Liberty Watch 2

When you buy a certain type of car, suddenly you see them everywhere. When you are pregnant, suddenly you notice all the other pregnant women around. When you get a new model of things, you suddenly start noticing things that you didn't see before. Naomi Wolf's ten steps to dismantling a democracy is helping me organize different incidents in my head and fit them into a coherent model of what's going on. So I've started a new tag - Liberty Watch - to point out actions that fit into those ten steps. This one is more about non citizens but it relates to keeping track of people, restricting their movement, and preventing key individuals from presenting their views publicly. So it would seem to partially fit the following steps in Wolf's list:

4. Create a surveillance apparatus for its ordinary citizens.
5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens,
7. Target key individuals
8. Restrict the press

Below is a mass email I got from the president of the American Association of University Professors, probably the major institution that represents American university faculty, about foreign professors having trouble attending conferences or taking visiting professorships in the United States.



In spring 1983, just over two years into Ronald Reagan's first term as president, I was in the midst of a complex ballet with the U.S. State Department. My institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had invited the distinguished cultural studies and Marxist scholar Stuart Hall to teach a course and keynote a conference. He had just been told by the U.S. visa office in London that they had no record of his application?an application he had submitted three times. I scheduled a tentative interview with National Public Radio, then presented the State Department with a choice: issue the visa or listen to me discuss the situation on NPR. It issued the visa. Those, apparently, were the innocent Reagan-era days when the State Department could actually be embarrassed by bad publicity.

A quarter of a century later, in 2007, we are living in a very different world. Our State Department is no longer subject to embarrassment on this issue. The atmosphere today is reminiscent of the Cold War, when the U.S. government regularly barred from the country visitors whose views it rejected. But Congress repeatedly restricted this power, first limiting exclusion to those presenting a genuine national security risk in 1977, then explicitly applying standards for constitutionally protected speech to foreign visitors a decade later, finally shifting the focus for deportation and exclusion from beliefs to conduct in 1990.

As a result, for many years foreign scholars have given papers at conferences and taught at our colleges and universities. These interactions have advanced knowledge across a whole spectrum of fields and strengthened our ties with other nations.

But for six years foreign scholars have frequently been denied entrance to the United States. Often they have been turned back after their planes have landed. Most had already visited here without incident. Some had done so after the 9/11 attacks; a number are graduates of U.S. institutions. Their stated reasons for visiting have been both clear and legitimate.

Earlier this year, as AAUP president, I signed an extensive legal declaration outlining the AAUP's consistently strong stand against the exclusion of foreign scholars for ideological reasons. For about two years we have been involved in litigation seeking to compel the government to admit Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan to the country. His visa was revoked in 2004 as he prepared to take up a tenured appointment at the University of Notre Dame. Then he was denied a visa to address the AAUP annual meeting. The declaration I signed lists Michael Chertoff and Condoleezza Rice, respectively Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary of State, as defendants.

Usually no reasons are given for denying a visa. In Ramadan's case, as a result of our lawsuit, the government was compelled by a court to give an official explanation. It said Ramadan had provided "material support" to terrorists. The support? Donations that Ramadan had made to European Palestinian-relief organizations which later gave money to Hamas. The idea that Ramadan could have anticipated later donations defies reason. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union was once again pressing our case in federal court. On October 25, an assistant U.S. attorney suggested that potential donors write to organizations specifying that no donations go to support terrorism. Suffice it to say I am not convinced that would prove effective.

Another suit involves South African scholar Adam Habib, who in 2006 was intercepted at the airport and denied entry to the United States, where he was scheduled to meet with officers of the Social Science Research Council, Columbia University, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Bank. The State Department subsequently revoked the visas of his wife and their two young children?an extraordinary step for which no explanation was given. Contending that censorship at the border prevents U.S. citizens and residents from hearing speech that is protected by the First Amendment, the lawsuit challenges his exclusion and contends that his exclusion violates the First Amendment.

On many other occasions the AAUP has written letters on behalf of excluded scholars. Sometimes our efforts and those of other academic organizations have succeeded in having travel restrictions against particular scholars lifted, but the list of distinguished visitors prevented from entering the country continues to grow.

Obviously we must bar entry to those presenting genuine threats to national security. But the government should not act as if we fear ideas almost as much as we fear bombs. As the ACLU put it, it sometimes seems we are fighting not so much a war of ideas as a war against ideas.

We urge all of you to write to your representatives in Washington to reverse this practice and let foreign scholars visit the United States. (If you are not sure how to reach them, use the AAUP's lobbying tools.)

You may not agree with Tariq Ramadan or all of the other excluded scholars, but we hope you'll agree that the University of Notre Dame had a right to offer him a job, and the AAUP had a right to invite him to address our annual meeting. Academic freedom embodies principles behind which all of us can unite.

Cary Nelson
AAUP President