Campus Watch
| Founded | 2002 by Daniel Pipes |
|---|---|
| Location | |
|
Key people
|
Winfield Myers, Director |
| Website | Campus-Watch.org |
Campus Watch is a web-based project of the Middle East Forum, a think tank with its headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to its website, Campus Watch "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them." Critics of Campus Watch say that it is a pro-Israel lobbyist organization involved in harassing, blacklisting, or intimidating scholars critical of Israel.
Campus Watch was launched in 2002 by Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes. It is headed by Winfield Myers.
Campus Watch encourages students to submit reports about college professors. In 2002, Campus Watch created a controversy when it compiled these reports into 'dossiers' critical of various professors at institutes of higher learning in the United States, in which it detailed their supposedly "anti-Israeli statements". In response to the posting of the dossiers on its website, many individuals sent harassing emails and phone calls to the profiled professors, and the website was widely condemned in the media for supposedly engaging in "McCarthyesque" intimidation. The Campus Watch project was derided as a "War on Academic Freedom"; in protest, more than 100 academics asked to be listed along with those accused by Campus Watch. The response of Judith Butler, a comparative literature professor at Berkeley, was circulated on the Internet:
Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University who was the subject of a critical dossier on the website, suggested that the Campus Watch campaign was an attempt to silence legitimate criticism, "by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges." Khalidi taped an anonymous phone call he received, subsequent to the Campus Watch dossier publication, that says: "Khalidi, Columbia alumni love Campus Watch because they keep an eye on thugs like you. We have our eye on you. You'd better watch out."
...
Wikipedia