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Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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November
5, 2003
How I Ended Up on
the Professor Watch List at University of Texas
Illusions
of Neutrality
By ROBERT JENSEN
I was happy to learn last week that a conservative
student group at the University of Texas had published a "professor
watch list" of instructors who "push an ideological
viewpoint on their students through oftentimes subtle but sometimes
abrasive methods of indoctrination."
I have long held that one of the most
serious problems on our campus -- the largest in the country,
with more than 51,000 students -- is that the student body is
largely depoliticized. Given that lack of political engagement,
I'm grateful for anything that gets students talking about politics,
especially the role of politics in the university.
So, when my name ended up on the list
of the alleged indoctrinators (with no clear indication whether
I am subtle or abrasive), I wasn't upset, even though the group's
description of my "Critical Issues in Journalism" course
doesn't quite square with my experience in the classroom. While
I teach about the role of economics, race, and political ideology
in journalism, but there's a bit more to the semester than "a
crash course in socialism, white privilege, the 'truth' about
the Persian Gulf War and the role of America as the world's prominent
sponsor of terrorism." (The watch list is here.
My syllabus is here.)
But more important than arguing about
the accuracy of these course descriptions is challenging what
seems to be a key assumption of the project: Professors can,
and should, eliminate their own politics from the classroom.
For example, the list valorizes one professor who "so well
hides his own beliefs from the classroom that one is forced to
wonder if he has any political leaning at all."
These illusions of neutrality only confuse
students about the nature of inquiry into human society and behavior.
All such teaching has a political dimension, and we shouldn't
fear that. The question isn't whether professors should leave
their politics at the door -- they can't -- but whether professors
are responsible in the way they present their politics.
Every decision a professor makes -- choice
of topics, textbook selection, how material is presented -- has
a politics. If the professor's views are safely within the conventional
wisdom of the dominant sectors of society, it might appear the
class is apolitical. Only when professors challenge that conventional
wisdom do we hear talk about "politicized" classrooms.
The classroom always is politicized in
courses that deal with how we organize ourselves politically,
economically, and socially. But because there's a politics to
teaching doesn't mean teaching is nothing but politics; professors
shouldn't proselytize for their positions. Instead, when it's
appropriate -- and in the courses I teach, it often is -- professors
should highlight the inevitable political judgments that underlie
teaching. Students -- especially those who disagree with a professor's
views -- will come to see that the professor has opinions, which
is a good thing. Professors should be modeling how to present
and defend an argument with evidence and logic.
For example, in both my introductory
and law-and-ethics classes, I offer a critique of corporations
in capitalism. For most students, corporations and capitalism
have been naturalized, accepted as the only possible way to organize
an economy. But the modern corporation -- a fairly recent invention
-- should be examined critically, not taken as a naturally occurring
object. Given the phenomenal power of corporations, including
media corporations, in contemporary America, how could one teach
about journalism and law without a critical examination of not
only the occasional high-profile corporate scandals but the core
nature of the institution?
The conservative group claims its goal
is "a fair and balanced delivery of information" in
the classroom. If that really is their concern, I have a suggestion:
Check out the business school. I've heard reports that some faculty
there teach courses in marketing, management, finance, and accounting
that rarely, if ever, raise fundamental questions about capitalism.
Wouldn't that be shocking, if we were
to discover that there really are places on campus where the
classroom is so thoroughly politicized that the myriad alternatives
to how to produce and distribute goods and services are not explored?
Would it not be unfortunate if students were being indoctrinated
into corporate capitalism, whether by means subtle or abrasive?
Robert Jensen
is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and author of the forthcoming "Citizens of the Empire: The
Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (City Lights Books). He
can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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