However, the AAUP did not issue a censure. Censure from the group is seen as an embarrassing stigma in academia that can make it harder to recruit and retain faculty members and obtain some research grants. It also could have barred the university from forming a Phi Beta Kappa honor society chapter. However, the AAUP held out the possibility that they still might issue a censure.
Questions for debate:[ol][li]Was USF right to fire Al-Arian?[]Was the AAUP right to condemn USF?[]Should the AAUP censure USF?[/ol] I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it seems wrong to fire someone who hasn’t been convicted. Innocent until proven guilty. It seems right for the AAUP to stand up for professors.[/li]
OTOH from what I’ve read, there is overwhelming evidence that Al-Arian really was a terrorist. It doesn’t seem right to have a terrorist on a university faculty.
Wrong, there is evidence that he was a terrorist supporter. He wasn’t an active planner or participants of any terrorist act, he simply may have donated money to unsavoury organisations. Let’s try not to call people we don’t like something they’re not just to make them sound like even worse people.
Guilt by association; if you do not denounce terrorists, you are supporting terrorism; if you support terrorists, you are a terrorist . This is part and parcel of the Bush Doctrine.
]
Um, no. I haven’t heard of anyone being arrested for “not denouncing terrorism”. Al-Arian is charged with providing material support to terrorism. Raising money for Islamic Jihad is and should be a crime. As for the “Bush Doctrine” (by which I presume you mean the famous and oft-misquoted “You are with us, or you are with the terrorists” declaration), it is a foreign policy (read: not relevant) doctrine which holds that countries which intentionally harbor and protect al-Qaeda will be treated as enemies of the United States. Seems reasonable to me, though if you really want to debate its morality rather than take silly little partisan snipes at a President you don’t like in a thread where they don’t belong, I will gladly discuss it in another thread.
This is the part I wanted to respond to – I’m not making light of an AAUP censure, but in my professional opinion, it’s not as dire as the linked article might have one believe. The entire SUNY system has been under an AAUP censure since 1978, for example. Yeshiva University has been censured since 1982.
From the AAUP web site:
In some ways, the AAUP could be compared to a labor union. One of the purposes of this organization is to investigate and make statement upon cases of individual faculty members who have not received fair consideration under what the AAUP has established as its own guidelines for academic freedom.
I’m not convinced the AAUP would have much to say had the process for the firing of Al-Arian been more in keeping with their recommendations for faculty review. They’re not saying anything about terrorist activities, they’re criticizing the methods of the institution’s administration. Making statements about cases such as this is what the AAUP does.
I agree: they have legitimate grounds to criticize the manner in which this issue was carried out. The actual outcome is not something that they have any right or reason to comment on (and it was probably the right outcome).
Can we all just agree that Al-Arian probably did a Very Naughty Thing and move on? In that the exact word we ascribe to him has nothing to do with the moral or legal situation?
My take on this is that he should have been put on “Administrative Leave”. The administration would look properly embarressed, and would dump him as soon as he is arraigned, etc. If by some miracle, Al-Arian proves his inccocence to the satisfaction of the locals, they could quietly let him back on, so long as he kept his mouth shut. Nice and diplomatic-like.
Why should he have to keep his mouth shut if he was found innocent? And why should he have to face the loss of his job, or being suspended, based only on an accusation?
He’s accused of being part of a conspiracy to commit mass murder. Separate questions are whether or not he’s guilty and whether or not the university followed appropriate procedures, but the charge itself goes way beyond “very naughty.”
Hamas, as an organization, does more than promote terror. There is a question here akin to the “dual use” question with regards to selling material to Iraq. Some of the money raised for Hamas would probably go to funding terrorist activities, some would probably go towards benign ends. This, as with so many things, is a grey area.
Saying he’s accused of conspiring to commit mass murder is accurate, but so is saying he conspired to provide food and clothing to palestinian refugees. This is a sticky case and I lean towards the “innocent until proven guilty” even if the accusations are of particularly heinous crimes. No censure or punishment until the verdict is in. Otherwise we get witch hunts.