UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Chairman Sue Estroff was appalled, aghast and angry that the Board of Governors did not round up a required two-thirds majority to back a resolution supporting the recommendation that entering freshmen read Approaching the Quran: The Early Revelations after a legislative committee voted to cut funding to the reading program. A lawsuit brought by three unnamed students admonishing the school for teaching religion in violation of the constitutional requirement of separation of church and state was decided in the Universitys favor since the reading requirement was supposedly optional. Former UNC system president Bill Friday was wheeled out to compare the Koran controversy to the Speaker Ban Law of the 1960s that prohibited avowed communists from speaking on campus. The law fueled campus foment and cost the University accreditation until the ban was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1968. Estroff, draped in the raiment of academic freedom, drew upon the Speaker Ban to state that the faculty at Chapel Hill would go over the wall if need bemeaning across the wall that separates the campus from Franklin Street where communist speakers were required to orate during the banto carry through on the seminars on the Koran tract that were attached to the required reading. The seminars were held on campus after the court ruling but the tempest in the University teapot had already boiled over, scalding Tar Heels with the blatant thoughtlessness of the faculty committee that chose the book. National media attention has ensued, including a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that wanted to know why the American Civil Liberties Union, so quick to challenge any display of Christian teachings and ceremonies anywhere near a school, has been strangely silent about celebrating Islam at UNC.
This controversy is not the Speaker Ban and academic freedom does not resonate today after 20 years of enforced speech codes on campus. The taxpayers of this state are being made out to be troglodytes by the Estroff gang for their objections to the Koran assignment. Yet they know, even if they cannot articulate it, that the majority of the UNC faculty is responsible for the fissure in our culture created by radical scholarship on campus. And they know that academic freedom has been the excuse to introduce academically unsound curricula that have served in the undermining of Western culture and what is loosely referred to as American values. The campus has gone beyond a cloister for intellectual freedom to become a conglomeration of activist cells committed to breeding radical social policy. They had their academic freedom and they abused it.
My email has been burning with arguments about the Koran controversy for a month and I've reached the conclusion that studying Islam is not the issue. Its the choice of that particular book among the hundreds available that triggers vehement opposition in the context of the patriotic wake left from 9-11. How, citizens want to know, could the University faculty involved be so insensitive to the suffering felt by the families of the victims and by all Americans on that fateful day? The suicide killers were hardly vague. It is inarguably clear that the attacks were acts on behalf of Muslims in the name of the Koran. Of course, not all Muslims participated in the heinous act or agreed with the terrorists. Yet the resulting reaction in the Arab/Muslim world was one of complicity and, in some notable cases, outright joy at the slaughter. Since the attacks, America is engaged in a military action in Afghanistan and covert activities to locate the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Our country remains in a high state of alert for fear of further attacks on our soil by cold-blooded killers who maim and murder in the name of Allah. School children are agonized by nightmares after the 9-11 attacks, Soviet-style security is now a permanent condition of our everyday life and a major confrontation with Iraq appears to be on the agenda, risking American lives and thrusting the country into an unsettling war footing.
The right word then is heedless. That's what the faculty committee at UNC was, heedless of the national trauma. I doubt a soul would have piped up an objection if the book chosen for required summer reading were one of the dozens that describe Arab/Muslim history, politics or its impact on the world today. I have several in my own library, collected over the years and based on my initial interest in Lawrence of Arabia. I'm sure this is true of thousands of you. Back when history was actually taught as history and not as self-esteem therapy for less achieving cultures, educated people were quite aware that while Europe was enveloped in the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, it was the thriving Islamic world that carried on the haute culture of civilization. The discovery of oil, the end of the Turkish Empire and the establishment of Israel added new dimensions to the laymans interest in the Arab world, as do the continuing romanticism of the desert and the image of an ancient and noble people left behind in the slipstream of modern history.
So what motivated the faculty committee, out of all the choices on Arab/Muslim history and culture, to choose a book that would inflame the citizens of the state? Was it total heedlessness and disrespect for the victims of the tragedy of 9-11? If so, how could they be so cluelessacademics that they are with all the time in the world to meditate on events, secure in their tenured superiority, ensconced in the musty Shangri-la of the Chapel Hill conclave? Did they honestly think that the Koran book-choice was somehow uncontroversial in the context of recent events, or were they actually trying to stick it to the public and the students to make some kind of political point? The anger felt in the state about the book is probably based more on that arrogant guilelessness than anything else.
So, are the faculty involved simply dumb and unaware of the world around them or did they choose the book on purpose, aware of the reaction? Theres probably a little of both in the equation if you look at the campus mindset over the past 30 years. Its difficult for professional and working people to believe that the liberal arts curricula on most campuses have been raided and taken over by radicals dedicated to the destruction of Western culture and the emergence of a one-world socialist order. This was demonstrated to a shocked public immediately after 9-11 when the reaction on the UNC campus was to organize a teach-in with the theme that America deserved to be attacked since it is a rogue nation that wields its imperialism at the expense of other cultures. The call to action was to eliminate profiling of Arabs and to warn against the ridiculous notion that the US planned to create internment camps for Arab-Americans similar to those created during World War II to isolate the Japanese-American population of the West Coast. To the self-righteous multicultural academic activist, America, with its free capitalist culture, is the enemy, not the Islamic terrorists. As the saying goes, my enemys enemy is my friend. In this instance campus radicals and Islam are good friends indeed in league against America, their common enemy.
Notes from La-La- Land
The dog days of summer were still barking furiously as North Carolina school children were ordered into classrooms on August 12 to accommodate the teacher union that insisted on the early start to ensure that enough teacher work days would be provided during the academic year. Only non-tenured teachers are required to be there on work days so it is actually more vacation, bringing the total to 31 days off during the academic year. Teachers, with nine weeks off in the summer, then work only 156 days a year compared to the rest of us who slave an average of 244 days. Lets be sure we have this right. Teachers work fewer days, have top benefits and North Carolina has dropped to the bottom nationally in academic achievement. Go figure.
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The International Spy Museum opened recently in Washington, DC, with yours truly in attendance. I was also treated to a tour of the CIA where I walked by a sign with the ominous words: Robert Hannsen Damage Assessment Unit which became the subject of conversation that evening at the Spy Museum opening gala as it has now been divulged that Hannsen tipped off our very own local spy Felix Bloch of Chapel Hill who was forced to resign as US Deputy Chief of Mission in Vienna in 1989 over espionage allegations. Certain intelligence officers are vocal in their anger that Bloch has not been prosecuted now that the evidence is clear he was a very high-ranking KGB asset.
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The health fascists, in league with trial lawyers and the gang of states attorneys generals, are at it again after the massive attack on tobacco, this time zeroing in on the diets of Americans. The tobacco attack forced the abandonment of smoking in public (with no evidence, by the way, that passive smoke has any measurable negative effect). So the next stop, after forcing fast-food chains to cough up billions, will be your kitchen. Ironic, isn't it, that government control of our private lives suits insurance companies perfectly. By dictating our behaviorsmoking, eating, drivingthey cut their losses. Yet there is no campaign against alcohol. A puzzlement indeed.