More from Columbia
First, a long article in New York that offers a persuasive interpretation of events. The most important points put forth by New York reporter Jennifer Senior:
--1.) As occurred in the Jerusalem Post story, the public comments of Columbia president Lee Bollinger suggest that he understands the basics of the problem—a sharp contrast with the “see-no-evil/hear-no-evil” approach followed by administrators at other institutions, such as Duke or Cal-Berkeley, that have faced similar issues.
When asked about Professor Joseph Massad’s strategy of stating in his syllabus that he offers a biased course, and that students who want a complete view of Middle Eastern affairs should not take his offering, Bollinger argued, “I believe a disclaimer before starting your course is insufficient. It doesn’t inoculate you from criticism for being one-sided or intolerant in the classroom . . . If you’re asking, in the abstract, ‘Can a faculty member satisfy the ideal of good teaching by simply saying at the beginning, I’m going to teach one side of a controversy and I don’t want to hear any other side and if you don’t like this, please don’t take my course,’ my view is, that’s irresponsible teaching.”
And when asked about former MEALAC chairman Hamid Dabashi’s written statement, about Israeli Jews, that “half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people. The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture,” Bollinger replied that Dabashi is free to say or write whatever he wants outside of the classroom. But, he added, “I want to completely disassociate myself from those ideas. They’re outrageous things to say, in my view.” Administrators can and should use their moral power to set the intellectual tone of the university; Bollinger’s willingness to condemn Dabashi’s ill-concealed anti-Semitic remarks is a commendable use of his authority.
--2.) Senior argues that a lack of intellectual diversity—rather than intimidation of students—is the key issue in the MEALAC controversy. Remarkably, both the department’s critics and its supporters concede that its recent hiring patterns and administrative leadership have demonstrated little regard for creating an intellectually diverse climate. They disagree only on whether an area studies program should attempt to accomplish this goal.
Zachary Lockman, chairman of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department at New York University, sees little wrong with MEALAC skewing in an Arabist direction. (Makes you wonder what sort of education NYU students in his field are getting.) “I think you can see this the other way,” he argues. “That universities or these departments are very much in the minority in the larger American setting. What you get from the media or government officials on the Middle East, the whole way the debate is framed, is very different.” This, of course, assumes that most undergraduates are: (a) aware of how “the media or government officials on the Middle East” frame the debate; and (b) it is the job of a university department to offer a diametrically opposed perspective. Those are pretty big assumptions.
Columbia professor Richard Bulliet more realistically argues that “the university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago. It’s become locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East.” More pointedly, Martin Kramer, the most effective critic of Middle Eastern studies programs around, laments that “at Columbia, Middle East studies became a rogue department, a friend-brings-a-friend department, and the guys who came in on Said’s coattails didn’t have his finesse. They were just garden-variety extremists.” As a result, the tendency was “to reinforce their ranks with like-minded people. Which may make the faculty meetings and sherry parties more pleasant. But the students lose.”
On another front, FIRE president David French has publicly urged Columbia president Lee Bollinger to dismiss the New York Civil Liberties Union’s defending the behavior of MEALAC professors. In a bizarre letter, the NYCLU affirmed its commitment to “ideological diversity, pluralism and tolerance in the campus community”—and then dismissed criticism of the MEALAC professors as part of an"assault" on academic freedom, accepted at face value Joseph Massad’s highly dubious characterization of his critics as engaging in a “witch hunt,” and contended that students could challenge the viewpoints of professors in the classroom only “if invited to do so by the professor.”
The NYCLU letter, French noted, “understates the appropriate levels of academic freedom and overstates the primacy of professors in the academic process,” especially in its argument that students may advance criticism in the classroom only if permitted by the professor. French added that"according to the NYCLU's reasoning, if a professor had not given permission for in-class dissent, a student could be forced to sit through a professor's defense of racial segregation - and even through a classroom discussion in support of segregation - without protest."
Academic freedom is primarily a right given to professors, but students possess in it a more limited form, and so the NYCLU’s idea that professors can tell students who disagree with them that the students can’t ask questions is absurd. Meanwhile, Bollinger’s frank defense of intellectual diversity suggests that this crisis might have a happy resolution.