Poison Ivy
In sharp contrast to other administrations that have faced allegations of curricular bias, the Columbia administration has treated the claims seriously: President Lee Bollinger publicly conceded that the school’s Middle East Studies department needed an Israel scholar, and Provost Alan Brinkley (whom I know and respect very highly) has promised an investigation into the charges laid out in the Sun and Daily News articles.
The Columbia controversy actually falls into two categories. The first involves the actions of an untenured member of the Middle East Studies Department, Joseph Massad. Several students have claimed that Massad openly chastised them about pro-Israel viewpoints and refused to answer questions in class unless they conceded a position critical of Israel. The latest student to come forward with such a complaint, Deena Shanker, told the Daily News that she once asked Massad if Israel gives warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee."Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded," she said."He told me if I was going to 'deny the atrocities' committed against the Palestinians, I could get out of his class."
Massad, who once compared Ariel Sharon to Joseph Goebbels and termed Israel “a racist state that does not have a right to exist,” has responded to the charges with a statement that confirms his critics’ portrayal of him. The film, he claims, “is the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel,” part of a “witch-hunt” coordinated by “anti-democratic and anti-academic forces” who want “to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the State of Israel.” He criticizes Bollinger’s decision to hire an additional Israel scholar “after pro-Israel groups launched a vicious campaign against the only chair in modern Arab Studies that Columbia established two years ago, demanding ‘balance’!” Indeed, he asserts, all other classes at Columbia on the Israel-Palestinian issue have “an Israel-friendly perspective” (a term that he doesn’t define). Quite apart from Massad’s bizarre rantings, it’s hard to conceive of any definition of academic freedom that allows a professor to refuse to provide instruction to students unless these students express fidelity to a certain political viewpoint.
The remaining cases at Columbia consist of professors articulating viewpoints that the Daily News accurately compares to those of a “voice from America's crackpot fringe.” A typical figure is Hamid Dabashi, chairman of the Middle East Studies Department, argued that CNN should be held accountable for “war crimes” for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001, has challenged claims that Al Qaeda exists, and has termed supporters of Israel"warmongers" and"Gestapo apparatchiks.”
As Brinkley correctly notes, “We don't tell faculty they can't express strong, or even offensive, opinions,” and so there is nothing that the administration can do about figures such as Dabashi. Though the major problems with Columbia’s Middle East Studies Department predate the arrival of Bollinger and Brinkley, the administration can, and hopefully will, use the powers that it does possess to ensure that academic merit rather than fidelity to a particular viewpoint on contemporary Middle East affairs guides hiring and tenuring decisions in the Middle East Studies Department: it’s hard to believe that a figure with Massad’s pattern of behavior was the most qualified candidate who applied for his job. Moreover, academic freedom doesn’t imply the freedom from criticism, and Bollinger has spoken out against efforts by many of the same faculty that hired Massad to force Columbia to divest from firms doing business in Israel, a campaign that compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and which Bollinger termed"grotesque and offensive." Indeed, the hero of this affair has been Professor Dan Miron, a member of the Middle East Studies Department who has provided open support to students who have experienced ideological intimidation in the classroom.
If Columbia’s administration provides a good guide in how to respond to a problem relating to academic freedom with sensitivity and perspective, that of North Carolina’s Rowan and Cabarrus Community College represents the other extreme. Rowan and Cabarrus issued a four-day suspension to an English instructor, Davis March, after March showed “Fahrenheit 911” to his composition class right before Election Day.
The administration here seems to be like the piano player in the bordello: after March was hired despite making clear his intent to bring his political views into the classroom, the administration was shocked—shocked!—that he actually did so. I’m at a loss to see the academic merit of showing “Fahrenheit 911” to a composition class a few days before the election, but if an administration allows ideologically biased hiring to occur, it has to accept the consequences. The precedent here—that a professor can be suspended for in-class speech the administration deems “political”—is too dangerous.
The types of problems in evidence (in very different ways) at Columbia and Rowan and Cabarrus, and seen recently at Duke, Stanford, and Cal, are likely to recur with increasing frequency over the coming years, caused by the intersection of two trends: (1) the increasing disconnect between the political viewpoints of the professoriate and the political viewpoints of the students they teach (if the Stanford and Cal study showed nothing else, it showed that the ideological imbalance is growing, not diminishing, as a result of newer hires); and (2) the increasing tendency to reconceptualize academic freedom or educational pedagogy to allow—or even encourage—the teaching of political content in the classroom. From two extremes, examples of this come from Cal’s decision to rewrite its academic freedom policy to allow such behavior, and the subversive agenda of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which targets non-elite public colleges and advocates replacing a liberal arts education with a curriculum centered on teaching “diversity skills,” a concept highly susceptible to politicization.
What can be done? Monitoring professors’ in-class speech is impossible. Publicizing inappropriate in-class behavior by faculty is necessary. And administrations need to take a hard look at their hiring and tenuring processes, to ensure that academic merit rather than fidelity to ideological litmus tests forms the guiding principle of personnel decisions.