I've posted before about conservative claims of persecution by the allegedly leftist academic establishment. Most of these are adbanced by a handful of well-funded right-wing outfits seeking out and disseminating reports of findividual incidents of such persecution. The champion in this field is, of course, David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, which recently carried this report, written (allegedly, see below) by a Kuwaiti student, Ahmad Al-Qloushi, charging his professor with an egregious instance of enforcing political bias, culminating in being told "you need regular psychotherapy" for writing a paper with which the professor disagreed.
The only problem is that the few pieces of verifiable information in the article turn out to be highly dubious. For starters, he writes: "Most of all we remember our one-week-old baby cousin who died while the Iraqi invaders were stealing incubators from hospitals to sell them for profit." This isn't true, because the incubator story is a fraud. Later on, he claims that, in his high school in Kuwait, "Many of my teachers were Palestinian; they hated America, they hated my worldview, and they did their best to brainwash me." As a comment on the article's discussion page points out, this is also extremely unlikely, as most Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War. So already his credibility is in serious doubt.
Moving on, Al-Qloushi's story centers around the final exam for an introductory class in American politics and government:
A week before thanksgiving Professor Woolcock assigned us a take home final exam. The final exam consisted solely of one required essay: "Dye and Zeigler contend that the Constitution of the United States was not 'ordained and established' by 'the people' as we have so often been led to believe. They contend instead that it was written by a small educated and wealthy elite in America who were representative of powerful economic and political interests. Analyze the US constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded the majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America's elite interest." ...I disagreed completely with Dye and Zeigler’s thesis. I wrote an essay defending America’s Founding Fathers and upholding the US constitution as a pioneering document, which has contributed to extraordinary freedoms in America and other corners of the world - including my corner, the Middle East.
Here's where it really gets interesting, as Al-Qloushi has helpfully provided us with a link to the paper in question. Oddly enough, the paper precedes the essay question with the numeral three, suggesting that the topic was one of at least three options for the final paper, which Al-Qloushi specifically chose to right on.
But more importantly, and for lack of a better word, his paper is shit. It is riddled with grammatical errors and makes no scholarly references whatsoever (unless you include two unsourced quotations, made without comment or explanation, from Thomas Jefferson and George W. Bush). The content is entirely polemical ("If [the Constitution] was so negative how did the Soviet Union collapse in the Cold War?") and analyzes neither the authors cited in the question nor the text of the Constitution itself.
The story gets even fishier given this press release, put out by the College Republicans chapter, of which Al-Qloushi is the president (a fact it negelects to mention, although the later FrontPage article does). The release was issued a day after the incident in question, and leads with an argument for Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights," which the American Association of Univeristy Professors has labeled an "infringe[ment] on academic freedom".
Horowitz has a history of deliberately provoking campus political controversies with outrageous behavior, notably through an incident involving newspaper ads attacking reparations for slavery a few years ago. It seems quite likely that this whole affair was premeditated, designed to provoke the professor into rejecting the paper and turning Al-Qloushi into a cause celebre for the right-wing media and an argument for the "Academic Bill of Rights".
Premeditated or not, it worked. The story has been picked up by the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, the UC Davis student newspaper, and dozens of right-wing blogs. At least one intelligent progressive blogger has pointed to it, apparently accepting the story at face value. (The San Jose Mercury News, to its credit, expressed skepticism about the story's veracity.)
This is the power of the right-wing spin machine: to take a dubious, and likely bogus, account of an isolated incident, turn it into an argument for a deceptive public policy measure, and immediately reach thousands of readers.
Posted by Michael at January 26, 2005 01:38 AM | TrackBack