Scottsdale Community College (SCC) failed to serve as scholars in an academic institution when the college buckled to local Muslim pressure surrounding three quiz questions.
Teaching a course on Islamic terrorism, Dr. Nicholas Damask, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject and has taught at Scottsdale Community College for 24 years, asked the following questions in a class quiz:
- Who do terrorists strive to emulate? (Answer: Mohammed)
- Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? (Answer: 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. (Answer: Justified within the context of jihad.)
A Muslim student raised offense with the professor over the questions and, after a couple of private emails back and forth, the student initiated a social media campaign against Damask.
Forty-eight hours later, the death threats got so bad that the professor and his wife, along with their eight-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents went into hiding.
Instead of upholding the right to academic freedom, Scottsdale Community College threw the professor under the bus.
In a online statement (see below), the college’s president, Christina Haines, not only apologized for the quiz questions, she said the questions would be removed from future tests and the student would receive full credit for the quiz:
“SCC deeply apologizes to the student and to anyone in the broader community who was offended by the material. SCC Administration has addressed with the instructor the offensive nature of the quiz questions and their contradiction to the college’s values. The instructor will be apologizing to the student shortly, and the student will receive credit for the three questions. The questions will be permanently removed from any future tests.”
As he made clear to the college from even before the statement was issued, Damask has no intention of apologizing. In his own statement, Damask said, “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.”
https://clarionproject.org/scottsdale-community-college-censors-islamic-terrorism-course-material/