Dr. Mitchell Bard, American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise

Most colleges have no one who can teach the history of Israel. In fact, the ICC just did a study that you all received, which showed that 53% of the colleges, including some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, don't offer any courses on Israel. An incredible 77% of the schools we looked at offer either 0 classes or only 1 on Israel.

And the story gets worse, because a high percentage of the middle east courses are taught by professors who are hostile toward Israel. The prevalence of outspoken anti-Israel professors is the most insidious danger to Israel's standing on the campus. Students and advocates come and go, but faculty remain for years and shape the campus environment and the minds of students. I can tell you the person who taught my undergraduate course on the Arab- Israeli conflict at UC Santa Barbara 20-odd years ago was incredibly anti-Israel. The final straw for me was when she showed some videos at the end of the course that the ADL had just reported were anti-semitic. I was back to speak at UCSB two years ago and discovered to my chagrin that the same professor is still teaching! So that professor has had more than 20 years to pollute students' minds, which is far more dangerous than "Apartheid" walls, checkpoints, protests and other theatrics that students may engage in.

UCSB also has a beautiful new middle east studies center. All you need to know about that institution is that the inaugural speaker was Hanan Ashrawi. And this is just one of many such centers that are funded largely by the Arabs ­ and US Taxpayers ­ to promote their distorted views of Israel and sanitized versions of Islam. Another problem is that faculty critical of Israel also tend to be extremely vocal and active while pro-Israel faculty usually are reluctant to participate in campus debate. For a variety of reasons, including intimidation, lack of knowledge, political correctness, and concern for their image on the campus and in their fields, pro-Israel faculty are hesitant to engage in public or even private support for students, or to take on their colleagues.

Recently, we had a great example of the problem when two professors, one a dean at Harvard, published a paper from the Kennedy School of Government that attacked the Israeli lobby as the root of all evil in American foreign policy. It was one of the most poorly researched works of anti-Israel propaganda anyone has ever seen, but what is important to understand about that paper is that it reflects the kind of thinking that is taught in classrooms all over the country and you rarely hear about it because students are too scared to complain.

Here are a few examples of the problem we have with faculty: Before the United States invaded Iraq, 1,500 academics signed a petition warning of an impending crime of humanity; That Israel would expel large numbers of Palestinians during the fog of the Iraq war. In fact, the coauthor of that Harvard paper, a political scientist from Michigan, signed this petition. A professor at Columbia gave a lecture in which he argued that Zionism is a European colonial system based on racist principles with the goal of eradicating Palestine, and that Zionists are the new Nazis. Princeton hired a professor to teach "Society under occupation: Contemporary Palestinian politics, culture and identity." At American University, an anthropology professor used a comic book as a text that is in the vein of Der Sturmer. Another professor crossed out the word "Israel" on a student's exam and wrote in the margin, "Zionist entity." Another handed out maps of the mideast without Israel on them.

We have every right to challenge the scholarship of professors, but if we are perceived as trying to silence criticism we just get into free speech battles that we can't win. I believe that the best course is to take a positive approach that focuses on providing alternatives for educating students about Israel. The ICC published a study I wrote that you should have received called "Tenured or Tenuous" that lays out some of the ways that we can begin to change the intellectual atmosphere on campus.

Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes and others have said that the solution is not Israel Studies but better Middle East Studies. Ideally, that is true, but with the exception of a few places, such as Brandeis, it is virtually impossible to change the department's orientation because they are dominated by anti-Israel faculty who worship Edward Said. Admittedly, a second best solution is to establish centers of Israel Studies. There are a number of issues we can discuss about the merits of such centers. For example, they're expensive ­ $5 million and up ­ and they potentially ghettoize Israel Studies. Nevertheless, I believe that such centers strategically located at major institutions around the country can serve as hubs for the promotion of the field.

Another option is to endowed chairs. Again there are pros and cons. They are expensive to create and, if you get the wrong person, can make the situation worse. On the other hand, a good scholar can completely alter the campus environment and serve as a catalyst for promoting the field. My organization has been focusing on bringing visiting Israel scholars to campus. There are a number of advantages to this approach, including having a larger pool of scholars to draw on for a short term assignment. We also see these visiting scholars as an opportunity to plant seeds at universities and show them the value of having such a scholar in the hope that the community and the university will then take steps to make it permanent. This happened at both UCLA and American University where we placed our first two scholars. This year we will have 9 scholars and next year we hope to have as many as 20.

Even if we had unlimited funds to create chairs, we would have a different problem, namely a shortage of people to fill these chairs. In fact, there are at least three chairs available now that have not yet been filled. There just aren't that many scholars of israel out there who are worthy of these positions. To address the supply problem, Brandeis has created a summer institute to train faculty from other fields so they can offer courses about Israel. Ideally, similar programs could be established in several strategic locations to reach hundreds of high school and college teachers. And you'll notice that I emphasize strategic locations. We want all of these projects to have the maximum impact, so it makes a big difference where any of these programs are created.

The other way to address the supply problem is to encourage students to get graduate degrees in Israel-related fields. Right now there's little incentive to do so because there are so few jobs and the faculties of Middle East Studies departments would never hire them. My organization now has a competition that awards $15,000 scholarships to students who want to pursue these degrees the key for all of this is investing wisely. The poster child for how not to do this was the case of Berkeley......

The Jewish community adopted a similar approach to respond to the failure to teach about Jewish history and the Holocaust by successfully establishing dozens of departments of Jewish and Holocaust studies and supporting research and providing scholarships. It is time to do the same for scholarship about Israel. The Arabs long ago recognized that one key route to influence in the United States was through the universities. Where do the future politicians, journalists, and other policymakers come from? Where do they get their training in middle east affairs? The answer, of course, is Columbia, American University, Berkeley, and other institutions where the only scholarship available is hostile to Israel. We can't afford to let any more time elapse before investing in the future.