The University of California faculty recently voted to amend its statement on academic freedom to bring it into accordance with the politically engaged (or doctrinaire, depending how you look at it) pedagogy of most of its teachers. Gone is the old wording about the professor's obligation to maintain neutrality in the classroom; in its place is new wording about how academic freedom protects instructors' and students' rights to advocate their political views in the classroom.

The amendment was made following the May 2002 uproar that surrounded the course descriptions of UC Berkeley English graduate student, Snehal Shingavi. In his blurb for a course entitled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," Shingavi advised conservative students against taking the course. Though Berkeley administrators had Shingavi, an activist who heads the Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, alter his course description so as not to appear overtly discriminatory, the story didn't end there. The changes to the UC academic freedom statement are frequently cited by newspapers as growing out of that controversy (here's an example and here's another). The implication--which the papers don't make explicit, but which they make nonetheless--is that what went wrong during the Shingavi debacle was not Shingavi's arrogantly partisan approach to teaching freshman composition, but the school's inability to point to an academic freedom statement that anticipated and justified his actions. It's always been clear that the issue for Berkeley admins wasn't that Shingavi was using freshman comp as a soapbox for his politics, but that he went a bit too far when he explicitly discouraged conservatives from taking his class. Had he let that discouragement remain implicit in his pro-Palestinian course description, there would have been no problem at all as far as they were concerned. Critics of the new policy have rightly voiced concern that the new policy gives a green light to professors who want to use their classrooms not to educate, but to indoctrinate.

Now UC faculty and administrators are facing the first test of the new policy on academic freedom. A graduate student instructor has used his Arabic language course to expound his views--which include the canard that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is not an anti-Semitic forgery that has been used to justify acts of hatred against Jews, but is, rather, a legitimate document written by Zionist Jews themselves. The instructor is a former Iraqi soldier who comes to Cal via Saudi Arabia. He is working on his doctorate in Islamic Studies. A Jewish student taking the course wrote a letter of complaint to Berkeley's Dean of Letters and Science -- and then forwarded it along to sundry bloggers. You can get the full picture at Little Green Footballs and FrontPage.

As enrollment in Arabic language classes soars at Berkeley and elsewhere, there may well be more of this sort of thing. Many of the folks who can teach this stuff are likely to have views that are mortally abhorrent to some of their students. And it will be interesting to see how the school deals with the trouble that is beginning to brew. Will Berkeley admins point to their new improved industrial-strength academic freedom policy, and defend the instructor's right to express his beliefs? Will they take the slightly more circumspect position that the instructor has a right to his beliefs but that it was out of place to bring them into the classroom? (In fairness to the instructor, it sounds like his views came out incidentally, while conversing with a student who had initiated a conversation with him about foreign policy.)

My guess is that there's no way in hell Berkeley admins will take a public stand on whether the Protocols are forged or real--it's too volatile, and they will thus treat the issue of the instructor's confusion of propaganda and fact as a question not of his competence, but of his right to his beliefs. The old academic freedom statement required professors to "stick to the logic of the facts." The new one expressly does away with that language. In doing so, it effectively allows instructors such as this one to elevate belief to truth, and to present propaganda as fact.

Some are calling for the instructor to be dismissed. But that won't happen. If people don't like what they see at Berkeley, they should vote with their wallets, their words, and their votes. They are wasting their time demanding this guy's dismissal.

UPDATE: The Daily Californian has more.