Academic freedom and the "intifada curriculum"

Academe, May/Jun 2003 by Post, Robert C

In early May 2002, the English department of the University of California, Berkeley, published a description on its Web site of a section of English R1A, a course in basic reading and writing skills. The course was titled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. " The course description explained, in provocative terms, the context of the Palestinian Intifada and its relationship to Palestinian writing; it closed with the warning that "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." The course description quickly became a hot topic in the national media, with an appearance by the course instructor, a graduate student, on CNN's Hardball. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal decried the "Intifada curriculum" as one symptom of American universities' being "beholden to leftist ideologies."

Taken by surprise, the UC Berkeley English department asked the course instructor to revise his description. By July, working with the department, the instructor had published a new description. During the same time, the president of the University of California, Richard Atkinson, asked Robert C. Post, the author of the text that appears below, to review the issues of academic freedom and governance raised by the controversy surrounding the course. Here is Post's August 12, 2002, letter to Atkinson, reprinted with the omission of some footnotes.

DEAR PRESIDENT ATKlNSON:

You have asked me to discuss the issues of academic freedom and responsibility raised by the controversy surrounding "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," a section of English R1A to be taught in fall 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. These issues are multiple, novel, and complex. Because time is short, I can at best offer a preliminary evaluation that seeks to identify the most prominent of these issues and to suggest how they might be analyzed and resolved.

English R1A is a course that instructs undergraduates in basic skills of reading and writing. The course is offered in approximately sixty sections, each designed and taught by a graduate student instructor. The section entitled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" became controversial because of its initial course description, which read:

Course Description. Since the inception of the Intifada in September of 2000, Palestinians have been fighting for their right to exist. The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people. And yet, from under the brutal weight of the occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance. This class will examine the history of the Palestinian resistance and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians in order to produce an understanding of the Intifada and to develop a coherent political analysis of the situation. This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.

This course description was plainly unacceptable. After much discussion and many drafts, the description, which is posted on the Web site of the Berkeley English department, was altered to read:

This is a course on Palestinian resistance poetry. It takes as its point of departure the Palestinian literature that has developed since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, which has displaced, maimed, and killed many Palestinian people. The Israeli military occupation of historic Palestine has caused unspeakable suffering. Since the occupation, Palestinians have been fighting for their right to exist. And yet, from under the weight of this occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance. This class will examine the history of the Palestinian resistance and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians. This class takes as its conceptual starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Discussions about the literature will focus on several intersecting themes: how are Palestinian artists able to imagine art under the occupation; what consequences does resistance have on the character of the art that is produced (i.e., why are there so few Palestinian epics and plays and comedies); can one represent the Israeli occupation in art; what is the difference between political art and propaganda and how do the debates about those terms inflect the production of literature; how do poems represent the desire to escape and the longing for home simultaneously (alternatively, how do poems represent the nation without a state); what consequence do political debates have on formal innovations and their reproduction; and what are the obligations of artists in representing the occupation? This 1A course offers students frequent practice in a variety of forms of discourse leading toward exposition and argumentation in common standard English. The course aims at continuing to develop the students' practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills but with increasingly complex applications. Students will be assigned a number of short essays (two to four written pages) and several revisions.