Colleges strive to create welcoming, inclusive communities for students from every background. But a new effort at George Washington University has scores of critics and supporters abuzz with heated comments that continue to pour in on various blogs and news articles. At the request of the university’s Muslim Students’ Association, George Washington began offering a once-weekly, female-only swim hour in March. But it only recently turned into an online debate over issues of religious and sexual discrimination and — though not always explicitly — racism, spurred by an article in the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet . The Lerner Health and Wellness Center pool closes to men for one of the 20 hours it’s open each week, with a tarp blocking the view through the glass door and a female lifeguard on duty. The university declined to comment for this article beyond a two-sentence statement that said its officials are reviewing the closure while they establish a formal recreational swim policy. ON THE WEB: Islam case still simmers MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Muslim college opens doors A few highlights from Internet comments on The Washington Post ‘s and TBD’s recent coverage of the swim hour: “Should a minuscule minority force the overwhelming majority [to] abide by their rules or should it be the other way around?” “Western society should not accommodate to Islam on this point; it is Islam that should change.” And in rebuttal: “Come on, folks. An hour a week — what’s the big deal?” “It’s not an unreasonable request. ‘Women’ is like half the population.” Many comments not quoted here could easily be considered racially offensive. Despite the naysayers, Sisters’ Splash, as it’s called, is not the only special accommodation that a college has made for Muslim students. George Washington already has foot baths for pre-prayer rituals, and a handful of other institutions — including the University of Michigan-Dearborn and George Mason University — have them as well. In 2008, at the request of female Muslim students, Harvard University ran a one-semester pilot program that reserved six hours a week for female students only at one of its lesser-used gyms, though the program was discontinued after that semester. There’s also Gamma Gamma Chi Sorority Inc., an Islamic-based sorority that has five regional chapters, though not all are active. Shelley Mountjoy, a doctoral student at George Mason who briefly attended George Washington as an undergraduate, doesn’t much care what goes on at private colleges. But she takes issue with the foot baths at George Mason and with other religious accommodations at public universities. She is afraid that policies like the female-only swim hour will have a domino effect and spread to other colleges. “I don’t want my tuition dollars paying to accommodate somebody’s religion,” she said. “It’s not the entire campus’s religion. We don’t all have to subscribe to Islamic law.” Because George Washington is a private university, there are no constitutional issues with the swim hour, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Should a similar program start up at a public university, the presence of church-state issues would depend on the many facts of the situation, such as whether access is religion-specific, Khan said. Mountjoy, who serves on the boards of Atheist Alliance International and the national Secular Student Alliance, is also the founder and president of the Secular Student Alliance chapter at George Mason. She said that although some criticism of the swim hour and other services might stem from a bias against Muslim people, she takes issue with any type of religious accommodation. “I actually think that it’s in everybody’s best interest to keep religion out of our public schools,” she said. “I would react the same if this was a Christian-only swimming hour.” Students say the criticism is mostly coming from off-campus. Shaeera Tariq, a sophomore at George Washington and vice president of the Muslim Students’ Association, helped initiate the swim hour. She said nobody really knew about it until the Hatchet article came out — and as it happens, she is a reporter at the paper and she pitched the article to her editor. “It definitely sparked a lot of debate amongst people, but it seems to me there is a definite positive sentiment on campus and people are in favor of it,” she said. “We’re not closing down the mall or something for an hour. We’re just closing down a pool that wasn’t used very often in the first place.” John L. Esposito , an Islamic studies professor and founding director of Georgetown University ‘s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said many of the negative reactions undoubtedly stem from an “Islamophobia.” “It’s very clear that there’s a good chance many of them have a real problem accepting Muslims or Islam, and we’ve got to deal with that. In a pluralistic society, that form of bigotry and racism — we’ve dealt with it before and we’ve got to deal with it now,” Esposito said, referring to civil rights struggles. “It seems to me this is a perfectly understandable thing that we should be doing. All of these members of the community pay tuition and so faculty and administrators have to always be open to responding to and accommodating the needs of people.” Esposito cited numerous other ways institutions serve different groups: parking for people with disabilities, campus chapels for various religions, and excusing attendance for students celebrating religious holidays other than the traditionally recognized Christmas or Easter. “If there’s a segment of the community that can benefit from an accommodation, you make it when you can,” he said. “The fact is, they have rights and you have to accept it.” Zahin Hasan, president of the Muslim Students’ Association, said the number of women — Muslim and non-Muslim — who attend the swim hour varies. But the point is that the college is serving more students, better. “What I can’t understand is how utilizing an underused service, such as a gym pool, is a bad thing,” Hasan said in an e-mail. “Very few people know about the pool, and even fewer use it. The benefits of Sisters’ Splash far outweigh the few inconveniences it may present.” But, he added, a “great majority” of George Washington students have shown support for the swim hour. According to a 2005 Gallup report, gender inequality is one of American women’s top concerns about “the Muslim or Islamic world.” (Notably, many Muslim women perceive the promiscuity, pornography and public indecency portrayed in Hollywood images as mistreatment of women in the Western world, the report says.) It’s an issue that is mentioned frequently in online comments about the swim hour. One person wrote, “If Muslim women are too modest to wear ordinary swimsuits when they swim, then maybe they should stop swimming and go see a psychiatrist. Teaching sexual repression is wrong; making women feel that they are bad and wicked merely for having female bodies is wrong.” Another wrote, “If because of religious convictions they chose not to exercise that freedom, the rest of society should not validate it by accommodating it.” But the swim hour’s proponents — and there seem to be many — point out that about half of the student population can participate. And accusations of racism are not difficult to come by. “We’ve seen a number of these kinds of programs around the country. I think it goes way beyond Muslim women; I think there are enough women who would be more comfortable swimming in a same-sex environment that it would be of interest to women of all faiths in America,” said Ibrahim Hooper , a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There is a cottage industry of Muslim-bashers that look for any opportunity to marginalize American Muslims or to demonize Islam, and any denomination of Islam in our society is going to be targeted by these people.” There is more to the issue than religion, though. Erin E. Buzuvis, an associate professor of law at Western New England College and co-founder and contributor to The Title IX Blog, said it’s unclear whether barring men from the pool constitutes a violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law requiring gender equity in educational programs at federally funded schools and colleges. Men can still swim 95% of the time, so they’re not completely excluded. And if the program’s purpose is to accommodate a religious group, rather than women in general, that could work in the university’s favor. “The university might have a plausible defense that while this would technically be a form of gender discrimination, that they’re doing it to accommodate a student’s religion,” Buzuvis said. “If that weren’t an issue, I would say a female-only swim hour would be highly questionable under Title IX.”

BERKELEY, California — Amid the uproar over the proposed mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, a new Islamic college recently opened its doors in California with plans to educate a new generation of Muslim-American leaders. Founded by three prominent Islamic scholars, Zaytuna College in Berkeley is a small school with just five faculty members and 15 students in its inaugural freshman class. The school wants to become the first fully accredited Muslim academic institution in the United States. QURAN: Florida pastor steps back from plans to burn Muslim holy book Zaytuna College is opening at a time when fierce opposition to the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near the former World Trade Center has left many American Muslims feeling under siege. Many mosques are boosting security this week ahead of the Sept. 11 anniversary that some fear could bring trouble to Muslim communities. Zaytuna has generated little controversy in this famously liberal college town, but some conservatives question the founders’ motives. Frank Gaffney , president of the Center for Security Policy , a conservative think tank, accuses the school of seeking to indoctrinate students and spread Islam in America. “This is stealth jihad in the sense that it is about promoting in the United States incubators for sharia,” the religious law of Islam, said Gaffney, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. Zaytuna’s founders dismiss such criticism, saying it represents the views of a small minority of Americans who don’t understand Islam. “I think Zaytuna College over time can help contribute to a healthier understanding of Islam by removing ignorance,” said co-founder Zaid Shakir , an Air Force veteran and California native. The college is seeking to “prepare morally committed human beings that can go out and make a difference in the world as Muslims.” Zaytuna, which means “olive tree” in Arabic, offers an education that combines training in Arabic language and Islamic scholarship with courses in the humanities and social sciences. There have been other attempts to start Muslim colleges in the U.S., but those schools have closed or remained obscure. Students of all faiths are welcome at Zaytuna, but its first freshman class is made up of an ethnically diverse group of nine women and six men who are all Muslims. Most students wear head scarves or skull caps and participate in afternoon prayer. Zaytuna is housed in rented classrooms at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, just a few blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus. “Religion is the main part of my life. I have religion and then everything else comes around that. So that was definitely the main reason I wanted to come to Zaytuna,” said Sumaya Mehai, 21, who spent two years at community college in Santa Barbara before enrolling at Zaytuna. The college is working toward earning accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of six regional accrediting associations in the U.S., a process that is expected to take four to eight years. The founders hope to build an institution that will train scholars, professionals and religious leaders to serve the country’s fast-growing Muslim population, which now numbers in the millions. With few Islamic seminaries or colleges in the U.S., many American mosques have brought in imams from countries including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which can lead to a disconnect between religious leaders and their congregations. The three founders of the school are all leading Islamic scholars. Hatem Bazian is a Palestinian-American who teaches Islamic studies at UC Berkeley. Shakir and Hamza Yusuf are American converts who spent years studying Islam overseas before becoming leading Muslim scholars in the U.S. Zaytuna, where tuition is $11,000 a year, offers a bachelor’s degree with two majors: Arabic language and Islamic law and theology. Students take classes in subjects such as Islamic ethics, Islamic finance and Muslims in America, as well as courses one finds at a traditional liberal arts college — sociology, philosophy, linguistics, astronomy. Zaytuna’s opening is “one of the signs that Muslims have come of age in this country” and will be “a unique contribution to higher education,” said Ebrahim Moosa , a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University . But Moosa said the bachelor’s degree curriculum seems more like that of a theological seminary than a liberal arts college because most of the required courses are related to Islam. “From where I’m sitting, it’s heading in the direction of becoming a theological seminary, unless there will be a radical rethinking of the program,” Moosa said. In the years to come, Zaytuna’s founders hope to enroll more students, add more majors, offer graduate programs and have its own campus. The school is raising money from Muslim communities in the U.S. and trying to build an endowment. Freshman Hadeel Al-Hadidi, 24, completed her bachelor’s degree in communications at the University of Michigan-Dearborn before enrolling at Zaytuna. She hopes to pursue a career in film. “Zaytuna College is more of a personal thing,” she said, “to make myself a better person, to better myself in my religion.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 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They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns. The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade. But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania . Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and “contemporary Islam’s Billy Graham ,” Fethullah G?len has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called G?len Movement operate an “education, media and business network” in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick. Top administrators say they have no official ties to G?len. And G?len himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of G?len-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes G?len’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” G?len is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders. Education officials who are familiar with them say the schools aren’t trying to proselytize for G?len’s vision of Turkey . While Turkish language and culture are often offered in the curriculum, there’s no evidence the schools teach Islam. Nelson Smith, former president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, sees no evidence of an “active network. What I do see is a really impressive group of educators.” The Turkish-affiliated schools focus on math and science and often appear as top scorers on standardized tests. Still, lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high. The schools’ unacknowledged ties to G?len, they say, mock public schools’ spirit of transparency. “That’s what I was always asking for,” says Kelly Wayment, a former board member and parent at Beehive Science & Technology Academy in Holladay, Utah. He has pressed for more than a year to get the school to acknowledge ties to G?len. “I said, ‘Parents have a right to know.’ ” Wayment says Beehive removed him from the board last year after he began investigating the decision to fire a popular Spanish teacher, saying it was based on a single classroom visit by the Tustin, Calif.-based Accord Institute of Education Research, an education services company with ties to a chain of California charter schools inspired by G?len. He complained to Utah state Rep. Jim Dunnigan, a Republican lawmaker, who launched an audit of charter school governance — the audit is ongoing. But Beehive’s Karlene Welker says Wayment “removed himself (from the board) by pulling his students out of the school.” Utah’s State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences. The charter school board looked into Beehive’s ties to Islam and found them “circumstantial,” but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation. Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. “When they’re in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?” But questions about hiring and academics also have arisen in Arizona, where Daisy Education Corp. runs five schools and has received certifications for 120 H-1B visas for foreign teachers since 2002, records show. In Texas, the Cosmos Foundation has filed 1,157 H1-B applications since 2001. It operates 25 Harmony schools statewide. Since 2001, Harmony has imported 731 employees using H-1Bs, surpassing all other secondary education providers nationwide. Parents last year also accused one Harmony school of “pushing out” underperforming students — a charge the Texas Education Agency confirmed. Ed Fuller, a University of Texas-Austin researcher, found that Harmony schools throughout Texas had an “extraordinarily high” student attrition rate of about 50% for students in grades six through eight. “It’s not hard to be ‘exemplary’ if you lose all the kids who aren’t performing,” Fuller says. Crossing the line? At minimum, the rapid growth of the Turkish-affiliated schools shows how the freewheeling world of charter schools has changed the face of K-12 education in the USA. In most cases, charters are loosely regulated in exchange for improved performance. A few schools are affiliated with religious groups or offer programs that others can’t. But in several cases, a school’s orientation has forced it to show that it’s not crossing lines and endorsing religion. Examples: •Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota charter school authorized by Islamic Relief USA, a Virginia-based aid group. In 2008, the school ran afoul of state officials who said having teachers take part in voluntary Friday prayers could give students the impression that the school endorsed Islam. •Sacramento City Unified School District in California, which for 12 years has fought a lawsuit that says the city’s Waldorf schools are based on the religious beliefs of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Whether such schools continue to grow is no small question, since President Obama has made charter school expansion a priority. While the Turkish-affiliated schools disavow any connection to the G?len Movement, G?len himself maintains in legal filings that he’s the inspiration behind their growth. But William Martin of Rice University in Houston says educators’ assertions of “no organic connection” to G?len are accurate. Nonetheless, he says their efforts to minimize ties to G?len, likely from fear of being branded Islamists, bring “unnecessary and probably counterproductive” suspicion. “I do not think they are a sinister organization.” In an e-mail interview, Mehmet Argin, principal of Tucson’s Sonoran Science Academy, says his school’s parent corporation, Daisy Education Corp., “has no legal or organic ties” with other schools. He cautions against linking charter schools founded by Turkish-Americans directly to the G?len Movement “just because Turkish-Americans may be inspired by Mr. G?len.” In an e-mail interview, G?len denied any direct connection to these schools, rejecting the notion that there is a “G?len Movement,” but acknowledging there may be educators now in U.S. schools who have listened to his philosophy. “I have no relation with any institution in the form of ownership, board membership or any similar kind,” he said. A ‘third force’ G?len has pushed for more dialogue between the Western and Muslim worlds, yet he is a controversial figure in Turkey. The University of Oregon’s Hendrick, whose writings explore the G?len Movement, calls him “Turkey’s most famous religious personality.” His movement is considered the nation’s “third force” alongside the military and Turkey’s ruling Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, or AKP Party. In 1999, after traveling to the USA for medical treatment, G?len was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic state. Since then he has remained in Pennsylvania. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in 2007 denied his bid for a visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability in education,” G?len sued, saying his followers “had established more than 600 educational institutions” worldwide. He eventually prevailed, earning a green card in 2008. But Turkish educators in the USA continue to disavow their ties. “G?len is both the reason behind his schools, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with them,” Hendrick says.