Barbara Sullivan

Review of UC Berkeley

THIS SCHOOL ALLOWS PROFESSOR'S TO VIOLATE THE CONS...

THIS SCHOOL ALLOWS PROFESSOR'S TO VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION! "SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE" LOOK THIS PROFESSOR UP!

Professor Hatem Bazian of the University of California at Berkeley has given his 100 students an unusual assignment. They must create a Twitter account and denounce Islamaphobia for his Asian American Studies 132AC: Islamaphobia, class. Tarek Fatah, a columnist for the Toronto Sun.says he received an email from a student in Bazian s class. The student wrote:

I ve been told by one of my professors I will be required, as part of my grade, to start a Twitter account and tweet weekly on Islamophobia. I can t help but feel this is unethical. This is his agenda not mine.

Bazian is co-founder of Zaytuna College, the first Muslim college in the United States.

The student claims Bazian is using his class for unpaid labor to further his goals:

There are 100 students in the class, all of us forced to create individual Twitter accounts. I m not wholly clear on what our final project is yet (I find it very interesting that he excludes both the Twitter account requirement AND the final project from his official syllabus), but we have to meet with a group in San Francisco, and our class will be surveying people of color on the impact of some ads put out by [anti-Sharia blogger] Pamela Gellar. Now I m no Pamela Gellar fan, I think she s nuts, but I feel between the Twitter stuff and the final project he s basically using us as unpaid labor to work on his agenda.

A representative from Berkeley has refused to comment on this issue. Bazian did offer a reply:

My course is designated as an American culture community engagement scholarship class Students are asked to send at least one posting per week on something related to the course content, be it from the actual reading or anything they read or came across. The class is titled De-Constructing Islamophobia and the History of Otherness [Students] are asked to post based on examining Islamophobia through looking at earlier historical examples.

Sponsors of the course includes:

Zaytuna College, Bay Area Shura Council (a non-profit organization of mosques), the Council on Islamic Relations, Mosaic TV, Arab Talk Radio and Illume Magazine