ARIZONA—This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: back in May, a professor faced death threats for suggesting otherwise.
Professor Nicholas Damask worked with FIREFIRE to defend his academic freedom rights after his college tried to force him to apologize for quiz questions about Islamic terrorism.
Nicholas Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.
Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American University in Washington, DC, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has worked at the school.
Professor Damask’s troubles began during the past Spring semester, when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:
Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed.
Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]
Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of jihad.
Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.
Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was “offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.” Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed the course.”
Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages about the quiz, the school, and myself.”
At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”
After Damask refused to make any kind of apology to the student or anyone – during a conference call with school officials on May 1 — the officials went ahead and posted an apology to the student and the Islamic community. That post said that Damask would be required to apologize to the student for the quiz questions, and that the questions would be removed from future tests — because they were inaccurate and inappropriate.
[UPDATE]
Nine days after publicly vilifying the professor the college reversed gears and apologized to him for “a rush to judgment.”
The college issued a statement Sunday, May 10th which clears the professor of any wrongdoing, and instead points the finger at the college district’s lack of judgment and tolerance for its long-time professor.
“I apologize, personally, and on behalf of the Maricopa Community Colleges, for the uneven manner in which this was handled and for our lack of full consideration for our professor’s right of academic freedom,” Interim Chancellor Steven R. Gonzales said in a statement released on Sunday. “To avoid rushing to judgment a second time, I am announcing the immediate independent investigation of the facts related to his situation.”
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“Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them” (Psalm 119:165).