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FedEx follies
University officials were stunned to receive a letter on January 30 from Assistant Secretary of Education Sally Stroup denying all 30 Cal applications for Fulbright-Hayes scholarships this year. The applications were turned in a day late, she ruled, and exceptions could not be made. The reason they were late--FedEx missed a scheduled pickup--wasn’t considered sufficiently compelling, nor was the fact that paper applications were necessitated by the department’s buggy online application process, nor was the fact that, technically, the department’s criteria were met (the package was legally backdated).
A solution was later brokered by Fulbright committee chair Steve Uhlfelder. Berkeley and FedEx would split the cost of the scholarships (over a half million dollars) and the State Department would judge the Berkeley applications separately. But the lingering question remains: Why?
Jason Seabright, one of the 30 applicants, suspects politics. “The Bush administration has gone out of its way to punish Democratic California,” he says, pointing to their failure to help during the energy crisis as just one example of attacks on the state’s public institutions. Buttressing the theory is the fact that Stroup is a former Republican staff member and a lobbyist for the privately held University of Phoenix. (In contrast to her strict Berkeley ruling, Stroup has pushed to relax academic standards for federal student grants to Phoenix, which drew a $6 million fine in 2000 for violating them.)
Fellow applicant Carl Friere believes it was simple bureaucracy. Support for this view comes from Uhlfelder, who worked with Education officials to find a solution and believes they were mainly worried about lawsuits from students who met the deadline. Further, he said, political explanations don’t wash: like Stroup, he’s a Bush appointee, too.
Whatever the reason, for Berkeley officials, the result is the same: next year, they won’t give the bureaucrats any excuses.
--Kerry Tremain
Bear hugs: In February, senior Natalie Griffith and the Cal women’s swimming team came from behind to score an emotional victory against Stanford--its first since 1978--en route to an undefeated season in the Pac-10. The Bears, led by senior all-world swimmer Natalie Coughlin, sent 15 athletes to the NCAA championships in late March, finishing in sixth place.
Critical thinking under attack
In a conference on “Academic Freedom After September 11, 2001,” the first held on the topic at a university campus, a group of scholars analyzed the impact of national security concerns--and national politics--on academic freedom. The consensus was that the freedom to engage in critical thinking itself is under attack on the nation’s campuses.
Organized by Berkeley history professor Beshara Doumani, and sponsored by the campus Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the conference was held at International House on February 27. It first examined the history and meaning of academic freedom and then the portent of current policies, including a House of Representatives resolution, passed unanimously last year, to monitor the scholars and scholarship of Middle Eastern studies itself.
Doumani voiced a concern echoed by the participants when he said that universities today are at a crossroads, seen as either a bastion of evil or a stronghold of freedom. He said that, along with a foreign axis of evil, the political right imagines and attacks a “domestic axis of evil”--composed of liberal government, liberal media, and liberal universities.
Philippa Strum, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, pointed out that policies protecting academic freedom are by no means a natural or inevitable part of scholarly life; in fact, they were hammered out in the early years of the two world wars--in 1915 and in 1940--by the Association of American University Professors. That the United States is now at war against terrorism, she suggested, has prompted politicians to constrain that freedom and should provoke academics to stand up in its defense.
Stanford University professor Joel Beinin, a prolific Middle East scholar, spoke bluntly of “a new McCarthyism” in detailing how the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and many individual scholars in the field have been subjected to “a barrage of intemperate criticism from neo-conservative pundits and foreign policy intellectuals.” He said that “neo-conservatives have exploited the understandable post-September 11 fears of the American people by attempting to restrict what may be thought and said about the Middle East, especially on university campuses.”
In response to charges from the right that MESA has been overtaken by critics of U.S. foreign policy, Beinin said that “opinions which could barely be articulated a generation ago now circulate relatively freely on campuses. This is the real problem of the neo-conservative McCarthyites. Their immediate motivation for attacking Middle East studies is the fact that scholarly consensus on the Arab-Israeli conflict is now too critical of Israel for their taste.”
Berkeley graduate student Snehal Shingavi spoke against what he called “a way of thinking that labels all criticisms of U.S. foreign policy as anti-American.” Describing himself as “the poster boy for anti-Americanism on the American campus”--it was Shingavi who raised a national ruckus two years ago when the course description of his class on “The politics and poetics of Palestinian resistance” included the suggestion that “conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections”--Shingavi said that the next ten years will be both “exciting and terrifying” for intellectual freedom and civil liberties, on and off campuses. He urged academic intellectuals to defend the critical thinking done at universities and to bring their scholarship to the American public in ways that are meaningful and helpful to the nation at large.
--Russell Schoch
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Fonda memories: Cal photojournalism teaching fellow Ken Light (right) has long preached against digitally altering news photographs. So when rightwing websites circulated a Jane Fonda-enhanced forgery of his 1971 photo of John Kerry, Light shot back, calling it “photo fakery at its worst.” Still, he admits, it wasn’t all bad news. The forgery drew wide media attention to the issue and to Light, whose photo agent is busy tracking down all those who used the image--and billing them.
 | Andrew Moisey, graduate student in rhetoric, was the recipient of this year’s Dorothea Lange Fellowship for his documentary photographs of fraternity life. |
Professor James Sethian was awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize in applied mathematics. It is only the eighth time the award has been given since 1970. |  |
 | Judge Alfred Delucchi ’54 is presiding over the highly publicized trial of Scott Peterson. |
The San Diego Museum of Man has named Mari Lyn Salvador ’71, Ph.D. ’76, as executive director. Her predecessor, Douglas Sharon, now heads Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. |  |
 | Arup K. Chakraborty, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and A. Richard Newton (left), dean of the College of Engineering, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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April 2004
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