Maggie's Farm

The New York Daily News editorial today is titled "Academically incorrect: Brooklyn College book choice makes a mockery of education."

This comes in reaction to my blog posts (here, here and here), which the New York Post, New York Times, and many other blogs have also featured.

Today's New York Daily News editorial:

The faculty at Brooklyn College chooses one book each year that will be required reading for nearly all incoming freshmen. This year's choice, "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," has generated controversy.

Up front and for the record: President Karen Gould and her professorial force are free to assign whatever works they choose - even if academic excellence takes second place to offering students an unchallenging, feel-good bonding experience.

But that freedom comes with the responsibility to provide inquiring minds with the straight goods about the literature they've been ordered to read. Here, by all the evidence, Brooklyn College has failed.

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" was written by Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at the school. The book is a collection of seven profiles of Arab-American youths living in Brooklyn after 9/11. Each is a victim in one way or another.

Akram works in his family's East Flatbush bodega, which one resident boycotts because "they support Bin Laden"; Rasha and her family are roused from bed and held in detention as suspected terrorists, then released; Sami, a Marine, deploys to Iraq, where fellow soldiers call him a terrorist because of his background.

College officials say the book is in line with previous selections, such as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." In their telling, the reading is meant to mirror the diversity of the student body, particularly its immigrant experience.

But to treat Bayoumi's book as nothing more than an anthology of coming-to-America stories is supremely false advertising. This is not a memoir, but a polemic.

Bayoumi chose the profiles to support his argument that social attitudes have combined with the effects of U.S. foreign policy to deprive Muslims and Arab-Americans of civil rights, with the effects felt most severely by the young.

Had he chosen to tell stories of seven other Arab-Americans, people who immigrated from, say, Lebanon or Syria and followed well-trodden paths to success, he could have just as easily titled his book, "How Does it Feel to Live in the Land of Opportunity?"

Bayoumi sees America more darkly. In the book's afterword, he writes that "Muslims and Arabs are scrutinized for sedition at every turn," that Arab-American life includes "substantial government surveillance and repression," that "today, everyone - immigrant and citizen, activist and spectator - has become vulnerable," that "spies and government informants have penetrated Muslim-American communities" and that "torture has been normalized into American culture."

In sum, he asserts, "What we are currently living through is the slow creep of imperial high-handedness into the rest of American society, performed in the name of national security and facilitated through the growth of racist policies."

Bayoumi can hold these views if he likes. And Brooklyn College students would be well-served by rigorous debate over their merits. But that's not about to take place. College officials say that the contents of Bayoumi's afterward are not part of the conversation.