ACADEMIC FREEDOM, INTELLECTUAL DISSENT, AND PROTEST
"Any good thing taken too far becomes its opposite” (Polybius)

    Some expressions of dissent and protest do not deserve to be called "civil disobedience."  It's ironic that college campuses are often the place where we find protestors who cross the line.  It's time for fresh thought about the role of colleges and universities in society, especially in times of war.  Colleges and universities are not supposed to be breeding grounds for terrorism, nor should they be places for material or ideological support of terrorism.  Sure, they are places to exercise free speech, but those functions should be carried out in a reasonable and responsible manner.  Dissent and protest which gives aid and comfort to an enemy should be scrutinized closely.  Practically everyone would agree that the basic purpose of higher education is to enable the learning of both old and new knowledge.  Few would also disagree that academic freedom is an appropriate tool for accomplishing those purposes.  However, when "suspect" intellectual dissent hides behind the guise of academic freedom, or worse yet, under the guise of learning, there is cause for concern.

ROTC protesters on the nation's campuses have the right to hold up signs, conduct die-ins, and chant slogans ("Hey hey ho ho, ROTC's got to go") like they did back during 1967-1970, and even though 30 ROTC buildings were burnt down nationwide then, what's different today (from 2005-onward) is the greater scope of the protests (hundreds a year), the organizational groups involved (Code Pink, ANSWER, others, and of course, the Anarchist movement which has been there all along), and objections which vary from opposition to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy since 1993, to opposition to the Iraq War to opposition of military action against Iran.  However, given the similarities of protests in both time periods, is it possible that some cyclic phenomenon is at work?

    The news media and blogosphere are frequently filled with stories about some "muddleheaded" professor somewhere (Gross & Levitt 1997), some "moonbat" professor elsewhere (moonbat describing someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency), those "great pretenders of academe" (Anderson 1996), "flawed eccentrics and exhibitionists" (Schoenfeld & Magnan 1994), and dare we say it -- "terrorist professors" (Cassell 2004), who do nothing less than give aid and comfort to the enemy.  Terrorist professors exist.  The legal elements for saying this will be examined later, but for now, let's assume that at least some kind of "patriotism crisis" seems to afflict some people.  It may be noted immediately that we're on dangerous ground here since calling someone's patriotism into question is the same as calling someone a traitor, which is bad form, so perhaps "not being on the same page" is better.

    To be sure, radical teaching exists. The character of radical teaching has been said to involve cultural illiteracy (Bloom 1987; Hirsch 1988), indoctrination (D'Souza 1998), propaganda and brainwashing (Kimball 1998), idiotic extremes of political correctness (Kors & Silverglate 1999), and militant activism (Black 2004).  Jeremiads exist on many sides of this issue (see Posner 2002 for a review of the "Jeremiah school" or declinist literature in higher education), and there have also been tomes written about crackdowns on intellectual dissent in the name of "national security" (Churchill & Vander Wall 2001), and treatises about the "dumbing down" of curriculum (Sykes 1996), as well as the decline of "national intelligence" (Itzkoff 1994).  On this last point, Kerr (2001) offers a good account of what Jefferson and Whitehead used to refer to as the nation's best defense -- an educated citizenry.  But who sets the role model for this?  As the German saying has it, a professor is a person who thinks otherwise, so maybe they're not expected to be role models.  Does eccentricity extend to the right to question the legitimacy of one's own government, whether the homeland has a right to exist, and whether history can be rewritten to deny events ever happened?  Tolerating a few little spots of radical teaching seems to be the hobby of colleges these days, but at the risk of sounding alarmist, few nations can afford to allow their universities to become hotbeds of radical activism.  There are radical academics whose pronunciamiento say more, not less, campus activism is needed, along with collective solidarity, unionization, and widespread political critique (Nelson & Watt 2004).  There are other radical academics who are card-carrying communists bent on destruction of the American way of life.  Both types flock to colleges and universities for one reason -- a safe environment free from penalty and prosecution.  Compare this to the penalty for Holocaust denial in parts of Europe which is about 20 years in prison.  Surely, there is at least a need to examine academic structure and culture, and why if it is to serve some kind of safety valve function, should the dysfunctional be sorted from the functional.     

    Higher education is in crisis these days.  A number of factors affecting the "crisis" in academe are exogenous, important nonetheless, but not necessarily related to terrorism, civil liberties, or national security.  Let's get those factors out of the way first.  The libertarian basis for higher education presupposes that colleges and universities ought to be places of extreme dissent.  Librarians have always been the most radicalized, strongest advocates of this belief, frequently expressed as "it's not always good for everybody to think the same" (Berninghausen 1975).  Slaughter & Rhodes (2004), however, point to another factor, a growing opinion that the current crisis is driven by commercialization, i.e., the so-called business model of higher education where one ought to at least make sure the kids have some skills at graduation, other than the ability to think critically, so that they can become employed somewhere befitting a college graduate.  Clearly, there are some bipolar opposite goals affecting the crisis.  Many academic gripes derive from this goal conflict.  Nelson & Watt (2004: 3) list the typical grievances heard on college campuses these days as: "increased class sizes, increased teaching loads, decreased library resources, decreased research funding, declining real salaries, increasingly centralized curricular control, reliance on contingent labor (adjuncts), decreasing job security, increasing threats to academic freedom, challenges to cultural diversity, the specter of repressive surveillance, segmentation and fragmentation of labor, increasing pressure to focus on job training, decreasing political support for higher education, increasing student demand for services ..., a fixation on revenue generation ..., strategic planning or commitments to excellence ..., the threat of distance learning, the erosion of intellectual property, and the assault on affirmative action."

    Enter the factors related to terrorism and homeland security and the "gripe list" extends to: sweeping dragnets, increased spy powers, politically-motivated surveillance, detention regimes, improper handling of unlawful combatants, collateral damage, torture, profiling, invasions of privacy, banned books, and repression of dissent.  Additionally, some academics have cosmopolitan concerns such as the freedom of international travel among scholars and students.  Other general concerns include grade inflation and lowered standards of admissions and academic performance.  It is pointless to try identifying who might be the responsible parties for these grievances, and it is just as futile to attempt listing all the complaints that America's professoriate can generate.  However, some grievances have more legitimacy than others.  In all fairness, there might be something to the hate and fury which many protestors have toward the Bush administration and/or the claim that Israel doesn't automatically occupy the moral high ground in all things anti-terror, BUT there is something discernably wrong when such hate and fury blinds them to the dangers of Islamic extremism, and something even more wrong when nationwide polls (2006 Scripps Survey) find that about a third of Americans suspect the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 attacks to go to war in the Middle East" and 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.  Such 9/11 trutherism (as it is called) represents a malevolent unreason which threatens to undermine the rational basis of open inquiry.  The sad truth is that there is more propaganda (in the form of books, movies, and conferences) devoted to trutherism than there is for a clear-eyed look at the problem.  Professors need not look far to find something critical of the war on terror to show in class.        

    National security concerns among academics are usually focused on the intersection of the Patriot Act with academic freedom and intellectual dissent.  Regarding these matters, Etzioni (2004) puts forth the centrist "slippery slope hypothesis" to be mindful about -- that first the government trims some rights, then curtails a few other rights, and soon, more rights are lost, and gradually the entire infrastructure on which democracy rests tumbles down the slope with nobody able to stop it.  This same author also prooffers the competing "Weimar hypothesis" which predicts political swings toward popular support for a government in times of need.  The solution Etzioni (2004) advocates is to put "notches" in the slippery slope while providing certain "gifts" to the government in times of need, such gifts being concessions on safe things like better ID cards and safer online shopping.  Other concerns more directly relate the Patriot Act to what goes on in the classroom, and here, there are historical lessons to be remembered because America really did experience the banning of books during WWI with the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 (Leone & Anrig 2003).

    Going this far back into history may or may not be helpful but might have relevance to the December 2005 Florida trial of professor Al-Arian where a First Amendment argument helped achieve acquittal on 51 counts of using Islamic charities as fronts in a conspiracy to finance terrorism.  The five month trial had a jury of seven men and five women (including three blacks) which heard evidence like the professor calling suicide bombers "martyrs" and referring to Jews as "monkeys and swine" who would be damned by Allah.  Sedition acts in contemporary times continue to be upgraded with increased penalties and improved definitions, and calls for using treason law (giving aid and comfort the enemies) are bogged down, at least according to Coulter (2003) in the semantics of functionally treasonous vs. actually treasonous.

    Current sedition law is mainly derived from U.S. Code 18 Section 2388 which reads: "Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully makes or conveys false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies .... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."  Note that there is high standard of specific intent to be proven, and it is for this reason, not the countervaling value of dissent, which makes for the relative lack of prosecution.  Justice Holmes' comment in Schenck v. U.S. (249 U.S. 47, 1919) should be the guiding precedent: "When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."  This is not to say that all those with anti-war sentiments are seditious.  Certainly, any attempt by a government to outlaw sedition will be controversial, but there ought to be a line that should not be crossed -- a line which recognizes the difference between loyal opposition and disloyal opposition.  Some restrictions on dissent are just and right and Constitutional.  No war can be won when a disloyal opposition is given free reign to undermine it.

    Other writers have focused on issues dealing with immigration and detention.  Malkin's (2004) books are relevant in this vein.  Rehnquist (1998) covers suspension of the writ of habeas corpus from an historical view up to WWII (from an apologist standpoint), but more liberal writers have advanced the thesis that a government interested in persecuting immigrants today may go after anyone else tomorrow (Chang 2002).  Rehnquist (1998) and Stone (2004) remind us, however, that the American historical pattern is to suspend some rights in wartime, but restore them later in some kind of cycle of excess followed by excess followed by reconsideration and reconciliation.  This formulation of what is known as the "Stone thesis" involves more than this, however.  Implicit is an understanding that it is never a good idea to implement wholesale suppression of dissent, imprisoning and deporting dissenters -- only then -- later -- regretting those actions.  Nonetheless, it is logical that any civil liberty curtailed should be one restored, in a kind of “two steps forward, one step back” kind of pattern, but effective self-rule is key to maintenance of this cycle, with citizen self-suppression and responsible dissent the norm. 

    It has been said fighting a war on terrorism means never having to say you're sorry (to paraphrase the way Chris Capozzola puts it in his Washington Post review of Stone's book).  But in fact, being sorry is exactly what happens since throughout history when civil liberties have been given up in the name of national security, after the threat passes the pendulum swings back and civil liberties are not only restored but often enhanced (Fagin 2006).  Mistakes happen, but nations learn.  Detention as a topic tends to be treated by many authors alongside other side issues involving mistakes like overreaching surveillance, profiling, and torture (Darmer, Baird & Rosenbaum 2004), but others tie it into the problem of shifting definitions of terrorism and complaints about domestic sweeps on terrorist cells (e.g. the Lackawanna Six, the Detroit Cell, the Seattle Cell, the Portland Seven, and the Alexandria Eleven are often cited as examples of domestic overreach, with the monitoring of library checkouts and/or "data mining" being other examples).  Obscured in all this is any concern about "terrorist professors" (Cassell 2004 and persistent bloggers being the exception), and so we now turn to this controversial yet useful term describing those guilty of the crime of supporting terrorism.  It should be noted that a crafty criminologist might here take a legalistic "out" at this point and say a "terrorist professor" can be defined as anybody who does something that any prosecutor thinks is an indictable offense.  However, that's just going to amount to conspiracy in most cases, so there's a need to be a little more theoretical about the definitional matters first.

SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM ON CAMPUSES

    During wartime, the line between dissent and disloyalty is cloudy.  Dissent is a word implying more than simple deviation from a majority.  It is most commonly treated as part of First Amendment discourse, and it is during wartime when this amendment is most put to the test.  It is not to be abandoned lightly.  Craig Howe (of Craig Howe.com), following Stone (2004), argues that the First Amendment is essential to self-government, that it promotes character traits essential to a robust democracy: skepticism, personal responsibility, curiosity, distrust of authority and independent thinking, and that three principles shape the Supreme Court's understanding of the First Amendment:

1. No government paternalism in the realm of political discourse.
2. Punish the actor, not the speaker.
3. Differentiate between low- and high-value speech.

    This is not the place to fully discuss First Amendment jurisprudence.  Suffice it to say, as De George (1997) makes clear, academic freedom is not a species of free speech protected by the First Amendment (despite some appeals courts which have sometimes confounded the issue).  Academic freedom and tenure are not inalienable rights.  They exist because they serve ends which presumably benefit society.  It makes perfect sense, therefore, to discuss these things in the context of grand strategy or homeland security.  Regarding grand strategy, aside from notable efforts by Sidel (2004), Cronin & Ludes (2004), and Biddle (2005), comprehensive analyses of grand strategy post- 9/11 have yet to be written.  Progress is handicapped because the academic infrastructure is neglected, but there are many areas of neglect.  Take, for example, the field of criminal justice where Crank & Gregor's (2005) work stands out as the closest thing one might find as a textbook offering anything close to a suggestion by that discipline, although some books under the rubric of homeland security are also useful (Fagin 2006).  In developing grand strategy, there are, in short, no good criminal justice or criminological theories to serve as a guide.  In fact, if Shultz (2006) is right, conceptualizing terrorism as crime reduces our ability to even construct a grand strategy and puts the whole matter in the hands of lawyers defending their monopoly. 

    In terms of political science, Heymann's (2003) decision theory appears to have limitations, as do most conclusions drawn from the well-known theories of "soft" power (Nye 2003; 2004),  "sharp" (military) power, "sticky" (economic) power, and "sweet" (cultural) power (Mead 2004; Cronin & Ludes 2004).  They all seem to lead to the same point -- that the war on terrorism will be a long, drawn-out affair.  In this regard, what might be called "anti-quagmire" theory (Magstadt 2004) holds some promise.  Like soft power theorists, anti-quagmire theorists regard the continued use of "hard" military power as resulting in an endless cycle of periodic military intervention as necessary to keep up appearances, threats being credible only if backed by force.  Military strategy knows differently, in that endgame or handoff can occur (Collins 2002), and the U.S. has more long-term asymmetric capability than it knows what to do with (Johnson & Metz 2001).  Civilians, on the other hand, seem to only understand simplified versions of strategy when things go wrong, e.g., the "quagmire" factors:

1. Having no idea how or when to get out.
2. Not knowing whom you can trust once you get there.
3. Not understanding the local language or customs.
4. Being increasingly perceived as occupiers.
5. Having soldiers getting killed on a daily basis by an invisible enemy.
6. Watching the American public gradually turn against the President who "got us into this mess" in the first place.
7. Facing condemnation abroad, including by one's own allies.
8. Fostering obsessive secrecy in government on "national security" grounds
9. Eroding civil liberties at home while claiming to intervene on behalf of liberty abroad (Magstadt 2004: 160)     

    No one, as far as is known, has ever suggested marshalling the resources of the academic infrastructure to help fight the war on terrorism.  It's hard to imagine what such an unified front would look like (and if academics would cooperate).  Academics are more closely attuned and sensitive to the dangerous thought that "weeding" or policing of the professoriate might be called for.  On this point, as with Stone's (2004) excess-excess-reconsideration cycle and Woodrow Wilson's claim to only target those "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of national life," the vast majority of "terrorist college professors" (to use Cassell's 2004 term) have only received rather mild discipline, if any.  They have been unfairly sanctioned, and there has been a concomitant breakdown in self-regulation of the academy.  These twin problems usually involve the issue of tenure for college professors.

THE DISCONTENTS OF TENURE

    Taking away the privilege of tenure is the strongest tool in the box for dealing with "terrorist professors" and seems the inescapable conclusion as customs and norms don't seem to work and faculty discipline is not what it ought to be.  Lucas (1996) forcefully yet carefully argues that the only thing to do is abolish tenure altogether and forget about half-measures like post-tenure review and accountability schemes.  Tenure has regularly provided a protective screen (as well as a monopoly for lawyers, the ACLU, and the AAUP) behind which harmful speech and anti-American indoctrination of students occur.  In tenure's defense, it does a lot of good for many people.  However, a future associated with its unfettered hegemony is unacceptable, allowing extreme forms of the idea that American campuses should be "battlegrounds of ideas."  One is hard pressed to swear blind allegiance to something which so greatly usurps and corrupts the whole of the educative function.

    Across-the-board efforts to abolish tenure have encountered massive legal difficulties and do not seem worth the fight.  Tenure can be taken away individually, however, confirming academic fears of "weeding" the professoriate.  A national security exception could be added to the current list of reasons for taking away tenure, which presently include for adequate cause, for retirement for age, and extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies.  Poskanzer (2002) notes that the following four areas qualify as "for cause:"  incompetence (inability to perform); insubordination (unwillingness to perform); breaches of academic integrity; and moral turpitude.  Incompetence can involve disability, but most commonly involves being unprepared and disorganized, using wildly outdated course materials, and simply poor teaching.  Insubordination involves dereliction of duty such as refusing to teach assigned courses, failure to keep office hours, boycotting important ceremonies, failure to cover material in the syllabus, spending the majority of class time on nonpertinent matters, and proselytizing students.  Breaches of integrity involve plagiarism, misallocation of credit, falsification of credentials, perverting the learning process, taking advantage of students, leaving students to flounder, and treating others in an abusive or demeaning manner.  Moral turpitude involves criminal acts, sexual or racial harassment, dishonesty on reimbursement forms, holding tenured positions at more than one school, and giving students credit for fake courses.  Poskanzer (2002) states that incompetence absent proof of disability is the hardest thing to get a faculty member fired over; insubordination makes for the largest number of court challenges; breach of integrity is usually an "add-on" charge; and moral turpitude is the easiest thing to fire an academic over.               

    Returning to grand strategy, it just might be the ticket to somehow shepherd academic resources in a productive way in the war on terrorism as a kind of psychopolitical force or information power in the "war of ideas" as Lord (2004) puts it.  Public diplomacy has been the missing link in U.S. foreign policy for quite some time, and as Rapoport (2004) says, counterterrorism against "fourth wave terrorism" is far too reliant on deterrence, punishment, and preemption, all of which require a visible and destroyable enemy, or as Biddle (2001) notes, an identifiable enemy.  Expertise, of the kind academics claim a monopoly upon, could go a long way towards dismantling the intellectual foundations of terrorist support.  A truly integrated grand strategy could utilize university systems as part of informational power in DIME (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic dimensions of power.  Academic power could also be the "other" in the set of legal, financial, economic, law enforcement, intelligence, and other measures necessary for effective counterterrorism.  To attract academics to such a cause would require the development of grand strategy which ultimately aims beyond war to peace.  Cronin (2004) says such a strategy might be conscious of four things: points of diminishing returns; contradictions between diplomatic and non-diplomatic policies; over-reliance on conventional military solutions (including RMA-speak of waging war in fragile, networked environments where sensors, nanotechnology, and stand-off weaponry replace traditional set-piece battle); and the need to balance the inherent tension between liberty and order by paying attention to fundamental norms in international law that not only keep us from alienating allies, but solidifies support at home (Cronin 2004).  It would seem that academics would be naturally inclined toward the discovery of jus cogens in this regard given their cosmopolitan tendencies and "life of the mind" ideals.  Academics ought to also be very interested in the challenges of determining at what point the "war is won" and civil liberties can be restored or enhanced. 

COLLEGES AS BREEDING GROUNDS FOR TERRORISM

    A problem is that most terrorists are surely aware of how easy it is to usurp, hijack, or exploit an academic infrastructure.  Terrorists frequently benefit or receive value from academic debates over who is a "freedom fighter."  Terrorists realize very clearly that academic freedom allows radical dissent which breeds intellectual support, and that this is a process they can count on.  Professors who use the Internet to propagate their ideas are part of an additional problem, since terrorism is directly or indirectly supported this way.  "Electronic jihad," a term coined by Tom Regan at the Christian Science Monitor, is very real.  So are "virtual politics" and other forms of cyberwar carried out by terrorist groups and sympathizers (Jordan & Taylor 2004).  It is unfortunate that, other than a radical few, most academics tend to disregard the Internet as an intellectual property rights problem in the making.  It is clear that this is a subject ripe for more careful examination in the context of academic freedom.      

    The history and meaning of academic freedom are characterized by widespread contradictions and disagreements.  Possibly the only accurate thing to say about it is that it has become a term describing (more) the advocacy (than definition) of removing constraints on higher education.  Technically and historically (avoiding altogether the sodomistic overtones of going back to Greek pedagogy), academic freedom has two meanings: freedom of the teacher and that of the student.  However, in the late nineteenth century, when American university professors first brought the idea of academic freedom (Lernfreiheit) with them from German universities, the term has increasingly come to mean teacher's freedom (Hofstadter & Metzger 1955).  Ever since 1915, the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has been the lead organization dedicated to protecting and expanding this freedom. 

    The AAUP is energized by the Voltaire-Mill thesis (Furedy 1995) that "I may not like what you say, but will die defending your right to say it."  Hook (1970) expressed a similar idea that a tenured professor enjoys the right to heresy (fascism, racism, or what-have-you), and those who believe in academic freedom are obligated to defend them, no matter how wrong they consider them to be.  What liberals who adhere to this thesis fail to realize is that their guru, John Locke, said there are always exceptions.  All democracies make exceptions, in both directions of the pendulum.  The AAUP in their founding Declaration of Principles held that freedom to comment on current events is part of the freedom of extramural utterance and action, one of three elements of academic freedom (the other two being freedom of inquiry and research and freedom of teaching), with the proviso that this particular freedom has an importance of its own since discipline regarding it more frequently involves abuse of the employer-employee relationship (Joughin 1967).  One might argue that the employer-employee relationship has changed, or needs changing, from a 1915-era model.  In the AAUP Statement of 1940, academic freedom was held to be part of a teacher's freedom in the classroom, in discussing any subject relative to their discipline, with Lovejoy (1930), first general secretary of the organization having gone on record beforehand saying there were also duties to be accurate, exercise appropriate restraint, show respect for the opinions of others, and make every effort to indicate they do not speak for their institutions.  The most famous part of the AAUP's 1940 "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" reads as follows: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject," and in a later footnote, it is added: "The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is 'controversial.'  Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject."  In 1964, the Committee A Statement of the AAUP held that a faculty member's expression of opinion in or out of the classroom cannot be grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member's unfitness for their position (Joughin 1967).  Van Alstyne (1975) justified this by arguing for the avoidance of any chilling effect or "exceptionally inhibiting" restrictions, and Shils (1991) essentially stated a professor can say anything they want as long as they fulfill their contractual obligations of going to class and turning in appropriate grades.  The most recent AAUP statement, entitled "Statement on Academic Freedom in the Wake of September 11, 2001" says that "it is incumbent upon universities to protect the freedom to assemble and debate, and explore questions and ideas," this implying a new right to protection from threatening letters and emails.  In retrospect, academic freedom has certainly expanded in many ways, and it keeps on expanding, adding more and more privileges without adding any new responsibilities or duties.  It has over-emphasized the "heart" of free inquiry without enhancing its "head."  Bad scholarship exists as does harmful speech, and they should not be covered up by saying they're only "controversial."    

    Contractual obligations (not First Amendment or academic freedom protections) cover teaching method and pedagogical style as long as what is at issue is action, not speech, examples of "action" being a teacher disregarding institutionally established content or other institutional standards mostly relating to grading and/or carrying out course evaluations.  Higher education law (Poskanzer 2002) provides no crystal clear guidance, but it is generally understood that speech, not action, is protected, and "action" ought to be construed as related to teaching method insofar as it relates to what faculty do in the classroom, not what faculty say.  "Action" based on thought, however, brings up safeguards of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, making for tricky legal ground involving a "but for" test.  Contemporary court battles over tenure make the case for academic freedom as mostly involving freedom of choice in content, emphasis, and pace of a course within the parameters of international and national standards usually provided by expert testimony (Haskell 1997).  The main forensic issue is whether any harm would have resulted "but for" the content and emphasis, as if no bias ever happened.  For those unfamiliar with the law in this respect, it might be helpful to review the Pickering/Connick line of precedent (from Pickering v. Board of Education 1968 and Connick v. Myers 1983) which is sometimes phrased as First Amendment rights trumping anything that disrupts the "action" or smooth functioning of a university:

1. The court will make an initial determination whether the speech was on a matter of public concern.
2. The court will balance the interests of the faculty member's comments upon matters of public concern against the employer's interest in the efficient delivery of quality education.
3. If this balance favors the faculty member, the plaintiff must prove their protected speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the negative employment decision against them.
4. Should the faculty member demonstrate such causation, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to show it would have reached the same decision even in the absence of the protected conduct.      

    In times of needed citizen support, there are no guarantees from the universities.  The mere suggestion that support ought to be forthcoming triggers talk about free speech and free inquiry issues in an almost ritual-like reassertion that sometimes dissenting voices and radical critique should be welcomed on campus, even if unsettling or repugnant to most people.  What gets reaffirmed is a moral and cultural relativism which holds that no ideas are good or bad, right or wrong.  In this climate, dissent takes on wave-like forms (Sacco 2005) of epidemiology.  The voices of the nation's intellectual elite (intelligentsia) consist of media personalities and educators (Anderson 1996).  The latter group is going to include "radical" or "extremist" professors, professors with criminal backgrounds, professors who advocate and support terrorism, professors who are anti-war or revolutionary, professors who are Holocaust deniers, and professors who have an anti-Israel or anti-U.S. bias.  Such professors philosophically oppose any national security-related intrusions into the territory of academic freedom or their right to explore all and all sides of a political spectrum for whatever reasons.  It is clearly evident that the professors' union-like association, the AAUP, stands firmly opposed to any political intrusions on academic freedom and is supportive of dissent.

    Dissent can be disastrous in wartime, and some intelligentsia can be dangerous.  It is unknown exactly how many "dangerous" or "menacing" professors there might be, but if history is any guide, then seventy (70) appears to be a good enough estimate, since that's how many were officially "blacklisted" as un-American teachers during the 1951-1955 McCarthy Era, although an additional 400 were suspected of "un-American activities" but never blacklisted from holding professor jobs.  Popular websites like FrontPageMag and Campus Watch (to name two) chronicle the ongoing debates and developments in this area, and David Horowitz (2004), a liberal veteran of the McCarthy Era turned conservative reactionary, has been at the forefront (along with Daniel Pipes) at exposing the nation's "too-liberal" professors who can be accused of various things, such as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" and "siding with the enemy in a time of war."  A recent effort by Horowitz (2006) attempts to measure the number as being around one hundred (100), as follows (with selective additions made later):

    It might be instructive to analyze a few cases, as Horowitz (2006) has done, regarding professors involved in academic freedom controversies.  Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, University of New Mexico Professor Richard Berthold bluntly proclaimed to his students, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would get my vote."  He claimed it was a joke, but was suspended from teaching for a semester.  Shortly afterwards but still during 2001, a University of South Florida professor of computer science, Dr. Samuel Al-Arian, who is of Palestinian descent, came under criticism for making statements such as "Victory to Islam; Death to Israel."  A federal investigation ensued and discovered that the professor had ties to international terrorist groups.  The university suspended him without pay and banned him from campus.  He returned to campus, lost tenure and was fired, on grounds that he failed to distinguish his views from being a representative of the school.  Federal authorities also jailed him on conspiracy charges.  Also in 2001, Baylor University professor of Jewish Studies, Marc Ellis, garnered controversy over the extent to which the courses he taught either denied the Holocaust or more accurately claimed that Jews point to the Holocaust to distract attention from Israeli crimes against Palestinians.  Prof. Ellis' outspoken, anti-Zionist views have made him the "poster boy" for academic anti-Semitism on college campuses, ironic considering that he is Jewish, but understandable given that he sees the war on terrorism as a Christian crusade.  One can imagine the battles and outcries that have rocked this predominantly Baptist campus.  Numerous other campuses were also shaken with controversy in the wake of 9/11.  For example, fights broke out between students at Boston College, students at UNLV chased Marine recruiters off, students burned the flag or had it torn down at Marquette and Arizona State, and Muslim student groups celebrated terrorist acts at places like San Diego State and UNC-Chapel Hill.  

    During 2002, several students and professors at Harvard and Yale started suing one another (and their schools) for libel in reaction to criticisms of their outspoken views on 9/11 and the war on terror.  Particularly at Yale, threats of lawsuits and charges of censorship extended to the student newspaper there, as two parties, Andrew Sullivan (a right-wing blogger) and Glenda Gilmore, chair of the History Dept., fought it out over whether Saddam Hussein was such a bad guy and whether Prof. Gilmore (in Sullivan's opinion) was among the nation's top five professors who hate America for saying that it is an aggressor nation who is its own worst enemy (see Daniel Pipes' article "Why Do So Many Professors Hate America?")  

    Early in 2003, a Columbia professor of anthropology named Nicholas De Genova got in trouble during an anti-war rally calling for "a million Mogadishus" against American soldiers fighting the war on terrorism.  He went on to say that American soldiers in Iraq should throw grenades at their own officers; that U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy; that the U.S. flag is the emblem of a war machine; and that the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.  As you can imagine, there was intense fury over these comments, and the university had to provide a special security detachment for the professor.  The President of the college backed him up, mostly because his comments were made outside of the classroom.  Also in 2003, a professor was accused of having ties to terrorism, this time an Honors College professor, Dr. Mustafa Abu Sway, at Florida Atlantic University, who has since moved on to teaching for online schools overseas.

    In 2004, further scandal erupted at Columbia University where at least one Middle East Studies professor there referred to supporters of Israel as "Gestapo apparatchiks" and was accused of indoctrinating students in the classroom.  All in all, there are about seven or eight Columbia professors who regularly mouth anti-American sentiments (see Daniel Pipes' article "Columbia vs. America").  In response, the President and Provost of Columbia decided to create a counterbalancing department of Israeli Studies.

    In 2005, professors at Northeastern University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Univ. of Texas at Austin, and North Carolina Wesleyan either got in trouble or gained notoriety for comments along the lines of "the terrorists deserve to win," "the 9/11 victims deserved to die," or "9/11 was a government plot."  Most people are familiar with the Prof. Ward Churchill's controversy at Boulder where his comment that "More 9-11s are needed” was interpreted as a pro-terrorist and anti-American statement.  Many people may also be familiar with Prof. Robert Jensen (see website), an activist in the School of Journalism at Austin who proudly proclaims himself "a critic of the U.S. empire" and ranks himself up there in leftist popularity along with MIT professor Noam Chomsky (see website) who's last book, Hegemony or Survival, is dedicated to the proposition that America is a threat to the survival of the planet.  Some people may also be familiar with Professor "Jihad Jane" (name withheld; now deceased) at NC Wesleyan who taught an political science course named after one of Alex Jones' videos, 9/11 and the Road to Tyranny.   For purposes of further analysis, this paper will use Jihad Jane (whom this author knew and obtained permissions from) as a case study.

A CASE STUDY OF TERRORIST INDOCTRINATION ON CAMPUSES

    Some methodological notes are necessary to make beforehand.  In no way should what follows be construed as any kind of "Profile of a Terrorist Professor."  While the argument could be made, on grounds of methodological holism, that the exemplar reflects "the universe in a dewdrop," it is only a single-subject case study (a sample size of one).  Extreme care should therefore be taken in generalizing findings to any larger population.  Case studies of one have a long history in criminology, having been used since 1930 to develop theories or typologies of jack-rollers, pickpockets, safecrackers, fences, mafia wives, alcoholics, drug traffickers, and gang leaders, to name a few.  Following Berg (1989), the advantages of this method can be said to include the idiographic argument that individual data are rescued from a pile of averages, allowing a closer look at outliers of complete success or failure on the subject's part.  It is also possible to interpret nonverbal behavior from a case study.  There is also a certain ethics involved in qualitative research of this kind.  Allowing the subject to express themselves in their own words (given limitations of pontification and self-insight) often builds on ethnographic advantages (like rapport and naturalism) which enable a better understanding of thick, cultural phenomena that is better studied nonreactively.                   

    Jihad Jane was a 55-year old, white female, former associate (tenured) professor of political science who worked for about thirteen years at a small, denominational, liberal arts college in North Carolina loosely affiliated with the Wesleyan (non-charismatic, socially conscious) religious tradition.  She attended Howard University, Virginia Tech, and took her Ph.D. from SUNY-Binghamton.  Originally from Kentucky horse country, Jane loved horses and lived about twenty miles from work on a self-described "working horse farm" where, along with being a single mother of two traveling twenty-somethings (daughters), she enjoyed the care and feeding of her five cutting (quarter) horses, one of which she hoped would one day win a rodeo competition.  Active in both campus and regional politics, Jane was the de facto AAUP representative on campus and regular member of the tenure hearing committee, and once was elected by her local community to serve on City Council (an organization she later sued for a flap over fireworks debris landing on her property).  Although not religious herself (the phrase "Confederate Marxist" comes closest to describing her), she hung out or participated with Raleigh area groups like the radical Catholic Worker Movement, the Anarchist Black Cross, and ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & Racism).  When asked about the men in her life, she said she was long divorced from a wealthy husband, once visited Algeria where she developed a "great affinity for Arab men," and was also attracted to cowboys (having once run off to Wyoming with one for a semester).  In advocacy of socialist and terrorist causes, her office and office door contained posters and photos of people like Lenin, Che Guevara, and assorted revolutionaries.  She took pride in being practically the only Marxist faculty member at the school.  She supported various student activism on campus, like the Black Students Association and the Political Science club, and took great relish opposing various ideas and initiatives by the college's administration (once or twice helping beleaguered colleagues sue the President or school).  Like many faculty members, she held grudges against some people on campus; e.g., bookstore personnel (for profit-seeking, among other things) and cafeteria service providers (whom she regarded as in league with prison food providers).  Sometimes virulent in faculty meetings, and almost always challenging in conversation, it would become readily apparent Jane had a strong antipathy toward Jews (two or three Jewish colleagues at work were often the brunt of her comments).  In the closest thing this author has ever seen toward indoctrination, several of her students, indeed some honor students, were overheard saying things like the book, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was based on truth.  It is also safe to say she was attracted to numerous conspiracy theories involving the Zionist-controlled American government, new world order, CIA, and police state.  She battled a long illness (digestive system cancer) mostly with homeopathic remedies, then went toward the Mexican border for Laetrile treatment where she passed away on November 20, 2005.

    The events bringing Jihad Jane to national attention started in late 2003 with the launch of her web site, MegaLinks in Political Science, which supported, among other things, her upcoming Spring 05 Special Topics course called 9/11 and the Road to Tyranny, a title she would borrow from one of Alex Jones' (http://www.inforwars.com/) videos.  Her original interest in learning to use the web in conjunction with her teaching was to reach a larger audience, and she developed a number of both online and traditional course supplements utilizing her website.  From the start, it was also a website that reached out to the public too, with links to alternative news sources like Counterpunch, Jeff Rense, and PrisonPlanet, to name three of her favorite websites from which she regularly printed out tons of articles.  In late 2004, she obtained the services of an admirer of her website over in Ireland to touch up the design and layout.  This made the website more visually appealing, and kept her logo which showed a picture of some Sardinian terrorists holding M16s with the words "Jane on the Left" immediately below and the words "Fighting the New World Order" immediately above (the bottom caption would be later removed voluntarily because of its similarity to a Ward Churchill graphic).  The 9/11 course was originally conceived and approved (under fairly loose procedures for approval) as a course in conspiracy theories, some of which, it turned out, Jane was serious and passionate about -- like the Zionist conspiracy for global domination, the Holocaust as the greatest hoax ever, and that the Bush administration planned or knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.  The main textbook for the 9/11 course was Michael Parenti's 2002 book, The Terrorism Trap, but the course was setup to require weekly readings at alternative news source sites. 

    The 9/11 course first drew criticism on April 5, 2005 with a FrontPage magazine.com article by Mike Adams (of www.DrAdams.org and a criminal justice professor at UNC-Wilmington).  Discoverthenetwork.com maintains the best archive on this and subsequent transactions, but Mike really thought the hooded terrorist in the logo was Jane along with his criticism of her for hyperlinking headlines that read: "America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under Zionist control...Jews rule America (and most of the world) by proxy. They trick us into fighting and dying for THEM," "Israel is preparing to launch a nuclear attack on Iran," and "Killing Jews is Good."  Mike also took issue with some of Jane's assigned essay questions, such as "Discuss the sweeping attack on democratic rights under the Bush administration."  On April 18, 2005, another critic appeared, this time Jon Sanders (of the John Locke Foundation, a NC think tank).  Jon's blog at Frontpage magazine.com regarded Jane's website as "Ridiculous Course of the Month" and dissected it in detail, criticizing things like thinking the Bush administration carried out the 9/11 attacks as and excuse for global domination, that a Jewish cabal controls world events, that President Eisenhower was abducted by aliens, and that neoconservative leaders go off to a remote California location to practice owl worship.  By April 30, 2005, the Associated Press had picked up the story as well as many of the state's newspapers.  Jane, in fact, was invited to appear on national TV, but declined, and instead engaged in a few telephone interviews with reporters and bloggers, some of these conversations being profanity-laced.  Meanwhile, emails and phone calls started pouring in to the President's office at the college (and to colleagues, this author receiving some).  Heated email exchanges took place between college staff, citizens of the local community wrote into the local paper, and students started speaking out for and/or against Jane.  The course ended around May 7, 2005 with about eight students receiving good grades (not unusual numbers).  Somewhere around that time, the President issued a statement saying the school "seeks to foster freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry....The professor's views are not those held by the overwhelming majority of Americans. She presents alternative views that many find repugnant..., but our students are intelligent and thoughtful, often disagreeing without academic penalty and upset at any opinion that they can be brainwashed. We endeavor to ensure, however, that what is taught accords with the standards of each profession and discipline..., [therefore] we will be asking a team of respected Political Scientists to evaluate, out of the glare of publicity, the academic appropriateness and integrity of the professor's approach to teaching...and [the professor] has agreed that this approach would be helpful."  No team of Political Scientists were ever formed as Jane took medical leave the following semester, then passed away, and all traces of her website were removed in early January 2006.

WHY THEY PROTEST: AN ANALYSIS

    Interpretation of a case study can only yield limited conclusions, and in so doing, it seems wise to start with the most general observations first.  It's no secret that both liberals and radicals share a common anti-militaristic outlook in time of war.  Eugene Debs once said "War is a socialist opportunity" and by that he meant it raises opportunities to form alliances with all sorts of discontents; e.g., intellectuals, ideologues, pacifists, and even those in the center of political spectra.  Institutions of higher education in America, as perhaps they've always been, are places of discontent, often at odds with society and their own communities.  It is unlikely they will ever be places that the nation can reliably call upon in times of needed citizen support.  This may be true only in America, however, since in other nations, the concept of "social patriot" (one who respectfully disagrees) can be more commonly found.  Intellectuals and radicals also share a common outlook -- insistence upon the right to experiment and improvise.  It is evident in our case study that the professor in question "took liberties" with her course, and such people will often gleefully self-admit such things.  A question of some importance is "Why?" and to adequately answer that in the context of academic dissent and protest, we need to move beyond the most obvious of answers, anti-militarism, which is a given and only the first in a set which contains three other causal factors: antisemitism; anti-administration; and anti-capitalism.  The four (4) causal factors appear to be: 

• anti-militarism --  the primary goal of the protestors; their whole personality being opposed to all things military

• anti-Semitism -- a prejudice against all things suspected of being Jewish or under Jewish influence

• anti-administration -- a tendency to react oppositionally to college rules and regulations

• anti-capitalism -- disdain, dislike, or even hatred toward the U.S. economic system

    Anti-militarism is something all "thinking revolutionaries" agree upon.  It's a given when talking about "intellectual" or principled dissent.  It seems to be a deep-seeded personality traint of some kind, and at least it is perhaps true that psychologically some people are oriented toward action without much thinking and others too much.  Anti-militarism is often combined with a tendency to favor anti-capitalism because Marxism and most forms of socialism carry an agenda of action.  To Marx, one declares what something is by declaring what it should be (Zinn 1968).  This is the adaptive structure of academics with ideological fetishism, or those who think their teaching should consist mainly of, time and again, going back to dredge up, regurgitate, critique, and/or destroy old knowledge, especially sacred cows.  The threat of online education as a crisis in higher education is relevant in this regard for the ambivalent stance most academics have taken towards it in regard to the capitalist threat of commercialization.  Homeland security is also regarded by such academics as threatening to the way they have found to make a living by "breaking down the walls" of society.  Hence, anti-militarism and anti-capitalism go hand-in-hand. 

    Anti-Semitism was present in our case study not only in the "open" ways our exemplar acted (direct indoctrination of students), but in "latent" or hidden forms.  Consider that the standard counterargument consists of saying "our students" are "intelligent and thoughtful" enough to resist brainwashing.  This is the equivalent of saying "no problem here" which is a typical response to the presence of bad things going on.  Latent anti-Semitism is a concept normally ascribed to Luhmann (1995) and is quite prevalent on American campuses given that it, like other things, comprise what academics simply don't talk about.  It is part of the cultural code of decisionmaking by hidden consensus so common in university governance, especially small schools.  Another way of saying this is that most academics, like our exemplar, are cultural rather than racial antisemites, strongly resenting not so much the existence of Jews, but their relative influence and the influence that even discussing anti-Semitism openly might have.  It may be hypothesized that much of this is due to the envy (relative deprivation), prestige contests, and continuous status seeking which characterize academic culture.

    Anti-administration is admittedly a clunky term for describing the premise that someone feels more or less integrated into a collectivity by the ratio of things they are for and against -- in this case, their college administrations.  College administrators should not bear the entire brunt of responsibility since it's true that academic types are a difficult, oppositional bunch to manage.  Faculty see "administrative threats" in ways that sometimes defy logic.  It is quite possible that "significant events" in administrative history are perceived as mixtures of external and internal threats on campus which drive professors over the edge, so to speak, into radical activism.  With our case study, there were two such events (not noted beforehand).  One was the murder of Rachel Corrie in March of 2003 (run over by Israeli bulldozer) where it can be remembered Jane tried to unsuccessfully organize campus protests, which may have led to her interest in "virtual protest" via an online presence.  This probably turned her toward the Palestinian cause more than anything else, and it didn't help that the administration repeatedly vetoed her requests to put the 9/11 course online.  A second significant event was the dismissal of an Arab professor at the school later that year, for not having adequate credentials (only a MS not a PhD).  It was brusquely inquired whether Jane had an affinity toward this man, and she said most definitely not, it simply being a matter of legal and other action against the administration.  However, Jane also perceived this event as hypocritical in light of faculty and administrative diversity claims.  She took it as evidence of racism on campus, this being perhaps the moment when her anti-Semitism came to the fore.

    There is a strong tendency among academics to diffuse threats via collective solidarity, which is another way of saying that "backlash" effects happen when one tries to "fire up" a faculty to be more relevant, marketable, or "on board" with anything.  What happens is that the personalities of fairly quiet senior faculty role models become agents of socialization, an ascription-based pattern as opposed to an achievement-oriented one which utilizes the vastly more fresh talent of junior faculty.  Faculty do less, not more, and quality deteriorates.  The "classics" are taught and retaught, and things go on the same, but it is equally likely that strong personalities might emerge or remerge in this environment.

    Another common event in the college setting is the development of a critical mass of distrust between faculty and administration, leading the faculty to withdraw from seeking academic rewards and privileges to obtain affective satisfaction elsewhere.  This is almost like the instinctual basis for families, where people go to find a warm place when occupational expectations are thwarted.  It is also the trigger for seeking out "other" venues, which may or may not include the perceived "comradeship" which comes from activism and protest.  The generalized desire is to find anybody to agree with completely.  A significant detail in our case study is the fact that Jane was unmarried and a "loner" much of the time, and it is not insignificant that both terrorists and terrorist professors share this "loner" characteristic which Sageman (2004) reports as only a 27% rate but 80% feel excluded from society in some way.  Feeling alone or excluded sometimes leads to deviant in-grouping and out-grouping patterns.  "Latent" identity memberships are better than none, and cultural codes are rich enough in most organizations to tolerate all sorts of strange and hidden beliefs as long as the perceived ability to act collectively or "together" is ensured.

    It is especially noteworthy to draw attention to how radical dissent "travels" across university campuses.  To better understand this, it might be best to introduce a little known subfield of criminology (and victimology) called "wave theory," revising Sacco's (2005) account of it which is itself limited by the moral relativism (no idea right or wrong) inherent in the social constructionist perspective.  Wave theory rightly belongs to the functionalist tradition, going back to Erikson (1966) who argued that crime waves (as well as control waves) represent how societies establish their unique moral character in response to boundary crises.  Erikson only studied a 60-year period of 17th-century Massachusetts, but a key point of Eriksonian sociology is that overly dramatic acts of boundary maintenance are often called for to fulfill a reaffirmation function.  In other words, societies (as well as university systems) sometimes push themselves to the limits of toleration in order to experience the felt sensations of integration and solidarity.

    The graphic below is a normal crime wave.  The important thing to note is that even though most people will only think of the "rise" stage as a crime wave, to victimologists and criminologists, the decline may be just as important to study.  In fact, the study of falling crime rates has been something of a growth industry in criminology lately.  LaFree (1999) states that a normal crime wave will have four main properties: (1) wave length -- some crime, like riots, are of short duration, being "mini-waves" lasting only a few hours, days, or weeks while other crime waves, like murder, tend to have a longer sweep, about 60 years on average it turns out; (2) wave shape -- the symmetry of the wave, or whether the rise is as rapid as the fall, with economic conditions being critical here, the ebb and flow of the economy helping smooth or symmetricize the wave; (3) degree of linearity -- whether or not the rise and decline are proportionate or consistently up and down, and most criminologists who have studied waves find they are non-linear, usually with a tail peak or something at the end; and (4) synchronicity -- whether or not the wave catches hold across the whole nation, or is isolated in a specific geographic region.  

     Gurr (1981; 1989) has also written about the wave-crest-plateau patterns of crime waves, and Gurr's (1976) ideas have been the inspiration for more than one sociological theory about terrorism.  The Gurr wave occurs with some regularity in a 50- or 60- or 70-year cycle (length is not predictable).  It's intended to be a "long wave" but not as long as Kondratieff or K-waves in economics (cycles of balance and surplus in the supply of labor relative to employment).   In the short run, it has its uses, like for new types of crime that are especially heinous; e.g., serial or mass murder, gay-bashing, cyber-terrorism, carjacking, etc.  The Wave Peak is the sharp rise in something new.  There is always a subpeak or "copycat" phase where there may be not so much of the phenomenon, but it may be more brutal or damaging in ways.  Then, there's always a final crest, the last part of the wave before the behavior starts to fizzle out and settle down to tolerable levels in the plateau stage.

    Overhead views of a crime wave are also possible (Sacco 2005) as are other ways of portraying the way rumors and panic are distributed in a population.  Discovering the dynamic points of waves involves the discovery of key social constructionist points being that a crime wave exists when people come to perceive that one exists.  Wave theory holds that there is no rule about the number of people who must be involved, however.  Sacco (2005) states that every wave has four characteristics: (1) victims -- there is a redistribution of victim experiences; (2) offenders -- there is a national preoccupation over them; (3) events -- interesting, new, unique twists put on ordinary happenings; and (4) places -- certain domains become risky, like schools in "school crime" or "workplace" in workplace crime.  Experts, academic and otherwise, propagate crime waves by drawing attention to their purported understanding of the size and dimensions of the problem.  In other words, faculty will generate a crisis over national security intrusions on academic freedom regardless if any such intrusions are significant or not, and just as normal is that critics of higher education will complain about terrorist professors regardless if many exist or not.  What travels through the population is a sociocultural artifact in a process of diffusion, but is better described by the older term, contagion, because what happens is unthinking and almost automatic copying of behavior.  There are specific means by which diffusion occurs, called channels or linkages, but the basic model is similar to that in communication studies -- consisting of senders (emitters) and receivers (adopters).  Academic dissent therefore diffuses like a fad or fashion, not in most cases transmitting the motive (adopters are seen as already predisposed), but the techniques, values, and lifestyles which increase the risk of blind or improvised action.  In other words, academics "lose their heads" when dealing with diffusion of rumors and conspiracies.        

    It might be worthwhile, in future studies, to examine the psychological processes of why people respond irrationally to rumors, but in the academic context, we have seen quite simply that motivation doesn't matter.  Hard evidence, facts, and logic seem to have no role to play in getting academics "unworried" about potential loss of their privileges.  In the free-floating world of ideas that is the academic environment, dissent and protest can spread like wildfire since under conditions of moral relativism and need for boundary maintenance, one should normally expect criticism, libel, sedition, and even treason to occur, mindlessly as it were, which is hardly the kind of principled, intellectual dissent one would ordinarily expect.  Another conclusion which should be readily apparent is that backlash effects will occur whenever an attempt is make to effect productive change in the permissive climate of academic freedom today.  Crackdowns in the name of national security will not likely lead to mass protests, but instead to utter passivity and increased quibbling among faculty which, in the long run, is deleterious to the quality of higher education.  Certain issues will, of course, always remain unspeakable on campuses, functioning as "latent" forces perpetuating a closed culture where all that matters is the diversity of ideas, no matter which is right and which is wrong, and unfortunately, no matter who dies as a consequence of this.  The prospects are dim for pinning hopes on the academic infrastructure in providing the full measure of intellectual assistance that is needed in time of war, and unless something is done to drastically alter things, the university system is likely to remain not just a residual institution (Barzun 1993) but become America's peculiar institution of the 21st century.                

INTERNET RESOURCES
A Book Review of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime
ACLU Spyfiles
Ben Shapiro on Should We Prosecute Sedition
Bob Jenson's Website at Trinity University
Campus Watch: Monitoring Middle East Studies on Campus
College Freedom: A Website about Academic Freedom and Patriotic Correctness
Dealing with Foreign Students & Scholars in an Age of Terrorism (pdf)
Monitoring with Foreign Students in the United States: A History (pdf)
NAFSA Association for International Educators Website
National Academies Website on Scientific Travel Overseas
NewsMax Link to David Horowitz' Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC)
Students for Academic Freedom: SAF Home Page for Campus Chapters
The Chronicle of Higher Education: News, Advice, and Jobs for People in Academe
Townhall.com & FrontPage Magazine
Treason Watch: Communist Goals 1963 and Now
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
http://www.insidehighered.com/
http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.thefire.com/
http://www.911AsHistory.org/
Zombietime's Coverage of Anti-U.S. Demonstrations

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