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Chronicle article: 14, 000 Academics and Writers Sign Statement Opposing Threatened U.S. Invasion of Iraq
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Shulman)
Wed Mar 12 08:35:43 2003
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 08:11:59 -0500
From: Peter Shulman <skip@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from:
skip@mit.edu
The following message was enclosed:
news from the home front.
--**peter
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This article is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/03/2003031202n.htm
- The text of the article is below -
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Wednesday, March 12, 2003
14,000 Academics and Writers Sign Statement Opposing
Threatened U.S. Invasion of Iraq
By ROBIN WILSON
Fourteen thousand intellectuals -- most of them academics --
have signed a statement that appeared as an advertisement in
The New York Times on Tuesday condemning a possible U.S. war
with Iraq.
The ad says: "On the eve of battle, 14,000 U.S. writers,
academics and other intellectuals say NO TO WAR." It calls
waging war at this time "morally unacceptable," and says: "No
compelling evidence has been offered of an imminent threat to
our security that would justify the use of military force."
Joshua Cohen, chairman of the political-science department at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coordinated the ad
campaign and collected the signatures via a Web site.
Mr. Cohen, who is co-editor of Boston Review, a political and
literary magazine, said that 90 to 95 percent of those who
signed the document are professors. They include Eric Chivian,
an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard
University who won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, Edward W. Said,
a university professor at Columbia University, and Elaine
Scarry, a professor of English at Harvard. Writers, medical
doctors, pastors, and peace activists also signed, including
the writers Nora Ephron and Susanna Kaysen and the activist
Gloria Steinem.
Although the advertisement does not list all 14,000 names,
they are available online at the magazine's Web site.
Mr. Cohen said professors had donated the $50,000 it cost to
place the ad. He decided to start an online petition last
month when a foreign academic e-mailed him about the possible
war and asked: "Where are the American intellectuals on this?"
Said Mr. Cohen: "I knew there were a lot of people opposed to
the war and doing stuff about it. But there wasn't a
sufficiently strong presence [among intellectuals] on the
issue."
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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