Pedagogy, Scoundrels, and Reflections on MEALAC
This stage of the Columbia struggle is essentially over: the faculty will resist to its utmost any attempt to curb MEALAC abuses, and so progress will have to occur through the quiet efforts of an administration that seems to understand the essentials of the problem. Jacobs makes three points of broader relevance, however.
First, he takes issue with MEALAC defenders’ framing the issue as primarily a psychological one, caused by the apparently fragile psyches of Jewish students exposed to the “rhetorically combative” teaching style of some MEALAC professors. As Eric Foner recently informed the Times, “for a student to encounter unfamiliar or even unpleasant ideas does not constitute intimidation,” since “exposure to new ideas is the essence of education.” Former CU provost Jonathan Cole additionally termed exposure to “radical” ideas a vital element of a college education.
This approach falsely frames the dispute as a pedagogical rather than a substantive one. When I teach a course in US constitutional history, I might have a few die-hard Republican students who have grown up convinced that Richard Nixon was blameless for Watergate. Doubtless such students would find “unfamiliar,” “unpleasant,” and even “radical” my lecture on the Watergate crisis. So too would these students find “unfamiliar,” “unpleasant,” and even “radical” a lecture claiming that Richard Nixon regularly beat his wife. Yet the fact that it would expose pro-Nixon students to new, uncomfortable ideas does not make the second lecture defensible. The content—not the students’ psychological reaction to that content—is what matters.
Students, in short, should have felt uncomfortable when a professor such as Joseph Massad told them that Israeli agents were responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich; or when he claimed that Israelis originated the tactic of hijacking airplanes in the Middle East; or when he asserted that early Zionists allied with anti-Semites to drive Jews from Europe.
Second, Jacobs correctly observes that the investigatory report “invokes a sort of ‘professors’ omerta’ to intimidate dissenting professors, upbraiding whistleblowers who helped students report abuse.” (The report even sympathized with Professor Hamid Dabashi, who was upset when then-CU Rabbi Charles Sheer, acting at the behest of students, complained about Dabashi’s breaking a Columbia rule regarding the cancellation of classes.) In this vision of the academy, transparency in the classroom is, in and of itself, an evil. According to Joan Scott, chair of the AAUP’s academic freedom and tenure committee, “organized outside agitators who are disrupting classes and programs for ideological purposes . . . pose a threat far more serious than anything Prof. Joseph Massad may or may not have done.”
Again, translate the MEALAC defenders’ rhetoric from the theoretical to the specific case at hand. In this instance, the outside criticism has been sharp, and much of it, no doubt, has been motivated by an ideological agenda—ensuring that issues related to Israel are fairly treated in the classroom. Scott and others might disagree with that agenda, but, to my knowledge, none of the articles about matters at Columbia have contained factually incorrect statements. (Scott doesn’t define what she means by “organized outside agitators”; I suppose that my blog postings on Columbia would also come under her heading of an activity dangerous to the principle of academic freedom.) In contrast, we know that Professor Massad made demonstrably false statements to his classes, geared toward painting Israel in the worst possible light. And even the investigating committee conceded that Massad abused his authority when he expelled from his class a student who refused to publicly state that Israel was guilty of atrocities. Is Scott, speaking on behalf of the AAUP, really serious when she says that any outside criticism, regardless of that criticism’s merits, poses “a threat far more serious than anything Prof. Joseph Massad may or may not have done”?
Finally, Jacobs reminds us of the degree to which the public statements of the MEALAC establishment have essentially proved the critics’ point about unacceptable bias in the classroom. Massad made four public statements on the controversy—twice to the Times in articles where no one from the other side was interviewed, and twice on his website. The latter two statements raised grave concerns about his ability to fairly evaluate evidence. Rashid Khalidi told a reporter from New York that Arab students and only Arab students knew the “truth” about the Middle East. Perhaps most incredibly, MESA president Juan Cole argued that the real problem was the fact that “the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the academy,” including among international relations contingents of political science departments.
When challenged to produce even “a single syllabus at the American Political Science Association archive or elsewhere with a ‘Zionist’ bent,” Cole replied that he didn’t “give a rat's ass whether those courses have a Zionist bent or not. I am saying that ‘bent’ is not a relevant category of analysis when evaluating university teaching. Everybody has some bent. The question is, whether students come out of the class having learned to reason about a set of problems or not. The content is not as important, since they'll forget a lot of the content anyway, and will receive it selectively, both during and after the class.” As University of Chicago professor Daniel Drezner points out, however, this response flies well wide of the mark, since Cole’s original post was about content, not pedagogical approach.
Over the past few years at Brooklyn, I’ve been struck by how often an administration committed to reorienting the curriculum around a quite explicit ideological agenda has defended itself from criticism not by discussing the content of the courses it’s championing but by trying to obscure the issue through points about pedagogy. This pattern seems to have spread to defenders of MEALAC as well. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it seems now as if, in the academy, pedagogy is the last refuge of scoundrels.