If you can't respond, smear
I've talked many times about my college alma mater, Bir Zeit on the Hudson. But I haven't talked much about the place that turned me into a political conservative - uber Leftist New York University. I went to law school at NYU from 1980-84 (I was JD/MBA - hence the extra year), and during the 1980 Presidential campaign - in which I backed Ronald Reagan against the Jew-hating Jimmy Carter - I became a political conservative because of the complete tone-deafness of NYU's 'liberal' atmosphere to anything that wasn't the party line.
The driving forces behind the American Studies Association's boycott of Israel are apparently all at NYU. Richard Behar tried reasoning with them. This was the response he got.
Five hours after my piece appeared online I received an email from that person. It was not what I expected. Here it is, in its entirety.
“Curtis Marez does not teach at UC Davis,” Prof. Duggan’s email began, in a reference to the outgoing ASA president. “Our conference,” she continued, “was not held in San Diego.”
When I read this, I was mortified. Stupid, piddling errors like these don’t belong in an article. But I had already made the corrections long before her email. (In the first case, the link to the college where Marez teaches was correct, but not his school’s name. In the second matter, I had incorrectly placed the conference in the city where Marez, the boycott resolution’s spokesperson, works and lives.)
OK. What else did I get wrong? The rest of the email said as follows:
“I could go on. But the number of errors in your obsessive screed are so numerous…. [ellipses in original].”
Wait a minute. Two minor errors, fixed hours before her email, she points out to me, but there were “numerous” other errors that she can’t bring herself to articulate? What were those errors?
Was my article an “obsessive screed?” I suppose that’s a value judgment, though I feel it’s a little harsh. But as I continued to read the email, that was a compliment compared to what came next:
“Do you realize that you sound, well, unbalanced? Which is a shame because I hear you wrote some really great pieces about Scientology! I hope you can take xanax and relax a bit?”
When you can’t refute the facts, smear and insult, I guess. (I responded in kind, for which I immediately apologized. There was no reciprocity.)Read the whole thing. Some academic discussion....
Labels: academic boycott, American Studies Association, boycott Israel
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:03 AM
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