ideology and encouraging anti-Israel activism. The five talks were replete with gross misrepresentations of the facts, selected half-truths and numerous unsubstantiated claims, including the following:
- Zionism is racism
- Israel is an apartheid state
- Israel commits heinous crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing
- Israel’s behavior is comparable to Nazi Germany
- Jews exaggerate the Holocaust as a tool of Zionist propaganda
- Israel should be dismantled as a Jewish state
- Morally responsible people should actively engage in mounting an opposition to the Jewish state, by, for instance, joining in the divestment campaign
The function of the university is to seek and transmit knowledge and to train students in the process whereby truth is to be made known. To convert or to make converts is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined–not taught, and the conclusion left with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts.
Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus in the UCLA Pediatrics Department. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is a lecturer in Hebrew at UC Santa Cruz.