Observations from the Spectator
Pretty serious charges, especially given that the Spectator cites not even one factual error from the Sun's voluminous coverage of the controversy. It seems as if the Spectator is suffering from journalistic envy, given that it has been scooped by the Sun from the start on this story. The Sun was first, for instance, to report the existence of the David Project film; to look into Hamid Dabashi's astonishing claim that university guidelines allowed last-minute cancellation of classes for political purposes; to bring us inside one of Prof. Joseph Massad's classes by obtaining notes from several students that revealed Massad's anti-Israel lecture rants; or, most recently, to discover that a member of the Law School's board of overseers had written President Bollinger to compare a Massad public address to a"neo-Nazi" rally.
The most ominous assertion from the Spectator, however, comes in its claim that on MEALAC, the opinions of the press or"even of the public at large should not play a role in what is fundamentally a University-based issue.”
Brooklyn College took exactly the same stance during my tenure controversy. The only hostile member of the department willing to speak on the record fumed that “it is outrageous that reputable scholars would go on at such length” about a case not from their campus. (After these words appeared in print, he ceased public comment.) This perspective is equally inappropriate to the MEALAC situation.
The Spectator’s assertion envisions a campus environment divorced from reality. It assumes, first of all, that a system of checks and balances exists within the university, making illegitimate the mere act of an outside appeal (to other scholars, to the media, to trustees, to interested parties). Yet on curricular and personnel issues featuring those willing to subvert established academic norms in pursuit of an ideological or personal agenda, too often no checks and balances are present—and not solely, or even primarily, for ideological reasons. Faculty from other departments don’t want to publicly criticize activities from outside their turf, lest this be used as a precedent against them at a later stage. Administrators, eager to avoid ruffling the feathers of the faculty, often perceive the path of least resistance as not challenging rogue departments like MEALAC. Students have little or no say in internal university mechanisms. Under such circumstances, the choice then becomes—as I discovered in my tenure case, as the Columbia students who have stood up to MEALAC intimidation have learned now—going beyond the campus walls or conceding an unfair defeat.
The Spectator also errs in claiming that as the MEALAC affair is “fundamentally a [Columbia] University-based issue,” it is inappropriate for others to comment on it. Public opinion provides a deterrent effect. Perhaps professors in other Middle Eastern Studies departments will now be less inclined to imitate the behavior of their MEALAC colleagues. And, more important, all of us now have a better sense of the distorted sense of “instruction” that occurs in classes taught by ideologues such as Joseph Massad.
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If the Spectator doesn’t like the Sun’s response to the MEALAC crisis, exactly how does it think the story should be handled? A good clue comes from the newspaper’s fawning coverage of an event organized by the New York Civil Liberties Union claiming that the students’ protests about MEALAC foreshadow arrival of a"new McCarthyism" on campus.
As the NYCLU was last heard from when commenting that students can challenge professors' opinions only if the faculty member supplies written approval to do so, in advance, few would have predicted a diverse presentation. But I would have thought the NYCLU at least would have attempted to provide the veneer of balance. Instead, the speakers were Anthropology professor Mahmood Mamdani, signatory of what President Lee Bollinger termed the “grotesque and offensive” petition demanding that Columbia divest from firms doing business in Israel, and recent author of an article detailing what he termed the"key parallels between neoconservatives and jihadists"; Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation; and Yeshiva University professor Ellen Schrecker, whose rather intriguing view of the past I’ve previously analyzed. Having assembled such a panel, Kate Meng-Brassel, president of the Columbia ACLU, remarked,"I’m glad we had opposing viewpoints in the debate." I can only assume that her comment was made tongue-in-cheek.
The positions of the NYCLU or the Spectator, lamentably, are not surprising; but their misuse of an enormously serious allegation (McCarthyism) raises more concerns. As the president of Columbians for Academic Freedom, Ariel Beery, observed the day before the NYCLU event,"the perversion of a term like McCarthyism by some residents of the Ivory Tower to make it mean any criticism of any idea whatsoever threatens the right to dissent." In a compelling essay, Beery urged the Columbia “administration to recall lessons from McCarthyism—the real period, and not the imagined purge supposedly carried out by students at Columbia. It was during that time that intellectuals learned the real value of unfettered discourse and the importance of academic freedom.”
Indeed, the only instances of suppression of opinions thus far in this controversy have come from MEALAC professors such as Joseph Massad, who ordered a student who refused to acknowledge Israeli atrocities to leave his class. The NYCLU’s conception of free speech, like Schrecker’s interpretation of “McCarthyism,” seems to turn logic on its head. As Beery concludes, “The whole point of free speech is to disagree with the orthodoxy of the time—to ensure that those with dissenting voices are able to make their claims without fear of reprisal. At Columbia, however, it seems that free speech is only for those people with whom one agrees.”