I think it's pretty clear that UW-Madison's decision to support 9/11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett was ill-conceived.
In a July 20, 2006 letter to Barrett (UW-Madison instructor), Provost Patrick Farrell threatened to can Barrett if he didn't behave.
Farrell wrote:
I have accepted your assurance that you could control your enthusiasm for your personal viewpoints on the topic of 9/11 and present them in class in an objective and balanced time frame and context. Given your assurance and the rest of our review, I was willing to allow you to teach the course in the fall.
As we discussed on the telephone on July 11, your subsequent efforts to publicize your ideas suggest that publicity for your views is paramount. If that were to continue, I would doubt your assurance that you will separate your own views and interests, as well as your capacity to separate them from what is needed for a good educational experience for our students.
Further, I was quite clear in our conversation on July 11 about how you identify yourself and your connection with the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the context of supporting your ideas on 9/11. The debate challenges you have sent identify yourself as an instructor at UWMadison, suggesting that you speak for the university--precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context.
In summary, if you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence that your assurances with regard to the course can be believed.
What was Farrell thinking?
As soon as the controversy went national, how could he possibly think that nutjob Barrett wouldn't be identified with UW-Madison?
Even if Barrett didn't promote himself as a UW-Madison faculty member, surely others would cite the connection, BECAUSE HE IS A UW INSTRUCTOR.
Bad news for Farrell--
An Associated Press story highlights Barrett and (Horrors!) uses his position at UW-Madison to suggest the legitimacy of his viewpoints.
Justin Pope writes:
Kevin Barrett believes the U.S government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners.
These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists.
Oh, there's that UW association again. Farrell isn't going to like that.
Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely discredited ideas about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, persists and even thrives. Members trade their ideas on the Internet and in self-published papers and in books. About 500 of them attended a recent conference in Chicago.
The movement claims to be drawing fresh energy and credibility from a recently formed group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
The organization says publicity over Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. They are a tiny minority of the 1 million part- and full-time faculty nationwide, and some have no university affiliation. Most aren't experts in relevant fields. But some are well educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas.
Here's a theory about the so-called scholars--
AP writer Pope is saying that well educated individuals, professors at prestigious universities, believe that the government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.
It appears that he wants the reader to conclude that their credentials provide ample reason to consider the validity of their theories.
Instead, I think the reader should conclude that the fact that there are "scholars" buying into 9/11 conspiracy theories indicates that loons congregate at universities and are among the ranks of academia.
In other words, there are nuts teaching on campuses.
"Things are happening," said co-founder James Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who maintains, among other claims, that some of the hijackers are still alive. "We're going to continue to do this. Our role is to establish what really happened on 9/11."
What really happened, the national Sept. 11 Commission concluded after 1,200 interviews, was that hijackers crashed planes into the twin towers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports that found fires caused by the crashing planes were more than sufficient to collapse the buildings.
The scholars' group rejects those conclusions. Their Web site contends the government has been dishonest. It adds: the "World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions" and "the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda."
The standards and technology institute, and many mainstream scientists, won't debate conspiracy theorists, saying they don't want to lend them unwarranted credibility.
But some worry the academic background of the group could do that anyway.
...Faculty can express any opinion outside the classroom, said Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. However, "with academic freedom comes academic responsibility. And that requires them to teach the truth of their discipline, and the truth does not include conspiracy theories, or flat Earth theories, or Holocaust denial theories."
UW-Madison doesn't understand academic responsibility.
Members of the group don't consider themselves extremists. They simply believe the government's investigation was inadequate, and maintain that questioning widely held assumptions has been part of the job of scholars for centuries.
These extremists are so clueless that they have no self-awareness of their extremism.
"Tenure gives you a secure position where you can engage in controversial issues," Fetzer said. "That's what you should be doing."
Barrett (UW-Madison instructor) doesn't have tenure. He didn't need that protection to espouse his lunacy. He just found a bunch of saps at Madison to give him safe harbor.
...Wisconsin officials say they do not endorse the views of Barrett, an adjunct, but after investigating concluded he would handle the material responsibly in the classroom.
That didn't mollify many state legislators.
"The general public from Maine to Oregon knows why the trade towers went down," said state Rep. Stephen Nass, a Republican. "It's not a matter of unpopular ideas; it's a matter of quality education and giving students their money's worth in the classroom."
In a July 20 letter obtained by The Associated Press in an open records request, Wisconsin Provost Patrick Farrell warned Barrett to tone down his publicity seeking, and said he would reconsider allowing Barrett to teach if he continued to identify himself with the university in his political messages.
The article is clearly sympathetic with Barrett (UW-Madison instructor).
Nass and other state legislators are made out to be unreasonable for objecting to Barrett getting paid by the taxpayers and having a UW classroom as a forum.
And "Academic Freedom" Farrell is made out to be a fool.
He supported Barrett, before he turned against him, while he was still publicly supporting him.
Something I find interesting is how AP makes a big deal about getting Farrell's letter via an open records request.
What's the story behind that?
That request was probably made at the urging of Kevin Barrett (UW-Madison instructor). He probably leaked the information to AP that he had received a letter from Farrell that would prove to be embarrassing. Barrett (UW-Madison instructor) had to be the one that tipped them off to its existence.
I can't say for certain that's what happened. I'm just doing my part to encourage critical thinking.
________________________________
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is doing its part to ease the wacko theories of wackos like Kevin Barrett (UW-Madison instructor) into the mainstream.
Scott Williams writes:
Critics of the conspiracy theory have lashed out, trying to pressure the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire faculty member Kevin Barrett because of his involvement with Scholars for Truth and his plans to include conspiracy theories in a class he is teaching on Islam.
Scripps Howard News Service found that more than one-third of the people answering its survey had suspicions about the U.S. government's role in the terrorist attacks.
The telephone poll of 1,010 adults, conducted at the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University from July 6 to 24, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
"We're not, by any means, an isolated fringe group anymore," said Steinhofer, a leader of the Milwaukee Accordion Club.
Others who have enlisted in Scholars for Truth include a 73-year-old economist and former Republican, a Minnesota scientist-turned-political-activist and the son of a UW-Madison basketball coach.
Though none of them has faced threats to their employment as Barrett has, some have experienced alienation or backlash because of political beliefs most Americans find objectionable.
...Outside the "9-11 truth movement," such arguments are mocked by many who support the government's investigation showing that Islamic extremists flew hijacked airliners into the twin towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Scotty Hettenbach, a UW-Milwaukee student whose father is an assistant to UW-Madison basketball head coach Bo Ryan, has drawn similar reactions on the Milwaukee campus while circulating fliers that question the government's role in Sept. 11.
"It's a coping mechanism for people to say, 'Hey, you're just a kook,' " said Hettenbach, 20, who joined the group last year.
The controversial group's Web site lists more than 200 members from throughout the academic world, as well as other professional backgrounds and assorted political organizations.
Two hundred members -- wow.
What a massive movement!
It's absurd to suggest that to call these kooks what they are, "kooks," is a coping mechanism. How condescending!
So is denying the Holocaust just a coping mechanism, too?
If anyone is using a coping mechanism, it's the 9/11 conspiracy nuts.
They can't cope with the fact that George Bush is the president and their hate for him is so intense that they need to come up with theories to pin the blame for 9/11 on him.
I guess it makes them feel better. It helps them get through the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment