Mona Baker

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Polly Curtis | The Guardian | 11 March 2004 Academics at Birmingham University have condemned moves by the university authorities to ban 300 of their personal websites. The university’s decision to stop hosting staff websites on university computers follows a series of controversies over links to allegedly anti-semitic content. As at many other universities,

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Anders Strindberg | The American Conservative | 2 February 2004 Congress threatens to cut off funding to collegiate Mideast Studies departments that refuse to toe the neocon line. Universities are no strangers to disagreement and debate. In fact, the process of argumentation has always been an important way for academics to sharpen theories and

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Michael Dobbs | Washington Post | 13 January 2004 When Rashid Khalidi took over the newly established Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia University last fall, the appointment was generally viewed as an academic coup for the school, which had succeeded in wooing away a prominent Middle East expert from the

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Laurie King-Irani | In These Times | 11 December 2003 Already-strapped institutions of higher learning are facing an ideologically driven effort to limit funding for the study of cultures outside the United States. For nearly four decades, American universities have benefited from the U.S. Department of Education programs funded under Title VI of the

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Tim Adams | The Observer | 30 November 2003 He’s ‘The Elvis Of Academia’ and ‘The Devil’s Accountant’. A relentless thorn in America’s side, Noam Chomsky has spent 50 years bringing his country’s elite to account. Here, he talks to Tim Adams about genocide and genitalia. On the railings outside my local train station

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Stanley Fish | The Chronicle of Higher Education | 26 November 2003 How will academe’s leaders respond to the assault under way on its autonomy and professional integrity? Stanley Fish asks. Two columns ago, I analyzed “The College Cost Crisis,” a report written (or at least signed) by U.S. Reps. John A. Boehner, an

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Michelle Goldberg | Salon | 6 November 2003 Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias. Now they’ve enlisted Congress in their crusade. On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Sarah Shields | commondreams.org | 16 November 2003 When I was in preschool, I heard fairy tales about all-powerful kings who arbitrarily threw people into dungeons. When I was in Hebrew school, I learned how Jews were rounded up by rulers during times of instability. When I was in High School, I studied the

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) VIJAY PRASHAD | Counterpunch | 13 November 2003 In mid-October, my email in-box began to receive forwards from Michael Bednar, a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Texas, Austin. The subject line suggested that it was an email joke: “Congress moves to regulate postcolonial studies.” Thanks to the vigilance

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Robert Fisk | CounterPunch/Independent | 4 November 2003 Is “Palestinian” now just a dirty word? Or is “Arab” the dirty word? Let’s start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote–among many other books–Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After