The U.S. war on terrorism was roundly decried Tuesday by the speakers at a North Carolina State University roundtable discussion on the war. The discussion was sponsored by the N.C. State Women’s Center, the Academic Study of Religion Club and Engineers Without Borders.
North Carolina university students are beginning to join the intellectual battle on campuses over the U.S. war on terrorism.
On October 5 the American Association of University Professors issued a statement denouncing criticism of professors opposing the war on terrorism by those who seek to “demonize” them.
The U.S. war on terrorism was roundly decried Tuesday by the speakers at a North Carolina State University roundtable discussion on the war. The discussion was sponsored by the N.C. State Women’s Center, the Academic Study of Religion Club and Engineers Without Borders.
A UNC-Wilmington student is threatening a lawsuit against a professor because she was offended by his response to her mass email, sent also to him, in which she claimed the war on terrorism was an “intensification of US imperialist repression already in progress.”
“Women Fight Fundamentalisms: Before and After September 11th” will be the topic of a two-day “teach-in” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. The teach-in will build upon the national consensus forged on Sept. 11 against the extremist, militant interpretation of Islam wielded by the terrorist al-Qu’eda organization, Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. That aberration of Islam is particularly vicious in its treatment of women. The topic of the teach-in is not, however, limited to the fight against that “fundamentalist” version of Islam by women. As the title clearly indicates, the topic is women fighting “fundamentalisms” (plural).
A month has past since the attacks on New York and Washington. Although most in the campus community are, like nearly all Americans, horrified by the attacks and wanting some semblance of justice brought to the perpetrators, a very vocal minority on university campuses is intermittently making new proclamations of U.S. culpability in terrorism. (A forum sponsored by the University Scholars Program at North Carolina State University featuring N.C. State professor of plant pathology Bob Bruck was the latest example of the latter.)
In response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, members of the “Progressive Faculty Network” at UNC-Chapel Hill have sponsored a series of “teach-ins” to give an alternative view of the attacks.
Someone used the Campus Calendar section of The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to place a fake announcement of a gay pride rally later in the week. The prank set into motion a ludicrous, only-at-Chapel-Hill chain of events.
There were plenty of comparisons made to Nazis and other totalitarian regimes at the University of North Carolina’s “teach-in” held in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but the focus of the comparisons wasn’t Osama bin Laden or terrorists in general, but the United States of America.
