AAUP Joins Lawsuit in Ideological Exclusion Case

Academe, Mar/Apr 2006 by Flower, Ruth

The AAUP in January joined two other national organizations and professor Tariq Ramadan in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU challenging the constitutionality of a key provision of the Patriot Act, which has been used to bar Ramadan from this country. The AAUP and its co-plaintiffs, the American Academy of Religion and PEN American Center, each seek to bring Ramadan to the United States to meet with organization members.

Ramadan, a Swiss national, is a widely respected scholar of Muslim affairs. Over the years, he had visited the United States frequently to lecture, attend conferences, and meet with other scholars. In January 2004, Ramadan was offered a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. But a few weeks before the beginning of the fall semester, as Ramadan prepared to move his family to Indiana, the U.S. government revoked his visa.

Neither the professor nor the university received an explanation for this action, but a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security said at an August 2004 press conference that the visa was revoked "because of a section in federal law that applies to aliens who have used a 'position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.'" This language appears in section 411 of the Patriot Act, and is known as the "ideological exclusion" provision.

The lawsuit argues that the ideological exclusion provision violates the First Amendment rights of the plaintiffs' members to hear a full range of ideas and damages the vitality of academic discourse. Vague terras in the statute allow the administration to use the provision to exclude individuals whose political views it disfavors. The AAUP routinely invites foreign scholars to lecture, attend conferences, and meet with U.S academics.

The suit seeks a declaratory judgment that the ideological exclusion provision is unconstitutional both on its face and as it has been applied to Ramadan, an outspoken opponent of terrorist activities. It also seeks an injunction to prevent the government from relying on this section to exclude any other foreign national.

"Fearing another's ideas enough to prohibit their expression is perplexing to scholars and troubling to citizens," AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen says. "The freedom to teach and the freedom to learn are protected freedoms in this nation, and the AAUP and its co-plaintiffs must insist that these two freedoms be respected. Now is the time when we should be listening to and learning from Muslim scholars, not trying to silence them," he adds.

-R.F.