Open Letter to the University of California, Irvine

Associate Professor of English, McGill University

Professor of History, Arizona State University

Assistant professor of South Asian history, Georgetown University

Department of Anthropology, Georgetown University

Independent Scholar

It is interesting to see that these petitioners are talking about academic freedom and campaigning to restrict some others from entering academia. What are they afraid of? If the university is willing to take a list of proposed candidates against the law, let these petitioners create a petition against the university. I see a clear biased agenda here.

Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Minnesota

Open Letter to the University of California, Irvine is absolutely wrong. It is making comments which are wrong and baseless.

I am shocked that the university where I received my PhD kowtows to donors with an ultra-nationalist, racist, xenophobic, and elitist agenda.

It is discrimatroy

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Research Fellow in Islamic Studies, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University

from Salaita's firing to Scott Walker's coporatizing UW system to this at UC-Irvine... scary to think what is happening to the "ideals of academic freedom"

If the allegations of this petition are accurate, these initiatives echo efforts made by a variety of groups in the past to control the production of knowledge and shape that knowledge production in ways that advance the interests of particular agenda-driven groups rather than contribute to the empirical study of South Asia generally. This has enormous negative externalities not only for the study of South Asia but also in the development of students’ understanding of the region and in directing the pipelines of future scholars of South Asia. Indeed, this may be the ultimate intent of such endeavors. I will call your attention to the fiascos that ensued in the Sikh Studies Chairs UBC (Dr. Harjot Oberoi) and at the U of Michigan (Peshaura Singh) during the 1990s. The funders of those chairs had a particular orientation in Sikh politics and harassed those two scholars when their scholarship undermined their political projects which generally oriented along the lines of the Sikh separatist politics in India. These proposed efforts seek to escape such outcomes by evaluating only scholars that are acceptable to the funders prior to being hired. Needless to say, this has enormous legal ramifications for a publicly funded university. More generally, such a way of funding scholarship—irrespective of the agenda of the funders-- undermine academic freedom and scholarly integrity and do not encourage empirical approaches to understanding a region that plays increasingly important part of global politics. Worrisome, they seek to reproduce in the United States a non-inclusive identity political discourse that is rooted in South Asia. Universities in the United States should not become nurseries for agenda-driven research irrespective of the agenda espoused.

Totally support the petition.

Stop supporting right wing politics and religio-cultural fascism in India.

Professor of Indology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

I agree with the petition.

M.Phil. student, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India.

Saffronisation of history is a very real threat in India, and apparently other parts of the world too. History should be based on facts and documentation, not on any group's biased agenda to rewrite history to suit themselves.