I picked this up from the Weekly Standard. We've covered Sami Al-Arian before (see my "money trail" piece, also news, video, revealing wiretaps, Jen's research, Parapundit's roundup) These 'learned men' seem to have a hold on reality that rivals Lyndon Larouche. The key text:
"To wit: The American Association of University Professors appears inclined to blacklist the University of South Florida (USF) -- by a formal, annual-convention vote of indefinite "censure" this coming Saturday -- as punishment for the steps that school has taken to terminate the employment of Prof. Sami Al-Arian. Whom we have met before, many times, in these pages. And whose decades-long "active extramural interest in Palestinian and Islamic developments," as AAUP investigators have blandly glossed the matter, has lately earned him solitary confinement at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Sumter County, Florida, pending trial on a detailed, massive, multi-count terrorism-conspiracy indictment."
"The AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, advising the group's full membership about the proper disposition of the Al-Arian case, allows as how the good professor's alleged crimes are a "manifestly very serious" business. But Committee A believes it a more serious business that the crimes in question "remain to be proven in a court of law," since "the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' ought to be observed in our institutions of higher learning no less than it is in our courts." Setting an example for us all, then, the Committee formally embraces a wholecloth, wait-and-see presumption that Al-Arian's "extramural interest" has always been entirely innocent of criminal character and that it consequently falls "well within the ambit of academic freedom"--a sanctum that USF has violated by firing the man."What is it about modern American university professors that whenever America is at war, they have to join the other side?
This is the sort of thing that will guarantee eventual attacks by Republican run state legislatures against academic tenure and hiring practices. After all, university professors discriminate against Republicans in hiring, why not make political orientation a "diversity goal" in professorial hiring and tenure decisions?
Update: Little Green Footballs seems to have beaten me to the punch.
I am the child of two professors, and I have never, in all my years, heard the American Association of University Professors mentioned at the dinner table.
I suspect that, like paying attention to school board elections, the politics of such organizations are run by the few who have the time and the inclination to be interested.
As a non-faculty employee of an american university for the past 17 years, I can attest that there is a component of the AAUP which has a socialist (even communist) mindset.
But I also personally have witnessed the AAUP being a stand-alone body against the abuses of power that can prevail in university administrations and state legislatures.
So I guess it's a case of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.