September 02, 2005, 7:41 a.m.
Zero Tolerance
Academics cannot call the Ground Zero shots.

By Candace de Russy

Americans are fast catching on: The International Freedom Center that is to be housed alongside the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero — that is, within the footprints of the World Trade Center — has fallen into the hands of people who are likely to desecrate the site. The decision by the Uniformed Firefighters Association to withdraw support from the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is but one example of the growing public awareness.

The first to sound the alarm about the IFC was Debra Burlingame, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Great Ground Zero Heist." Burlingame serves on the Foundation Board, and her brother piloted the plane that terrorists crashed into the Pentagon.

In response to her fears, and similar ones voiced by family members of 9/11 victims, Gov. George Pataki asked the center leadership to "guarantee" that its cultural and educational programming will neither disparage America nor offend the victims' families. The center has been given until September 23 to describe its plans for lectures, websites, displays, and debates.

Since primary responsibility for these programs has already been handed over to the higher-education establishment, it is doubtful that the IFC guarantee will be honored. Academics cannot even guarantee a fair treatment of contentious issues on their own campuses, so why suppose that they can protect the integrity of debate in other institutions?

Entrust Ground Zero to Whom!?

In an April press release, the IFC designated nine universities to provide initial programs, with the goal of making "the Center a . . . 'Public Square' on hallowed ground." "The character of a university," the IFC intoned, "allows for this form of 'sacred space' . . . in which sensitive, controversial and provocative subjects can be candidly explored, yet in a manner that does not generate political distraction." The center also quoted John Sexton, the president of New York University, who extolled today's campuses "modern sanctuaries [committed to] free, unbridled, and ideologically unconstrained discourse." (The New York Times similarly conflated the memorial with free speech, calling "attempt[s] to stifle discussion at the site of the 9/11 attacks . . . utterly at odds with the spirit that should be embodied in this sacred place.")

In a July 6 letter to reassure the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Tom Bernstein and Paula Grant Berry, who are chairmen of the IFC, further stated that the IFC's programs will accord with the spirit of the memorial, because universities have their "own time-tested mechanisms for ensuring the appropriateness of programs they offer."

Time for a reality check. As any informed and honest campus watcher knows — pace, President Sexton — campuses today are indeed "sanctuaries," but almost exclusively for scholars of radical-left persuasion. Under cover of "academic freedom," those of traditional or conservative bent are systematically excluded, and most "unconstrained discourse" is that of rank ideologues, including neo-Marxists, multiculturalists, "transnationalists" who have rejected an American national identity, militant feminists and secularists, and anti-American and anti-Israel activists.

Campus ideologues can fully be expected to assert their right to trumpet their partisan views at Ground Zero, a bully-pulpit extraordinaire if ever there were one. No doubt they are salivating at the prospect of molding the content and tone of IFC proceedings, and "[generating] political distraction," in a facility that will literally overshadow the Memorial.

Leaders of the Pack

How in practice would such professors likely affect IFC programming? What slant would they bring to "sensitive" matters, specifically those relating to America and 9/11? What now-familiar campus "discourse" would they visit upon grieving family members?

Picture visitors to Ground Zero moving from the Memorial to Center lecture halls. And then imagine the perorations of the following influential radical professors, who hale from the very universities to which the IFC has assigned programming. (More complete biographies of these professors can be found here

Historian Tony Judt of New York University, who has famously and venomously inveighed against Israel's very existence. He portrays the coutnry as a Goliath, "the . . . leading threat to world peace," and America as "the one place where Israeli propaganda has succeeded."

Jesse Lemisch, professor emeritus of history at the John Jay College/City University of New York, who deprecates the history of "great white men," holds that "being an activist is a necessary prerequisite for historians, and views history "as preparing the way for utopia."

There is rofessor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, Rashid Khalidi. who, after 9/11 criticized the media for what he called "hysteria about suicide bombers."

AbdouMaliq Simone, assistant director of the International Affairs Program at New School University, advocates "an alternative to a Western 'way of life' " and "[bringing] America to Islam." Although he rejects violent Islamism, he portrays this country as "hostile and dangerous to Islam," and concerning 9/11 he ambivalently speculated about how "the 'terrorists' . . . must have found America . . . stultifying, living as they often did in vacuous suburbs with strip malls, Chuck E. Cheese, and sports bars." (See "Traveling Islam" here.)

Richard Falk, who until his recent retirement was professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University. Falk stated that the basic cause of terrorist attacks against America is that "the mass of humanity . . . finds itself under the heels of American . . . power." After 9/11 he opposed the Patriot Act, asserted that the government uses terror warnings to instill fear in and control Americans, and cited "chauvinistic patriotism" and "an authoritarian approach to law enforcement" as evidence that the U.S. is moving toward fascism.

Glenda Gilmore, C. Vann Woodward chair in history at Yale University, who recently commented that American action in Iraq is "the first step in Bush's plan to transform our country into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition." When students expressed their opposition to this opinion, Gilmore threatened to litigate to prevent them from stating their views online.

Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, England, is a mainstay of Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq, a university-based organization that provides information about human suffering and reconstruction in Iraq with a decisively anti-U.S. tilt. He has written prolifically against U.S. military action in Iraq, in articles such as "36 Lies About the War" and "Behind the massacre". He is a signatory of an open letter titled "The Assassination of Iraqi Intellectuals" by the International Coalition of Academics Against Occupation.

Academics like the above typically choose to emphasize only one side of critical political issues, suppress facts that contradict their ideology, and view education as political advocacy. Frequently they hold forth on subjects about which they have no professional expertise, and all the more so since 9/11: Many became instant pundits on terrorism, foreign policy, and related topics. They reflexively invoke the real or invented failings of the West as justification for any attacks, and few in their ranks unequivocally denounce terrorism or the extremist Islamist ideology that spawned the current jihad, the basis for the 9/11 attacks.

The Poorest Guardians

These doctrinaire educators are the poorest candidates possible to fulfill the promise made by John Cahill, who was appointed by Governor Pataki to oversee development at Ground Zero, that the site will not be a staging ground for "political polemics" or "revisionist history." And it would also be out of character for them to celebrate the extraordinary valor of the police, fire fighters, and other public servants who lost their lives trying to save innocents at the Twin Towers.

It is also absurd to imagine them providing at Ground Zero what John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, describes as "a strong positive answer to the terrorists that they will not prevail." So alien and even derided are such ideas on campuses that it is difficult to imagine them fulfilling, with any profundity, Michael Bloomberg's hope that the memorial "will touch millions of hearts."

Let us not be lulled by the IFC's blandishments nor heed the siren song of those who, like the New York Times, soothingly advise "that a center so close to the memorial . . . will be sensitive to its location." New York's political leaders should instead direct the IFC to adopt New York Post editor Adam Brodsky's glorious and politically incorrect solution: Because the terrorists targeted freedom and America's way of life on 9/11, "Ground Zero," writes Brodsky, "should make a political statement — not that America is flawed, but rather that it's a rare force for good."

This nation deserves such appreciation. An institution dedicated to this mission near the Memorial would — without a doubt — touch millions of hearts.
— Candace de Russy writes on education and cultural issues. She is a trustee of the State University of New York and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. A shorter version of this piece appeared in the New York Post earlier this summer. .