A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, has expressed regret for advising "conservative thinkers" not to take his English Department course on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance." Snehal Shingavi, an Indo-American co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, had made the stipulation in the catalogue entry for the course he is to teach in the Fall 2002 semester.
The original catalogue entry also required that participants accept the notion that "the brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed and maimed millions of Palestinian people."
Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended in April for mounting a five-hour siege on a campus building in an attempt to coerce the university into divesting itself of investments in corporations with holdings in Israel.
Jewish groups are concerned by anti-Jewish outbursts that have become a regular feature of Palestinian and Islamic demonstrations in Bay Area campuses. In recent months, two Orthodox Jewish students at Berkeley were beaten, and a cinder block was heaved through the front window of the campus Hillel center; at San Francisco State, counterdemonstrators at a pro-Israel rally regretted that "Hitler had not finished the job."
Shingavi, who has now apologized for the wording of his course summary, declined to speak directly to The Report.
University Chancellor Robert Berdahl denounced the course description as published. But the course, which has attracted 17 students and a lengthy waiting list, remains otherwise much as described in the syllabus. The university has promised oversight, to ensure that it abides by the University of California faculty code, which prohibits screening out students for reasons other than lack of preparedness.
Sheli Teitelbaum/L.A. Josh Richman / San Francisco