Ron Radosh: Misshaping Minds at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College has assigned, as a book that all incoming transfer students must read, the extremely slanted work "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America."
A letter from the CUNY college's administration to faculty says the assignment is an "effort to provide a common experience for this population of students." Appalled that this is the "common experience" that administrators aim to foster, faculty members alerted The New York Jewish Week to the scandal.
The book's author is Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English who teaches postcolonial literature and theory and ethnic studies. His work includes editing a volume in tribute to Edward Said -- the late Columbia University professor who argued that Western prejudice against Eastern cultures had morphed into an ideology of racist supremacy, directed against Arabs and Muslims.
Let me be clear: It might be perfectly legitimate to assign "How Does It Feel" -- if, for example, the college also provided its students with a contrasting opinion, one challenging the view that Americans and New Yorkers in particular are completely Islamaphobic....
Read entire article at NY Post
A letter from the CUNY college's administration to faculty says the assignment is an "effort to provide a common experience for this population of students." Appalled that this is the "common experience" that administrators aim to foster, faculty members alerted The New York Jewish Week to the scandal.
The book's author is Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English who teaches postcolonial literature and theory and ethnic studies. His work includes editing a volume in tribute to Edward Said -- the late Columbia University professor who argued that Western prejudice against Eastern cultures had morphed into an ideology of racist supremacy, directed against Arabs and Muslims.
Let me be clear: It might be perfectly legitimate to assign "How Does It Feel" -- if, for example, the college also provided its students with a contrasting opinion, one challenging the view that Americans and New Yorkers in particular are completely Islamaphobic....