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Course Criticized
John E. Ullmann
To The Editor:
"Academic Freedom and the "Intifada Curriculum" in the May-June issue mainly shows that Berkeley labored and brought forth a rather tortuous mouse in the "revised" outline for "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance." It says that the course "takes as its conceptual starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination." That, of course, is also the "conceptual" basis for the bombing of civilians in Israel by the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The outline goes on to ask why there are so few Palestinian epics, plays, and comedies. If the oeuvre is so small, why does an English rather than, say, a history or political science department bother with this course? As for the poetry that does exist, is it in English or Arabic? Arabic has a rich poetic tradition, but that could be appreciated only by those who know it really well. The course promises "exposition and argumentation in common standard English." This sounds like political preaching with a bit of translated poetry on the side, rather than "develop[ing] the students' practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills, but with increasingly complex applications." As to the latter, are the issues then actually "complex," rather than given by the simplistic "starting point" above? Footnote 4 in the article voices the belief "that several students were provoked into signing up . . . precisely in virtue of their disagreement with the political views of the graduate student instructor." It is hard to avoid the conclusion that those came first and the English fig leaves came later.
John E. Ullmann
Management, Emeritus
Hofstra University
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