Islamophobia Amongst Academics Is Embarrassing But Not Endemic
By Vivekananda Nemana
The Huffington Post published an article yesterday by Abdulrahman El-Sayed, titled “Is Your Professor an Islamophobe?” El-Sayed, a doctoral student at Oxford, described a dangerous trend of academics abusing their positions to spread xenophobia against Muslims.
When that kind of inappropriate behavior happens, it’s repugnant, but it doesn’t happen enough to be a trend.
To make his point, El-Sayed cites “What’s Wrong With Muslims” by the London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and “Going Muslim” by NYU Stern’s Tunku Varadarajan — articles that are blatantly guilty of academic Islamophobia. El-Sayed argues that Kanazawa and Varadarajan constitute part of a “growing number of academics using [their] intellectual identity to promote intolerance and xenophobia against Islam and Muslims.” He warns that mixing the “crude ramblings of a Glenn Beck or a Rush Limbaugh” with an air of clear-eyed academic objectivity is particularly dangerous, since academic opinion has a legitimizing effect and could hold powerful sway over the public.
El-Sayed does make an excellent point here. Being an academic at an elite institution instantly makes your claims seem objective and carefully construed, even though Kanazawa and Varadarajan make outlandish claims that ostensibly have no basis in fact. That the exact opposite of what learning is about. I personally am a little ashamed that Varadajan is an NYU professor (I’m even more ashamed that he is Hindu, but that’s a completely different issue).
But as for the academic world, I doubt whether “ a growing number” of professors and intellectuals are actually using their platforms to spew bigotry. Academia is still, for the most part, extremely liberal. A Washington Post survey in 2005 found that 72 percent of college professors consider themselves liberal. Considering the long tenures of most academics, there is no reason that number should have changed significantly. Political correctness is probably even more prevalent than liberalism, especially at elite universities where whose faculty (if anyone’s) has the most clout on public opinion. Plus, public intellectual discourse is constantly under scrutiny. If that many more academics have been advocating xenophobia, we should have at least heard about some of it.
While it’s true that academic opinion has had a huge influence on mass opinion in the past, I am skeptical of the real danger posed by the rare occurrence of an intellectual bigot. Varadarajan was immediately slammed by his peers and shamed by the media, and far more people read his article after reading about the controversy than the other way around. Tea partiers and avid viewers of Glenn Bleck are unlikely to care about what some academic wonk has to say; people who do read their articles are unlikely to ignore the backlash against them. Intellectuals who disregard academic protocols have a place in neither the sphere of considerate public debate nor the realm of hysteria and Fox News.
After 9/11, Islamophobia has no doubt risen dramatically across the country. The panic during the 2008 election that Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim is evidence enough, not to mention the Muslim woman who was brutalized in Long Island in 2007. The website Islamophobia Watchlists 1437 documented cases of Islamophobia in the United States. In an age where our first black president broke barriers against a race, we are becoming increasingly discriminatory and intolerant of a religion.
Comparatively, it’s a mentality that thankfully hasn’t affected our academic institutions. I am confident that it will stay that way. This country’s colleges still value empiricism and rational thinking instead of emotional outbursts and pseudo-intellectualism. Bigotry by people such as Kanazawa and Varadarajan is pathetic, but they won’t be of any real consequence.
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