Another Win for FIRE
Cornell's speech codes are justified in the name of its commitment to"diversity." President Jeffrey Lehman recently explained his approach to the issue:
Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values. They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue. This is a powerful and, to my mind, vital contribution to our society's understanding of diversity and I want to endorse it wholeheartedly.Parents considering spending $40,000 to send their children to either Dartmouth or Cornell--roughly equivalent educational institutions--might want to follow French's advice and choose Dartmouth.
FIRE's triumph is particularly timely given a peculiar article in yesterday's Chronicle that attacked"outside groups" (at least,"outside groups" other than the AAUP, a couple of labor unions, and the NYCLU, which in this case means pro-Israel groups and FIRE) for activity in the Columbia MEALAC crisis. Reflecting the new talking points of the pro-MEALAC faculty, author Jon Wiener compares the MEALAC crisis to the complaints by three black students against Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom for alleged insensitivity in the classroom. Weiner argues that the two cases were almost identical, but explains the different impressions on the grounds that"political forces outside the two universities played key roles in shaping what the public was told about the cases."
I can only assume that Weiner didn't follow the events at Columbia that closely. (He wildly charges that the David Project sent"monitors" into the classrooms of MEALAC faculty, an allegation I haven't heard even the MEALAC professors themselves make.) In the Harvard affair, Thernstrom was charged with making racially"insensitive" remarks. When asked to define insensitivity, one student replied:"I am left to question his sensitivity when affirmative action is incompletely defined as 'government enforcement of preferential treatment in hiring, promotion, and college admissions' in a book we had to read for his course that he edited." There was never any allegation that he behaved in an unprofessional fashion, that he made factually inaccurate claims in the classroom, or that the Harvard History Department in general hired only those who lacked the requisite"sensitivity" to"diversity"-related issues.
In the MEALAC case, the entire department was alleged to have promoted an anti-Israel bias in hiring and promotion. Two professors clearly violated Columbia rules (Joseph Massad by tossing a student out of his class for refusing to state that the Israelis were guilty of crimes against Palestinians, Hamid Dabashi for cancelling his class at the last minute to attend an anti-Israel rally). Massad's classes were littered with factual inaccuracies (i.e., the Mossad was responsible for the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics or the Israelis originated the tactic of hijacking airplanes or Zionists allied with European anti-Semites to drive the Jews out of Europe). The response of MEALAC defenders only enhanced the credibility of student claims that improperly biased courses were being offered, as when Rashid Khalidi reasoned that Arab-American students and only Arab-American students knew the truth about the Middle East or when Massad claimed, without explanation, that all courses other than his own on the issue at Columbia were"pro-Israel."
This background might explain why the MEALAC crisis differed from the heightened"sensitivity" of a few students in Thernstrom's late 1980s course. But Weiner instead points to the ominous outside forces--groups like FIRE--aided and abetted by the media. I'd choose to side with FIRE in this dispute.