Campus Watch - Criticism

Criticism

An article in The Nation suggests that Daniel Pipes is "an anti-Arab propagandist", and his Campus Watch project aims to "smear" academics critical of the Israeli occupation or of American foreign policy. Campus Watch's project was identified, in The Nation and elsewhere, as resembling a decades-old AIPAC project:

In 1979 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) formed its Political Leadership Development Program, which "educates and trains young leaders in pro-Israel political advocacy," enlisting hundreds of college students to collect information on pro-Palestinian professors and student organizations. By 1983 the program had attracted more than 5,000 students on 350 campuses in all fifty states. The next year the findings were published as The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus, which surveyed 100 campuses and instructed students on how best to counter a "steady diet of anti-Israel vituperation." Around the same time, the Anti-Defamation League covertly distributed a twenty-one-page booklet containing "background information on pro-Arab sympathizers active on college campuses" who "use their anti-Zionism as merely a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism."

Joel Beinin, who has often been criticized by Campus Watch, has accused Daniel Pipes of being "beholden to Israeli right wing politics." According to Beinin, "After failing in his own pursuit of an academic career, Pipes has evidently decided to take revenge on the scholarly community that rejected him", in the form of the Campus Watch website. Pipes strongly denied Beinin's charges, writing that he was "offered a tenure-track position and turned it down, preferring to write than teach". while simultaneously attacking Beinin "of credentialitis, the disease that places more emphasis on qualifications than achievements" and the fact that "Harvard's doctoral program in history turned him down but awarded me a Ph.D.." Beinin has also alleged that Campus Watch "makes comments" about the ethnic and cultural background of scholars.

In their paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote that

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars prompted a harsh reaction, and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report "anti-Israel" activity.

Pipes responded to the Mearsheimer and Walt allegations, writing

This account is inaccurate in several ways (e.g. Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch), but I write specifically to state that no 'Lobby' told me to start Campus Watch. Neither the Middle East Forum nor myself has ever taken orders from some mythical 'Lobby', and specifically I decided to establish Campus Watch on my own, without direction from any outside source. I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to provide their information that connects this 'Lobby' to my decision to establish Campus Watch.

Later he wrote that "Mearsheimer and Walt unconditionally concede they have no information about the alleged “lobby” giving me orders concerning Campus Watch, confirming the falsehood of their initial claim" and furthermore added

Campus Watch is to Middle East studies as political analysis to politics, film criticism to movies, and consumer reports to manufacturing; we provide assessments for the public. Unlike politicians, actors, and business executives, who accept criticism with good grace, academics howl with umbrage at being judged.