Who should be punished?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
- Pablo Neruda
I hope Robinson's students are debating this as intensely as the readers here. If so, this seems a raging success as a learning exercise.
- ProfEd
What is college supposed to be about? Back in my day, younguns, many of us hoped it would be about discovering of an intellectual 'real world' beyond the borders of our (mainstream media mediated) conventional ideas. Even now, I'm sure for a few freshpeople that is part of what they hope their college academic experience will provide them.
But that's not how it generally works out. Most professors care almost exclusively about tenure and the academic mole hill, and besides, they fear where things might go if they did their duty to nurture or even fucking provoke a 'worldly' awareness (however unsettling) in their students. So they think and act 'by the book', keeping their ears to the mainstream world and listening for instructions on which thoughts win points there and which are over the line. Boring.
These profs, of course, have long been intimidated into silence or at best muddled concern over the actions of America's number one ally Israel, while happily railing on the evils of official U.S. enemies Iran, 'the Taliban', Sudan, and, earlier, Serbia, Saddam, and the Soviets.
Nonetheless, Israel's razing of Gaza last January compelled UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson to rashly provoke his 'sociology and globalization' students with an e-mailed photographic comparison of the Gaza and Warsaw ghettoes. Over the line.
Two of his 80 students complained, saying the Jewish professor was anti-Semitic. Because criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and because comparisons between barbed-wire-enclosed ghettoes - no one in or out enforced with deadly force - created by Nazi-era Germany and GWOT-era Israel are anti-Semitic.
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