[Dialogue] Minnesota College Bans Nobel Laureate Tutu From Talk On Peace and Justice

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Thursday, October 4, 2007 by Inside
<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/04/tutu>  Higher Ed 

Minnesota College Bans Nobel Laureate Tutu From Talk On Peace and Justice

by Scott Jaschik

Last week's visit by Iran's president to Columbia University symbolized to
many the openness of American higher education to hearing controversial
ideas and individuals. An incident coming to light at the University of St.
Thomas, in Minnesota, illustrates that some speakers are denied campus
platforms. In this case, the would-be speaker isn't a Holocaust denier. Nor
does he run a government that routinely denies basic civil rights to
scholars, journalists or gay people.
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/1004_03.jpg> 

The speaker barred at St. Thomas won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the prize for his nonviolent opposition to
South Africa's apartheid regime, was deemed unworthy of appearing at St.
Thomas because of comments he made criticizing Israel - comments the
university says were "hurtful" to some Jewish people. Further, the
university demoted the director of the program that invited Tutu after she
wrote a letter to him and others complaining about the revocation of the
invitation. (She retains a tenured faculty job.)

While the incident happened several months ago, it has only just become
public, when it was reported by City Pages, the alt-weekly in
Minneapolis-St. Paul. The revoked invitation has some faculty members at the
university seething.

"There isn't any academic freedom here when this happens," said Marv
Davidov, an adjunct faculty member who has taught courses about nonviolence
for 15 years at the university. "This is cowardice."

Tutu was invited to the university through a program called PeaceJam
International, which organizes conferences for high school students on
issues related to peace. While the program is not officially a part of St.
Thomas, many faculty members - especially in the Justice and Peace Studies
Program - are involved in it, and major speakers sometimes appear on the
campus, reaching those at the university in addition to the high schoolers
in the program. Tutu, invited through the Justice and Peace Studies Program,
was to talk at St. Thomas about issues of peace and nonviolence and there
was no expectation that his talk would focus on the Middle East.

Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St.
Thomas, said that when administrators were informed of the invitation, they
did some research about Tutu, and found that some of his comments had been
controversial. Then, the university consulted with some Jewish leaders, and
concluded that Tutu had made remarks that had been "hurtful" to Jewish
leaders.

"We had heard some criticism of him in the past that he had said things some
people judged to be anti-Semitic. We talked to the Jewish Community
Relations Council. We know a number of other people in the Jewish community,
and they said that some of the things he said had been hurtful and there was
a feeling - and this isn't among all Jews - that he had said things that
were hurtful to them," Hennes said.

"We never made a judgment that he is anti-Semitic. We have not made that
judgment. We have only been told by members of the Jewish community that his
words have been hurtful," Hennes said. He stressed that the university
sought out the views of Jewish leaders, and that the revocation of the
invitation was a university decision, and not one that was sought by anyone
outside St. Thomas.

"We make decisions every day on a regular basis on whether to invite people
to campus," Hennes said. Asked if disqualifying people from speaking for
being "hurtful" might block many speakers, he said, "That's not the case at
all. We have speakers on a wide variety of issues and interests, including
sensitive issues within the Catholic church." (St. Thomas is a Roman
Catholic university.)

"I don't think this squelches academic freedom," he said. "We made one
decision about an individual."

The individual in question won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984
<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1984/press.html>  for
his work promoting equality in South Africa through nonviolent means. While
St. Thomas doesn't want him to speak, he has been honored by numerous
American colleges with honorary degrees.

The comments by Tutu that appear to have set off scrutiny of the invitation
came in a 2002 speech in Boston about Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
The Zionist Organization of America has criticized
<http://www.zoa.org/2002/04/tutu_compares_i.htm>  the speech and said that
in it, Tutu compared Israel to Hitler. But a transcript of the speech raises
questions about that interpretation. In the transcript, published by one of
the groups that sponsored the lecture, Tutu is harshly critical of Israel's
government and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and expresses
regret that some Jews in Israel and elsewhere do not identify with the
oppression of Palestinians. But Tutu also explicitly talks about Israel's
right to exist within secure borders.

The transcript <http://www.sabeel.org/pdfs/Occupation%20is%20Oppression.htm>
released by Sabeel, a Palestinian ecumenical group, does not show a direct
comparison between Israel and Hitler. The mention of Hitler in the speech
comes during a section in which Tutu urged the audience not to assume that
the status quo lasts forever, and in which he urged those listening to
challenge to "Jewish lobby" in the United States. "People are scared in this
country [U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful,
very powerful. Well, so what? This is God's world. For goodness sake, this
is God's world. We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was
very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin,
Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end, they
bit the dust."

Davidov, the adjunct at St. Thomas, said he knew that some people were
offended by such comments, but he rejected the idea that all Jews were
offended. He noted that he is Jewish, and agrees with Tutu's remarks and
frequently criticizes Israel himself.

Cris Toffolo, an associate professor of political science and until recently
director of the Justice and Peace Studies Program, questioned the idea that
anyone who makes hurtful comments should be barred from speaking. "There are
some things in the world that are just hard to talk about, but when you get
past the hurt, you can get to the real issues, and explore those in a way
that could move the world to a more just place," she said.

Toffolo said she believed in the guidelines
<http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/A/outside.htm>  on controversial speakers
distributed by the American Association of University Professors, an
approach that says that controversy should never justify keeping away a
speaker.

She said that even if some find Tutu's ideas offensive, that's no reason to
keep him from being heard. Exposing students to controversy, she said,
doesn't endorse any particular point of view. For example, her introductory
political theory course, she assigns students to read an excerpt from Mein
Kampf. Well aware that Hilter's manifesto may be hurtful to Jews and others
in the course, Toffolo said she has asked students how they feel about the
assignment, and she's been pleased that students find it valuable - and
understand why the reading is included.

"They understand that this was part of the debate at that time and we need
to know about it," Toffolo said. "It's only by confronting all of the
realities that we can come to a deeper understanding of any period," she
said.

Toffolo said that she was informed that she was losing the directorship of
the program she led, and received a negative evaluation, right after she
spoke out against rescinding the Tutu invitation. She said that
administrators were very clear with her about the relationship between their
decision on her leadership of the program, and the invitation. (Hennes, the
St. Thomas vice president, confirmed that Toffolo was removed as chair
shortly after she defended the Tutu invitation, but he declined to say why
she was removed, citing the confidentiality of personnel decisions.)

"It's outrageous and it infringes on my academic freedom," said Toffolo of
the university's decision to strip her of the program director's position.

While Toffolo's work does not focus on the Middle East, she said that she
saw what happened to her as part of a pattern in which professors
<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/05/cole>  who are critics of
Israel face difficulty
<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/05/middleeast>  with their
careers. "This case is interesting because there are so many faculty members
running afoul because of their views on Israeli policy in the occupied
territories or U.S. foreign policy in terms of Israel," she said. "We need
to be able to have serious discussions of these issues."

C 2007 Inside Higher Ed

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/04/4301/

 

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