Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum, an American pro-Israel neoconservative think tank. It was founded by Daniel Pipes and the current director of Campus Watch is Winfield Myers. The organization is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. and was founded in 2002.^[1]

According to Campus Watch, the organization "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them." The organization further states "it fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds."^[2]

In reviewing the organization's first five years, Pipes stated:^[3]

Critiquing professors is more revolutionary than it may sound, for academics have long been spared public criticism ... . Who would judge them? Students suppress their views to protect their careers; peers are reluctant to criticize each other, lest they in turn suffer attacks; and laymen lack the competence to judge arcane scholarship. ... [W]e consider the work of these specialists too important to be left uncritiqued.

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at Hoover Institute and former Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno said:^[4]

"If professors, scholars, and public intellectuals choose to enter the civic arena and voice their beliefs, then they are all subject to scrutiny—praise, blame, rebuttal, agreement, even parody—for what they say and write in public fora. In the case of controversies about the Middle East, where tempers run high and there is easy promulgation of false knowledge, Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch sheds light on often volatile and intemperate proclamations-allowing both the scholarly community and the public at large to read what our professors and experts write and then to determine on their own whether it is accurate or mere nonsense."

Opponents of Campus Watch describe it as an attempt to stifle any criticism of Israel in American academia.^[5][6][7][8]

Rashid Khalidi, a Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a target of Campus Watch, wrote:

"This noxious campaign is intended to silence such perfectly legitimate criticism, by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges. They reveal the lengths that these people apparently feel impelled to go to in order to silence a true debate on campus."^[9]

Joel Beinin, then Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, now Director of the Middle East Studies Department at the American University in Cairo, said:

"Campus Watch [..] compiles dossiers on professors and universities that do not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon. Among other things, this may be Pipes' way of taking revenge on the scholarly community after failing in his own pursuit of an academic career in Middle East studies.[....] The efforts to stifle public debate about U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israel are being promoted by a network of neo-conservative true believers with strong links to the Israeli far right. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Bush administration's hands off approach to Ariel Sharon's suppression of the Palestinian uprising. And they are aggressive proponents of a preemptive U.S. strike against Iraq." [1]

In March 2006 political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote that Campus Watch was founded by "two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives" with the intention of "encourag[ing] students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel" and that it was a "transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars."^[10] Pipes states that this "account is inaccurate in several ways" and their latest version "still has lots of basics wrong".^[11]

• Jonathan Calt Harris, one of the editors of Campus Watch
• American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a pro-Israel policy group
• David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative think tank

• Official site
• Campus Watch at SourceWatch.