POLICING ACADEMIA

The lobby's campaign to mold debate about Israel has faced the greatest difficulty in academia. Not only do many professors have tenure (which insulates them from many forms of pressure), but they also work in a realm where intellectual freedom is a core value and where challenging the prevailing wisdom is common and often prized. There is also a deep-seated commitment to freedom of speech on college and university campuses. The internationalization of American universities over the past thirty years has brought large numbers of foreign-born students and professors to the United States, and these people are often more critical of Israel's conduct than Americans tend to be.
   Even so, groups in the lobby did not devote significant efforts to shaping discussion on campus during the 1990s, mainly because the Oslo peace process was under way. There was relatively little violence between Israel and the Palestinians during this period, and many believed the conflict was on the verge of being solved. As a result, there was only mild criticism of Israel in the 1990s and little need for the lobby to intervene.
   Criticism at colleges and universities rose sharply after the Oslo process collapsed and Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001, and it became especially intense in the spring of 2002 when the IDF reoccupied Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank and employed massive force against the Second Intifada. As one would expect, the lobby moved aggressively to "take back the campuses." New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought "speakers from Israel to discuss the challenges Israel faces as the only democracy in the Middle East."30 The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) initiated a series of advocacy training sessions for college students who wanted to defend Israel on their campuses, and a new organization—the Israel on Campus Coalition—was formed to coordinate the twenty-six different groups that now sought to make Israel's case on campus.
   Not to be outdone, Christians United for Israel recently formed a partnership with the David Project, a Boston-based pro-Israel group focused on campus issues. Their goal is to establish college chapters and training programs (the first being at California State University, Bakersfield) designed to help Christian students "make the case for Israel." CUFI executive director David
Brog said the purpose of the program was to "build the next generation," and David Project director Charles Jacobs said it "will teach them how to respond so that they can say more than just God gave Israel the land. We will teach them how to understand the conflict, not as a border war, but as a regional conflict between Arabs and Jews, as the centerpiece of a global war."31
   Predictably, the most important organization in the effort to win back the campuses was AIPAC, which had been monitoring campus activity and training young advocates for Israel since at least the late 1970s. AIPAC more than tripled its spending on college programs as Israel came under fire. The aim of this effort, according to Jonathan Kessler, the director of leadership development at AIPAC, was "to vastly expand the number of students involved on campus, their competence, and their involvement in the national pro-Israel effort." In the summer of 2003, AIPAC brought 240 college students on all-expenses-paid trips to Washington, D.C., for four days of intensive advocacy training. Students were instructed that when they returned to school they should concentrate on networking with campus leaders of all kinds and winning them over to Israel's cause.32 In 2007, more than 1,200 students from nearly 400 colleges and universities attended AIPAC's annual Policy Conference, including 150 student body presidents.33
   This campaign to cultivate students has been accompanied by efforts to influence university faculty and hiring practices. In the early 1980s, for example, AIPAC recruited students to help it identify professors and campus organizations that might be considered anti-Israel. The findings were published in 1984 in The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus. At the same time, the ADL, which was compiling files on individuals and organizations it considered suspect regarding Israel, surreptitiously distributed a small booklet containing "background information on pro-Arab sympathizers active on college campuses" who "use their anti-Zionism as merely a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism."34
   This effort intensified in September 2002, when Daniel Pipes established Campus Watch, a website that posted dossiers on suspect academics and, stealing a page from AIPAC's playbook, encouraged students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel.35 This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars prompted a harsh reaction and Pipes later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report alleged anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges.36
   Pipes's campaign to stamp out criticism of Israel on campuses did not stop there. Together with Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American scholar who has appointments at both WINEP and Israel's Shalem Center, and Stanley
Kurtz, a contributing editor at the National Review and research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, Pipes began encouraging Congress to curtail or at least closely monitor the Title VI funding that the federal government gives to Middle East and other area studies programs at major universities. The aim is to silence or at least inhibit critics of Israel and as a result force universities to hire scholars whose views are more in line with those of Pipes, Kramer, and Kurtz. The International Studies in Higher Education Act (HR 3077), which they supported, would have set up a government-appointed board to watch over international studies centers receiving federal monies. The board's mandate would include making recommendations to the Secretary of Education and Congress that would help ensure that the activities of centers receiving funding "reflect diverse perspectives and the full range of views on world regions, foreign languages and international affairs."37 Though seemingly innocuous, this aspect of the proposed legislation was in fact a response to Kramer and Kurtz's claims that existing Middle East studies programs were biased and fostering anti-American and anti-Israel attitudes.38
   Had the legislation passed as written, universities that wanted government support would have faced a clear incentive to hire individuals for their area studies programs who supported existing U.S. policy and were not critical of Israel. Key groups in the lobby backed the initiative, with AIPAC, the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, and five other organizations dispatching a letter to Congress that accused existing Title VI centers of "uncritically promoting a positive image of Palestinians, Arabs, and the Islamic World, while ignoring or denigrating Israel."39 HR 3077 was approved by the House but was never formally considered by the full Senate.40 Similar legislation was reintroduced in 2005 and passed the House by a narrow margin (221 to 199) in March 2006, but the Senate again declined to act and the legislation expired at the end of the 109th Congress.41
   Kramer and Kurtz claimed victory in 2007, however, when a congression-ally mandated National Research Council study of the Title VI programs recommended the creation of an executive-level presidential appointee to oversee international studies and language programs.42 The NRC study defended the integrity of existing area studies programs and did not endorse Kramer and Kurtz's accusations of bias. In fact, one member of the study group, former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt, told reporters that bias would have been visible if it were rampant, but in his words, "it's not out there."43 Some supporters of existing Title VI centers suggested that assigning these programs to a high-level presidential appointee would enhance their status and help them obtain greater resources. However, giving a sin
gle individual such extensive oversight also raises the worrisome possibility that a future presidential appointee might one day be in a position to implement the Pipes/Kramer/Kurtz program of ideological conformity.
   Moreover, the April 2007 version of the Title VI legislation on international education programs, now under consideration in the Senate, would create a complaint procedure for individuals who felt that an existing Title VI program did not contain sufficiently diverse views. If complainants were not satisfied by the university's response, their grievance could be "filed with the Department [of Education] and reviewed by the Secretary." The draft legislation also directs the secretary to "take the review of such complaints into account when determining the renewal of grants."44 If this clause becomes law, one can easily imagine groups in the lobby leveling repeated complaints against any Middle East studies program that employs someone who has criticized Israeli policies, in order to convince the Department of Education to cut off Title VI support or to encourage the university in question to safeguard its funding by tilting in a pro-Israel direction.
   To further counter a perceived anti-Israel bias in academia, a number of philanthropists have established Israel studies programs at U.S. universities (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish studies programs that already exist), so as to increase the number of "Israel-friendly" scholars on campus.45 NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies on May 1, 2003, and similar programs have been established at other schools, including Berkeley, Brandeis, and Emory. Academic administrators emphasize the pedagogical value of these programs, but they are also intended to promote Israel's image on campus. Fred Lafer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes clear that his foundation funded the NYU center to help counter the "Arabic [sic] point of view" that he thinks is prevalent in NYU's Middle East programs.46
   Similar motives reportedly lay behind gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson's proposed multimillion-dollar gift to expand the existing Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University so as to create a center focusing on the "Jewish theme as a paradigm of international relations." Ha'aretz reported in August 2006 that "one of the key goals of Adelson and other advocates of the Jewish center is to moderate the Arab presence at the university." The program's first director, Yossi Shain (who also heads the Har-tog School of Government at Tel Aviv University), said it was important to set up such a program at Georgetown "because it's a Jesuit school, because it's in Washington, because it's in the foreign service school." Similarly, university rabbi Harold White said that establishing the new center would bal
ance Georgetown's existing Arab center, and this was particularly important because "many Georgetown graduates end up at the State Department."47
   The lobby's desire to police academia has led to several noteworthy efforts to pressure administrators or influence personnel decisions.