Middle East studies in the News

Political Suicide

by Martin Peretz
The Spine (TNR Online)
November 6, 2006

http://www.tnr.com/blog/show_comments.mhtml?b=spine&pid=54613

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2906

I've known Amy Gutmann for forty years, ever since she was an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe and majoring in an honors interdisciplinary program in the social sciences, which, as it happens, I directed. She was a summa graduate--which means she's very smart. But she is now the president of a great university--the University of Pennsylvania--and this job at almost any place seems to carry with it a grave occupational hazard: that of becoming stupid.

So poor Amy, all dressed up at a Halloween party at the U of P, in her own house, no less, hung around and was photographed, beaming, with a graduate engineering student dressed as a suicide bomber. In other photographs, the would-be martyr is seen committing acts, this time fake acts, that shahids commit for real all around the world.

Is Amy, who teaches moral and political philosophy, so frightened that she was afraid to throw the student--Muslim, as it happens--out of her house?

Here from The Jerusalem Post is an article by Michael Freund telling the ugly story.

Note: Articles listed under "Middle East studies in the News" provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique.

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