Ithaca College Dustup
It appears that Ithaca College is unwilling to tolerate the notion that there are Israeli extremists who do bad things to Palestinians in Hebron and that this is an obstacle to peace.
My daughter, Emily McNeill, who is an alumna of Ithaca College, wrote a piece for IC View, the alumni periodical, in which she described some of her experience in Hebron this summer and suggested that the failure of Israeli authorities to control settler violence will have negative impacts going forward.
The editor of IC View has issued a public apology and the President of Ithaca College has denounced the publication of the article.
Comments on the website are decidedly against Prexy.
My daughter, Emily McNeill, who is an alumna of Ithaca College, wrote a piece for IC View, the alumni periodical, in which she described some of her experience in Hebron this summer and suggested that the failure of Israeli authorities to control settler violence will have negative impacts going forward.
The editor of IC View has issued a public apology and the President of Ithaca College has denounced the publication of the article.
Comments on the website are decidedly against Prexy.
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I'm sorry your daughter had this experience, Johnwmcn and, therefore, that you had it indirectly.
I don't know much about Ithaca -- although one of my students recently asked me to write a 'rec for his college application to it. What I can tell you is that all small private schools (I presume it is relatively small?) are running scared about enrollment, and will crack down on and distance themselves from anything they fear may be controversial in terms of publicity -- lest any potential tuition payer take offense and decide to go elsewhere.
Please don't let the number crunchers get you down. And tell your daughter that the price of being heard is sometimes to be censured by little minds with other agendas.
February 12, 2009 2:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not to mention the prospect of losing successful alums' donations - that's what they're really worrying about.
February 12, 2009 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
You better turn your daughter on to the fact it's pretty easy for an expat to get in jail for nosy political activism. And a lot of those countries don't mind keeping you locked up for years. They simply don't tolerate it.
February 12, 2009 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Wow. Just wow.
This is not the first time Rochon has taken this position in the I-P occupation. In 2007, while he was the executive vice president of academic affairs at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, he demoted the chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program for informing Desmond TuTu that he was dis-inivited to the University on the grounds of anti-Semitism.
Yet, as the executive director of Educational Testing Service (ETS), a provider of private testing materials, he appeared in a USA Today article talking about workplace discrimination and Islam in employee seminars that he was giving.
"The more you know and understand, the less likely you are to engage in even unconscious discrimination," says Tom Rochon at ETS.
How weird is that?
February 12, 2009 12:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
One might be led to suspect that he is good at following orders.
February 12, 2009 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't you think it's a huge stretch to interpret the College President saying that he doesn't think the alumni magazine is the right place for this article to saying that "Ithaca College is unwilling to tolerate the notion that there are Israeli extremists who do bad things to Palestinians in Hebron and that this is an obstacle to peace."
Emily was given many venues to express her thoughts and opinions and experiences while she was at IC and took advantage of those. She'd still be welcome to share those experiences on campus in the classroom or in other outlets. I don't think the President saying it was inappropriate to handle such a broad and complicated subject in such a narrow way in this particular publication means he's got an anti-Palestinian agenda. I don't see anything in what he said to infer that he disagrees with what Emily was saying. That seems very unfair of you.
February 16, 2009 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
You may have a point about the stretch, and I might on reflection take that point back.
At the same time, one must ask why expressing condemnation of extremist Israeli settlers is off-limits. As one of the commenters pointed out on the website, does anyone seriously think that an article by an alum who talked about an experience in Israel under rockets from Gaza would have been escalated to this level?
Subsequent campus discussion has been interesting.
February 20, 2009 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink