Campus Watch encourages students to submit reports about college professors. In 2002, Campus Watch created a controversy when it compiled these reports into 'dossiers' critical of various professors at institutes of higher learning in the United States, in which it detailed their supposedly "anti-Israeli statements". In response to the posting of the dossiers on its website, many individuals sent harassing emails and phone calls to the profiled professors, and the website was widely condemned in the media for supposedly engaging in "McCarthyesque" intimidation. The Campus Watch project was derided as a "War on Academic Freedom"; in protest, more than 100 academics asked to be listed along with those accused by Campus Watch. The response of Judith Butler, a comparative literature professor at Berkeley, was circulated on the Internet: Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University who was the subject of a critical dossier on the website, suggested that the Campus Watch campaign was an attempt to silence legitimate criticism, "by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges." Khalidi taped an anonymous phone call he received, subsequent to the Campus Watch dossier publication, that says: "Khalidi, Columbia alumni love Campus Watch because they keep an eye on thugs like you. We have our eye on you. You'd better watch out." After two weeks, Campus Watch removed the dossiers from its website. It continues to collect information from students, though it no longer publishes such dossiers. According to Juan Cole, one of the professors who was subject to Campus Watch's dossiers, the website continued to spread false information about him even after the dossiers were removed: "The removal of the individual dossiers is merely a cosmetic change, since the same academics are still being spied on, only under the rubric of spying on their campuses instead."
Criticism
An article in The Nation suggests that Daniel Pipes is "an anti-Arab propagandist", and his Campus Watch project aims to "smear" academics critical of the Israeli occupation or of American foreign policy. Campus Watch's project was identified, in The Nation and elsewhere, as resembling a decades-old AIPAC project: Joel Beinin, who has often been criticized by Campus Watch, has accused Daniel Pipes of being "beholden to Israeli right wing politics." According to Beinin, "After failing in his own pursuit of an academic career, Pipes has evidently decided to take revenge on the scholarly community that rejected him", in the form of the Campus Watch website. Pipes strongly denied Beinin's charges, writing that he was "offered a tenure-track position and turned it down, preferring to write than teach". while simultaneously attacking Beinin "of credentialitis, the disease that places more emphasis on qualifications than achievements" and the fact that "Harvard's doctoral program in history turned him down but awarded me a Ph.D.." Beinin has also alleged that Campus Watch "makes comments" about the ethnic and cultural background of scholars. In their paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote that Pipes responded to part of the Mearsheimer and Walt allegations, writing Later he wrote that "Mearsheimer and Walt unconditionally concede they have no information about the alleged “lobby” giving me orders concerning Campus Watch, confirming the falsehood of their initial claim" and furthermore added
Response
According to Campus Watch, it "critiques Middle East studies in North America regardless of whether they address Israel." In response to what it refers to as "a campaign of vilification and distortion" by critics, Campus Watch states:
