More from Columbia
It turns out that three years ago, one of Dabashi’s classes coincided with a major anti-Israel protest at Columbia. As students filed into the classroom for Dabashi’s lecture, they were greeted by teaching assistants wearing black armbands who told them that Dabashi would be speaking at the protest, and therefore no class would occur. The implied message, of course: students should attend the protest to hear Dabashi speak. The next day, Dabashi e-mailed the students:"Let me assert categorically that if there is another occasion when performing my moral duty prevents me from being in my class I will repeat what I did yesterday.”
Another member of MEALAC, Professor George Saliba, did the same. Saliba noted that it was OK to cancel classes for “attendance at a political rally where both students and faculty could benefit from access to accurate information on the Middle East that is never reported by the newspapers 'of record' nor is it even allowed to be reported by any member of the press as Ariel Sharon's army prohibited access to the press when he was committing his massacres in Jenin and for days, now weeks, after that.” (As we now know, no “massacre” occurred at Jenin.) Under Saliba's theory, perhaps MEALAC classes should never meet, and students should simply attend anti-Israel protests twice a week.
In response, the longtime Jewish chaplain at Columbia, Rabbi Charles Sheer, wrote an op-ed criticizing the MEALAC professors’ decision. On this issue, I would say that Sheer was pretty clearly in the right: professors are paid to teach, not to engage in anti-Israel protests. And if Dabashi felt that performing his moral duty compelled him to cancel class, then at least he could have informed the students in advance, rather than doing so in a way that suggested that students would be well advised to attend the protest.
So how did Dabashi respond? In a letter to the Columbia newspaper, Dabashi accused Sheer of engaging in the “astonishingly degenerate development in the American academy” of interfering “with the cornerstone of academic freedom at a university.” Sheer, according to Dabashi, was “mobilizing and spearheading a crusade of fear and intimidation against members of the Columbia faculty and students who have dared to speak against the slaughter of innocent Palestinians,” a “campaign of terror and disinformation reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.” Dabashi promised to continue to oppose Sheer’s “crusade against those of us who believe Zionism is a ghastly racist ideology,” since “we have received repeated and unequivocal assurances from our recognized administrators that we have done absolutely nothing wrong in defending the rights of voiceless victims of the massacres in Palestine.”
This is a breathtaking statement. If Dabashi was willing to make such allegations in print, imagine what would happen if a pro-Israel student disagreed with him in class?
Perhaps even more problematic, today’s Gershman article revealed another troubling incident regarding the committee President Bollinger set up to inquire into the classroom conduct of figures like Dabashi. At the time, Sheer complained about the class cancellation to Dean Lisa Anderson, but Anderson told him that there was nothing wrong with Dabashi’s behavior, and that if students wanted to complain about it, they should talk with the dean of academic affairs.
Anderson’s presence on the committee already has been cause for comment, since she served as faculty advisor to perhaps the most extreme member of MEALAC, Joseph Massad.
At the time, Bollinger defended Anderson’s selection, noting, “Someone can take a position that I strongly disagree with and they can still be ... capable of looking into something like this objectively.” This remark, however, avoids the issue: is it reasonable to expect a dissertation advisor to be impartial when examining the conduct of one of her students? There at least is the appearance of bias, made far stronger by today’s article. If Anderson didn’t find anything troubling in Dabashi’s conduct, is she really the right person to be investigating the current matter? Perhaps if Columbia administrators had taken a stronger line in 2001, when the Dabashi class cancellation occurred, perhaps the current controversy could have been avoided.
Anderson’s written record, moreover, suggests someone ill-disposed to approach this issue fairly. In her generally balanced 2003 address as MESA president, she lamented that because of “self-appointed guardians of the academy” organized by “websites like Campus Watch” meant that protecting academic freedom “is no longer beyond doubt.” These “policy advocates and polemicists,” she continued, “wish to dictate the range of respectable political conclusions,” and therefore “pose a serious threat to our scholarly integrity.” Anderson detected a “plan to monitor and evaluate the universities and their area studies programs [that] is not about diversity, or even about truth, but about the conviction of conservative political activists that the American university community is insufficiently patriotic, or perhaps simply insufficiently conservative.”
If we didn’t have professors behaving like Dabashi and Massad, I might sympathize more with Anderson’s evaluation of Campus Watch and proposals to establish a Title VI oversight board. That, however, is not the relevant issue to the Columbia inquiry. Does Anderson also consider the David Project a “self-appointed guardian of the academy,” filled with “policy advocates and polemicists,” and thereby a threat to academic freedom? If not, how does she distinguish between the David Project and Campus Watch? And if so, how can she possibly be objective in evaluating evidence that was presented to the Columbia administration by the type of group that she has branded a threat to academic freedom?