Campus Watch - Dossiers

Dossiers

Campus Watch encourages students to submit reports about college professors. In 2002, Campus Watch created a controversy when it compiled these reports into 'dossiers' critical of various professors at institutes of higher learning in the United States, in which it detailed their supposedly "anti-Israeli statements". In response to the posting of the dossiers on its website, many individuals sent harassing emails and phone calls to the profiled professors, and the website was widely condemned in the media for supposedly engaging in "McCarthyesque" intimidation. The Campus Watch project was derided as a "War on Academic Freedom"; in protest, more than 100 academics asked to be listed along with those accused by Campus Watch. The response of Judith Butler, a comparative literature professor at Berkeley, was circulated on the Internet:

I have recently learned that your organization is compiling dossiers on professors at U.S. academic institutions who oppose the Israeli occupation and its brutality, actively support Palestinian rights of self-determination as well as a more informed and intelligent view of Islam than is currently represented in the U.S. media. I would be enormously honored to be counted among those who actively hold these positions and would like to be included in the list of those who are struggling for justice.

Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University who was the subject of a critical dossier on the website, suggested that the Campus Watch campaign was an attempt to silence legitimate criticism, "by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges." Khalidi taped an anonymous phone call he received, subsequent to the Campus Watch dossier publication, that says: "Khalidi, Columbia alumni love Campus Watch because they keep an eye on thugs like you. We have our eye on you. You'd better watch out."

After two weeks, Campus Watch removed the dossiers from its website. It continues to collect information from students, though it no longer publishes such dossiers. According to Juan Cole, one of the professors who was subject to Campus Watch's dossiers, the website continued to spread false information about him even after the dossiers were removed: "The removal of the individual dossiers is merely a cosmetic change, since the same academics are still being spied on, only under the rubric of spying on their campuses instead."