© Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesUC Berkeley
The one-credit student-taught class has become the center of a bitter debate. The class was meant to teach the history of Palestine "from the 1880s to the present, through the lens of settler colonialism," its syllabus once read, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The syllabus has since been removed.
The class was a part of Berkeley's DeCal program, or Democratic Education at Cal. The premise is not revolutionary; students teach one-credit classes to other students on a pass/fail basis.
Some of these classes offer challenging topics like professional speaking, cryptocurrency and faith-based debates. Other classes are more fun, like ones about Korean drumming, introduction to baking and meditation classes.
However, the class on Palestine's history was removed after Chancellor Dirks received a letter from 43 Jewish and civil rights groups that claimed the class was acting as political indoctrination that encouraged students "to hate the Jewish state and take action to eliminate it."
The letter published on Tuesday accused both the student, Paul Hadweh, and the faculty advisor, Hatem Bazian, of having "extreme anti-Zionist political orientation." Hadweh is a member of the school's Students for Justice in Palestine, and Bazian is the chairman of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
The letter points out that the class is the only politically motivated DeCal class and claimed that much of the assigned course reading is from authors who have either called for an academic boycott of Israel, called for the dismantling of Israel, or both.
However, the letter did not call for a suspension of the class. Rather, it wanted a stricter policy that would prevent future classes from not meeting requirements from the Regents Policy on Course Content.
The Board of Regents stance on student led courses does ban "misuse of the classroom by, for example, allowing it to be used for political indoctrination." The problem is that political indoctrination is given no definition, leaving it open ended for potentially any politically charged course to potentially be against its policies.
As a result, Dirks' office responded by telling the groups that the class "did not receive a sufficient degree of scrutiny to ensure that the syllabus met Berkeley's academic standards," according to the Chronicle.
Dirks spokesman claimed that Hadweh "did not comply with policies and procedures that govern the normal academic review." He explained that Hadweh's syllabus had not been seen or approved by the dean of the College of Letters and Sciences.
Hadweh gave a statement to Academe Blog, saying:
"I complied with all policies and procedures required for creating the course. The course was vetted and fully supported by the faculty advisor, the department chair, and the Academic Senate's Committee on Courses of Instruction (COCI).The Dean of Berkeley's College of Letters and Science, Carla Hesse, first contacted Hadweh to inform him that the course had been suspended on September 14, according to Academe Blog.
The university suspended the course without consulting me, the faculty sponsor, the chair of the department, or the Academic Senate's COCI, which is responsible for approving all UC Berkeley Courses. The university did not contact us to discuss concerns prior to suspending our course."
Statements from the school placed the blame for the suspension squarely on Hadweh's shoulders.
Dan Mogulof, executive director for communications and public affairs at Berkeley, told InsideHigherEd, "Although the dean is not required to approve the course, students must still send her a copy of the proposal," and said that Hesse was surprised to learn about the class, as she had never received a syllabus.
However, when Academe Blog realized that the website for the DeCal procedure does not require the Dean of Letters & Science to receive a copy of the syllabus, Mogulof changed his story.
He wrote, "The existing policy of the Academic Senate's Committee on Courses and Instruction explicitly states that the relevant department chair or the Dean must approve new courses, and that 'a copy of the approved proposal form" must also be provided to the Dean. Neither of these steps were completed in this instance."
On Tuesday, Hadweh was told by Hesse that he had to do three things to potentially have the class restored, Academe Blog reported. First he was to prove that the class was "fair and balanced." Second, he was banned from "seeking to politically mobilize students" through the course, and third, he was to defend why the class about Palestine would be considered Ethnic Studies and not Near East Studies or Global Studies.
Meanwhile, the following classes remain available: 'Marxism and Its Discontents, Addressing Inequality through Urban Debate' and 'Rethinking The Drug War: Historical Context, Framing, and Education'.
UPDATE: September 20, 2016
UC Berkeley reinstates Palestine class, rejecting pressure from pro-Israel groups
After an abrupt suspension last Tuesday, a college course about the decolonization of Palestine has earned a reprieve from the University of California on Monday. After reviewing the course material, the Berkeley campus officials decided the class promoted open discussion and didn't push a political agenda.
The one-credit course is called "Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis," and was designed by a U.C. Berkeley senior of Palestinian descent, Paul Hadweh. Online outcry and a flurry of petitions across the campus in support of the class helped save it from annihilation. Every student in the class, Ethnic Studies: 198, wrote an open letter the day after the cancellation protesting what they called an affront to academic freedom. In signing up for the class, they insisted they wanted only to learn about the world's most vexing and important conflict.
"People want to learn about it," Hadweh, 22, told Mondoweiss. "I'm happy that we'll finally be able to go back to the classroom."
Carla Hesse the dean of the college of letters and science received a letter protesting the suspension that hailed the diversity of the students who are interested in the class.
"We are a diverse group of students that includes Christians, Muslims, and Jews; we are white, Black, Latin, Asian, North American indigenous, Middle Eastern, and more; we study Peace and Conflict Studies, Ethnic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, Media Studies, Economics and Engineering. In short, we are a sample of some of the wide and varied backgrounds, beliefs, and interests that compose the campus community. One characteristic we all possess in common, however, is a genuine interest in the academic discussion surrounding Israel and Palestine," the students wrote.
Palestine Legal, a Palestinian advocacy group, said that free speech rights were under threat.
"The First Amendment protects the right to free expression from government interference. This right ensures that students and professors are not targeted for expressing disfavored viewpoints. Any attempt by university officials to circumscribe academic content because you disagree with the perspective is impermissible "viewpoint discrimination," in violation of the First Amendment," Palestine Legal wrote.
After reviewing the course more thoroughly, Hesse approved it. The group also helped represent Hadweh during the week-long ordeal.
"This is a victory for Paul who spent spent 8 months going through all the recommended and mandated procedures to facilitate a course," said Liz Jackson, a Palestine Legal staff attorney, in a statement by the group. "It's also a victory for the 26 students who enrolled and had their academic studies severely disrupted, and for students and scholars across the U.S. who are facing a coordinated attack on the right to speak and study freely about Palestine-Israel."
The campaign against the class was lead by the AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel advocacy group which has a long history of attempting to stifle discussion of the Israeli occupation on University of California campuses.
In 2014, the group accused San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi, who teaches about Palestine, of misusing funds by meeting with Palestinian scholars in Jordan and Palestine. They also accused her of terrorist sympathies, as they do with others. She said this kind of accusation was not only false, but also perilous.
"The accusation that I support terrorism is both false and extremely dangerous in a post-9/11 climate that criminalizes advocacy and casts suspicion on even the most tenuous of associations with groups and individuals described as terrorists," she wrote.
"AMCHA's racist attack is nothing but political bullying intended to stifle and criminalize any and all discussions of Palestine or Palestinians in order to shield Israel from accountability for its continued violations of Palestinian rights," professor Abdulhadi wrote in a letter published in Mondoweiss.
But AMCHA wasn't the only one interested in this 1 credit Berkeley class. According to the Electronic Intifada, an Israeli minister in charge of combating the boycotting protests, Gilad Erdan, condemned the course as a means of promoting the protest tactic.
Hadweh told Electronic Intifada that he "first learned that our course was under scrutiny from a report in the Israeli media that describes the involvement of an Israeli government minister in efforts to cancel the course."
And then, miraculously, two hours later, something miraculous happened, EI reported.
"I received an email from the university notifying us of the suspension," he said.
But AMCHA did the heavy lifting, writing an open letter to the school signed by by 42 other groups and several Berkeley professors in calling for the suspension over accusations of antisemitism, against school rules prohibiting classes that "advance of partisan interest" or "political indoctrination."
But Hadweh said he and others only sought information, not activism. When he arrived at Berkeley, a school that proclaims its history of free speech activism, there was only one sporadically offered class on Palestine.
"Unfortunately, it's a topic that departments and faculty are too scared to touch. And you can see why with what happened with this course," Hadweh explained. What that means is that there was "not a place in the institution to critically explore the question of Palestine."
Hadweh emphasized that the lens with which his student-led class, offered through the university's DeCal program, was only one of many ways to talk about the issue.
"The difference between colonialism and settler colonialism is that while colonialism seeks to exploit the native population, settler colonialism seeks to eliminate the native population," he said. The course would examine the pattern using the North America and Australia as examples.
The brief suspension of the class, which faculty blamed on bureaucratic misunderstanding, came after AMCHA (which means "your people" in Hebrew, although AMECH has a ring to it too) reviewed the course and declared it to be pushing the "decolonization" of Israel and the elimination of Israel, which the course falsely defames as a colonial state.
"A key goal of the class is to encourage students to accept unquestioningly the false and defamatory idea that Israel is an illegitimate settler colonial state. Furthermore, by the end of the course students are required to have 'researched, formulated, and presented decolonial alternatives to the current situation,' which, in the context of the other course objectives, means that a significant part of the course will be devoted to thinking about ways to "decolonize" — that is, eliminate — Israel," reads the money quote in AMCHA's press release on September 13.
In AMCHA's view, the study of Israel as a settler colonial state means plotting Israel's destruction. Learning about the colonization of Palestine is a gateway to full on addiction to antisemitism, they warned the Berkeley faculty that the class would encourage students to seek the destruction of the nuclear-armed juggernaut, and not just its deconstruction as a text by curious Berkeley students.
AMCHA also scours academia for signs of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), and has a website that devotes itself to spotting and silencing it. The BDS movement aims to protest human rights violations by Israel through economic means, in much the same way as activists challenged Apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s.
Hadweh's class succeeded against long odds, and he hopes it will have an effect on future decisions in academia.
"I hope it means that university administrations will think twice before buckling to outside pressure and interest and instead double down on their commitment to academic freedom and open and critical inquiry," he said.
Formal education has been industrialized, turned into a money making machine that basically teaches you nothing, other than obedience and submission to the system and a Big Fine every time you make the slightest mistake. Swell , isn't it ?