A Statement of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Regarding the Recent Events at the University of California at San Diego
PHILADELPHIA, March 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement of the board of directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East in support of Professor Shlomo Dubnov:
We are the members of the board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), a grass-roots community of more than 50,000 academics on 4,000 campuses all over the world, who have united to promote honest fact based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We have noted with concern the degradation of civil discourse on campus and the increasing harassment and intimidation of pro-Israel and Jewish students and faculty in Europe, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.
In response to that concern, the SPME Legal Taskforce recently produced a Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and the Freedom of Speech.
Recent events at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) are a case in point. On February 29, 2012, after having tabled it in the two prior years, the Associated Students of UCSD (ASUCSD, the student government) defeated a resolution calling on the University system to divest from US companies, specifically General Electric and Northrop Grumman. UCSD's Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) had proposed the resolution, alleging that those companies supply components of
