By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 18th, 2013 
This is the second in a three part series “Principle and Practice.” See here for Part 1.
At the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home for just about my entire career, the relationship between principle and practice is counter-intuitive. Principle, in my judgment, has been, since the institution’s founding, at least as important as practice, and, ironically, probably of more practical significance. The New School’s history has been set by its principles, even as sometimes in practice the principles were not fully realized.
I am thinking about this at a turning point in our history: a relatively new university president, David Van Zandt, has just appointed, following faculty review and recommendation, a new dean, Will Milberg. It is a hopeful moment, rich with promise and possibility for our relatively small, financially strapped, unusual institution. How we now act has, potentially, significance well beyond our intellectual community. This is directly related to the founding principles of our place, their historical significance and continued salience.
Founded in 1919, as an academic protest, The New School has represented, and worked to enact, central ideals of the university in democratic society, doing a great deal on relatively little. The New School’s founders were critical of the way economic and political powers interfered with the intellectual and scholarly life of American universities. While they were responding proximately to the firing of two Columbia University faculty members for their disloyalty during WWI, they were, more generally, concerned that those in control of American universities, their trustees, who were (as written in the mission statement) “composed for the most part of men whose views of political, social, religious and moral questions are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen. Their tendency is therefore to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.”
Just a few years after the American Association of University Professors was founded to defend academic freedom and after the association wavered and didn’t . . .
Read more: Between Principle and Practice (Part 2): The New School for Social Research
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 28th, 2012 
This is the first part of a two-part post. Today I focus on Israel and point to comparisons. In part 2, I explore the comparisons. –Jeff
I am mimicking the title of my second book, On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America in the title of this post, as I am imagining writing a second volume, a case study focusing the theory in my book written thirty years ago to a particular cultural domain today. My thought experiment is motivated by a concern for my intellectual home, the university.
While the immediate stimulus for these reflections is the attack upon the Politics and Government Department at Ben Gurion University in Israel, first reported here on Tuesday, I think the crudeness of the attack is matched by more subtle, but also powerful, challenges to academic freedom and quality quite apparent in the United States, and elsewhere. I write about these concerns, thinking of my students and particularly of a Deliberately Considered contributor from Pakistan, Daniyal Khan.
The attack on the academic freedom of the politics and government of Ben Gurion University is straightforward political repression. There is an attempt on the part of the Israeli right to cleanse the Israeli academy of what it takes to be “anti-Zionism.” A NGO, sometimes labeled as Fascist, Im Tirtzu, has led the charge. Right-wing politicians have used institutional means to attempt a purge. There are only days left to forestall this dire outcome. (protest against these developments here)
An international review panel recommended reforms to broaden the intellectual profile of Ben Gurion University’s Department of Politics and Government (something I for one am not sure is a good idea) and the recommendations have been creatively misinterpreted by the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE), a government-appointed body charged with the supervision and financing of universities and colleges in Israel, to justify closing the department down. The independence of the university is under direct political assault.
This . . .
Read more: On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Academic Life in Israel, Pakistan and the U.S.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 25th, 2012 
The members of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University have agreed among themselves not to individually publish opinion pieces on the threat of closing of their department. For this reason, I have taken down the first version of this post. Instead I reproduce here the explanation of the situation of the department and the state of academic freedom in Israel given on the site Israel Academy Under Attack. For more information on the attack, go to the site, which includes suggestions for ways concerned readers can effectively respond to this assault on academic freedom. -Jeff
On September 4th 2012 the sub-committee for quality control of the Israeli Council of Higher Education recommended that the department of Politics and Government at BGU be prevented from registering new students for the 2013-14 academic year. This recommendation — which, if implemented, will lead to the closure of the department — will be voted on by the CHE in its next general meeting, due to take place on October 23rd. Below we provide an overview of the events that led to the sub-committee’s decision.
The saga began when the Israeli Council of Higher Education established an international evaluation committee to scrutinize political science departments in Israel.
From the very beginning, the process was mired by irregularities. First, Prof. Ian Lustick, a prominent American political scientist from U of Penn and an internationally recognized expert on Israeli society and politics, was removed from the evaluation committee for unknown reasons. In response, the original committee chair, Prof. Robert Shapiro of Columbia University, resigned and the political science department at Hebrew University stopped cooperating with the committee. The committee was subsequently recomposed with Prof. Thomas Risse from Frei University in Berlin taking the helm (Risse was aware that the other people resigned and still took it on), and included such people as Israeli Prof. Avraham Diskin who had previously written articles in support of the radical right wing group Im Tirzu.
This committee, whose members are praised as positivist and empiricist political scientists produced a report that was not . . .
Read more: Academic Freedom Attacked in Israel
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