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Brandeis Donors Exact Revenge For Carter Visit
Major donors to Brandeis University have informed the school they will no longer give it money in retaliation for its decision last month to host former President Jimmy Carter, a strong critic of Israel.
The donors have notified the school in writing of their decisions — and specified Carter as the reason, said Stuart Eizenstat, a former aide to Carter during his presidency and a current trustee of Brandeis, one of the nation’s premier Jewish institutions of higher learning.
They are “more than a handful,” he said. “So, this is a concern. There are evidently a fair number of donors who have indicated they will withhold contributions.”
Brandeis history professor Jonathan Sarna, who maintains close ties with the administration, told The Jewish Week, “These were not people who send $5 to the university. These were major donors, and major potential donors.
“I hope they’ll calm down and change their views,” Sarna said.
Sarna indicated he knew the identity of at least one of the benefactors but declined to disclose it. He said only that those now determined to stop contributing include “some enormously wealthy individuals.”
Eizenstat said his information came from discussions Tuesday with university administrators, who did not disclose to him who the donors in question were, or how much was involved.
Kevin Montgomery, a student member of the faculty-student committee that brought Carter to Brandeis, related that the school’s senior vice president for communications, Lorna Miles, told him in a meeting the week before Carter’s appearance that the school had, at that point, already lost $5 million in donations.
Asked to comment, Miles replied, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Miles said that university President Jehuda Reinharz was out of the country and unavailable for comment. The school’s fundraising director, Nancy Winship, was also unavailable, she said.
“I have not heard anything from donors,” said Miles. “I don’t know where Stuart’s information is coming from. I don’t think there is any there there, in your story.”
The apparent donor crisis comes on the heels of a series of Israel-related free speech controversies on the Waltham, Mass., campus, of which Carter’s January appearance is only the latest and most high-profile. Critics of Israel last year protested Reinharz’s removal of an art exhibit from the school library containing anti-Israeli paintings — denounced by some as crude propaganda — by youths from Palestinian refugee camps.
The university got flack from the other side when it awarded an honorary doctorate in June to renowned playwright and frequent Israel critic Tony Kushner, who once referred to Israel’s founding as “a mistake.”
The run-up to Carter’s appearance was also punctuated by acrimony when the former president declined an initial invitation to appear in a debate format with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Instead, Dershowitz appeared only after Carter left the hall.
Yet, the school has also won notice for a course it offers on the Middle East conflict co-taught by Shai Feldman, a prominent Israeli strategic analyst, and Palestinian Khalil Shikaki, a leading West Bank demographer. It also conducts an exchange program with Al Quds University, a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem. The Brandeis student body of about 5,000 is about 50 percent Jewish but also contains a significant population of Muslims.
Nevertheless, the free-speech controversies seemed to pit Brandeis’ commitment to maintaining its status as a top-tier, non-sectarian university —with all the expectations of untrammeled discourse this brings — against its determination to remain, in Reinharz’s words, a school under “continuous sponsorship by the Jewish community.”
More
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13674
They are “more than a handful,” he said. “So, this is a concern. There are evidently a fair number of donors who have indicated they will withhold contributions.”
Brandeis history professor Jonathan Sarna, who maintains close ties with the administration, told The Jewish Week, “These were not people who send $5 to the university. These were major donors, and major potential donors.
“I hope they’ll calm down and change their views,” Sarna said.
Sarna indicated he knew the identity of at least one of the benefactors but declined to disclose it. He said only that those now determined to stop contributing include “some enormously wealthy individuals.”
Eizenstat said his information came from discussions Tuesday with university administrators, who did not disclose to him who the donors in question were, or how much was involved.
Kevin Montgomery, a student member of the faculty-student committee that brought Carter to Brandeis, related that the school’s senior vice president for communications, Lorna Miles, told him in a meeting the week before Carter’s appearance that the school had, at that point, already lost $5 million in donations.
Asked to comment, Miles replied, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Miles said that university President Jehuda Reinharz was out of the country and unavailable for comment. The school’s fundraising director, Nancy Winship, was also unavailable, she said.
“I have not heard anything from donors,” said Miles. “I don’t know where Stuart’s information is coming from. I don’t think there is any there there, in your story.”
The apparent donor crisis comes on the heels of a series of Israel-related free speech controversies on the Waltham, Mass., campus, of which Carter’s January appearance is only the latest and most high-profile. Critics of Israel last year protested Reinharz’s removal of an art exhibit from the school library containing anti-Israeli paintings — denounced by some as crude propaganda — by youths from Palestinian refugee camps.
The university got flack from the other side when it awarded an honorary doctorate in June to renowned playwright and frequent Israel critic Tony Kushner, who once referred to Israel’s founding as “a mistake.”
The run-up to Carter’s appearance was also punctuated by acrimony when the former president declined an initial invitation to appear in a debate format with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Instead, Dershowitz appeared only after Carter left the hall.
Yet, the school has also won notice for a course it offers on the Middle East conflict co-taught by Shai Feldman, a prominent Israeli strategic analyst, and Palestinian Khalil Shikaki, a leading West Bank demographer. It also conducts an exchange program with Al Quds University, a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem. The Brandeis student body of about 5,000 is about 50 percent Jewish but also contains a significant population of Muslims.
Nevertheless, the free-speech controversies seemed to pit Brandeis’ commitment to maintaining its status as a top-tier, non-sectarian university —with all the expectations of untrammeled discourse this brings — against its determination to remain, in Reinharz’s words, a school under “continuous sponsorship by the Jewish community.”
More
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13674
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Friday, February 16, 2007
Brandeis Defunded by Rich LikudniksSuper-wealthy donors have retaliated against Brandeis University for inviting former president Jimmy Carter to speak on campus in connection with his book on Israeli Apartheid in the West Bank. They said they will withold further donations to the school.
The president of Brandeis, Jehuda Reinharz, once commented on Middle East Centers at major American universities, saying, "My problem is not the anti-Zionism or even that many of them are anti-American, but that they are third-rate." Why exactly should he judge their scholarship by whether or not they are Zionists? Does everyone have to be a Zionist? As for the Red-baiting and vague, general put-down of the works of other academics, it is too despicable for words. Reinharz notoriously thought well of the "scholarship" of Joan Peters, whose "From Time Immemorial" was dismissed by Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath as a forgery.
So I have to say it is delicious that Reinharz himself is now having the economic plug pulled on him by rich old bullies who think, by virtue of his invitation to Jimmy Carter, that he is anti-Zionist, anti-American and third rate.
Carter's book, by the way, is mostly just Christian Zionism. It ignores 1400 years of Muslim history in Palestine and Jerusalem, accepts Peters's false thesis of significant in-migration of Arabs in the interwar period, and only dares raise some timid protests about the execrable treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by Israeli occupiers and colonists.
If even Carter can't protest even this much without causing a whole university to be defunded, then there is something radically wrong with higher education in the United States. And what is wrong with it has nothing to do with the (quite high) standard of scholarship in Middle Eastern studies. It has to do with radical intolerance of any views that depart from a rightwing Zionist orthodoxy, and a willingness by upholders of that orthodoxy to deploy big money to punish anyone or any institution that departs from it.
By the way, I have several friends on the Brandeis faculty, and their academic scholarship is first-rate. I hope they can go on enlightening us. Scholarship, pace Reinharz, is not a zero sum game. We are all enriched by the work of good scholars everywhere.
posted by Juan @ 2/16/2007 06:11:00 AM