Joseph Massad: Statement Before Columbia Committee
This is an excerpt from the statement Joseph Massad made on March 14, 2005 before the committee at Columbia University investigating charges of intimidation in the Middle East studies program:
I have prepared a statement to read to you. I would be happy to answer your questions
afterwards. Before I begin, however, I want to ascertain that as professor Katzneslson has
informed me, the only complaints that your committee has heard about me are the two
complaints that the press reported from my students, namely the complaint by Noah Liben
and the complaint by Deena Shanker. As for the complaint by Tomy Schoenfeld, who was
not my student, I presume, his case is irrelevant to this body, as your mandate states that
“as a result of the expression of concern by a number of students that they were being
intimidated by faculty members and being excluded from participating fully in classroom
discussions because of their views,” you are expected “to identify cases where there appear
to be violations of the obligation to create a civil and tolerant teaching environment.”2 If
there are any other complaints against me, unless I am told what they are and who made
them, and the date and place where they allegedly took place, I shall not respond to them.
I appear before you today because of a campaign of intimidation to which I have been
subjected for over three years. While this campaign was started by certain members of the
Columbia faculty, and by outside forces using some of my students as conduits, it soon
expanded to include members of the Columbia administration, the rightwing tabloid press,
the Israeli press, and more locally the Columbia Spectator. Much of this preceded the David
Project film “Columbia Unbecoming,” and the ensuing controversy. In the following
statement, I will provide you with the history of this coordinated campaign, including the facts
pertaining to the intimidation to which I am being subjected by the Columbia University
administration, most manifestly through the convening of your own committee before which I
appear today out of a combined sense of intimidation and obligation and not because I
recognize its legitimacy. You need to bear with the details of the following narrative, as the
campaign of intimidation against me is most insidious in its details.
I started teaching at Columbia in the Fall of 1999. At the conclusion of my first academic
year, during which I taught my class on Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies, I
received a Certificate of Appreciation for teaching presented by"The Students of Columbia
College, Class of 2000," and was nominated and was one of the two finalists for the Van
Doren teaching award which went that year to Professor Michael Stanislawski. In my second
year, I began to be told of whispers about my class on Palestinian and Israeli politics and
Societies. Jewish Students in my class in the Spring 2001 would tell me that I was the main
topic of discussion at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Hillel and that my class is
making the Zionists on campus angry. I took such reports lightly, as the class had doubled in
size from the first year. I did notice however that the class included some cantankerous
students who insisted on scoring political points during the lectures. I would always diffuse
the situation by allowing all questions to be asked and by attempting to answer them
informatively. I would do so in class and during office hours. I had strong positive evaluations
from most of my students with some complaining that the class was biased. Although my
course description explained that “The purpose of the course is to provide a thorough yet
critical historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with
the background to the current situation,”3 I decided in the following year (Spring 2002) to
emphasize that point more clearly. The course description read as follows:
The course examines critically the impact of Zionism on European Jews and on Asian and
African Jews on the one hand, and on Palestinian Arabs on the other --in Israel, in the
Occupied Territories, and in the Diaspora. The course also examines critically the internal
dynamics in Palestinian and Israeli societies, looking at the roles class, gender, and religion
play in the politics of Israel and the Palestinian national movement. The purpose of the
course is not to provide a “balanced” coverage of the views of both sides, but rather to
provide a thorough yet critical historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to
familiarize undergraduates with the background to the current situation from a critical
perspective....