Yes, you are right of course. We should shut the place down. We certainly can’t allow a university to exist which would allow professors who engage in cliche-ridden journalism in their spare time—let alone allow such a professor to stand before a classroom.

No, of course it doesn’t matter that that professor has broken no rules, displayed no incompetence, publishes regularly in peer-review journals, abused no students (never mind that the professor himself has been subject to years of harassment including death threats).

Off with his head!

The article was unbalanced and loaded with every “meme” of the anti-Israel discourse of the academic establishment- eg, at haste and at random: – the scene with the 1 white soldier and the 2 black ones (Israelis are racist), – the “Brooklyn accent” of the pilot (Israelis are white folk from Brooklyn who do not “belong” in the ME), – the “How many Palestinians had been murdered here, trying to prevent its desecration, destruction, the eradication of the center site of a world religion?” – implying that Israelis have murdered Palestinians whilst pursuing the desecration of the mosque. As if. – The description of Tel Aviv ariport: “Not a single sound of laughter, not a single sight of a leisurely walk, no one crying for a departing loved one, no one joyous at the arrival of a friend, no human rush to catch a flight, no two strangers exchanging flirtatious glances” – oh please…

I laughed my way through it. Less funny to be Jewish and be taught by a prof who really believes this nonsense. If this is what passes for analysis and thought at Columbia University, they need to shut the place down.

That was a very good and moving article (the one in Al-Ahram), thanks for posting the link. The quote you provide makes a lot more sense in context.

It’s funny, because without having read the whole article I might have thought that the statement was a bit harsh. But elsewhere he describes Israeli soldiers in a very sweet, humanizing way. Without the full context the complexity of the message really gets lost.

The interesting thing to me, however, is how much the David Project (the group attacking academic freedom at Columbia) has relied on innuendo to suggest that Dabashi, Massad, etc., are somehow against the Jewish people. Anyone who knows them and their work could vouch for the fact that this is false. . . though their feelings about the policies of the Israeli state are a different matter (in this case they are clearly and outspokenly opposed). But what is interesting is how an academic freedom case which is premised upon charges that Massad had discriminated against certain students in the classroom (charges which never fell apart upon closer inspection) gets shifted into an inquisition into these professors’ feelings about Jews (something that can never really be proven or disproven, and which, moreover, is totally irrelevant to the case).

Would anyone ever, for instance, suggest that an African American professor should be fired on the basis of questionable allegations that she “hates” white people or is anti-white? Or what might be a better analogy, that she hates the apartheid system, or that she hates the very idea of a state constituted on the basis of race. The very idea of it is absurd. But this is how far off-topic the discourse surrounding this academic freedom case has wandered.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia:
(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/dabashi/)

He wrote an article from which the following is an extract for Al-Ahram in September 2004:

“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.”

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/cu12.htm

Also, it is interesting that while this discussion has fixated on the possibility that the whole committee was set up from the beginning in Massad’s favor, he himself has never recognized its legitimacy and makes a good case that it much better represents the “plaintifs.”

http://www.censoringthought.org/massadstatementtocommittee.html

Anyway, I was originally going to write that any report that states “Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani, 58, was new to America and barely known outside his narrow academic discipline, African studies” doesn’t know the broad influence of works such as Citizen and Subject in general political and social science very well.

Sebastian,
The “green eyes” comment was always to me the most ambiguous. And the scholar who made the comment remembered making it, admitted as much in public, and expressed confusion over what had been understood by it. The committee decided that the comment was an attempt at Socratic pedegogy gone wrong: the professor was—or could be understood as—trying to make vivid the problem of basing claims to the land of Palestine in terms of race or genetics.

The cite from the Professor of Persian studies is a new one to me, and I’ve tried to follow this question closely. Where does it come from and who is it?

I generally disagree with the characterization of the report as a whitewashing. There are a number of serious criticisms of the professors involved and of the institution.

1. The conclusion that Massad went “beyond commonly accepted bounds” of classroom rhetoric might seem mild to people outside the academy, but it will reverberate within the academy. Massad is as of yet untenured. Not only has he called down a storm of controversy, but an internal committee has judged that he went too far. That won’t bode well for his tenure review. (When the controversy first emerged, Juan Cole suggested that it was precisely because Massad was untenured that he was being targetted.)

2. The committee concluded that grievance procedures at Columbia were insufficient and intransparent. The outside involvement is a problem that the insufficient grievance procedures opened the university up to. The outside involvement has been deleterious—really, it has poisoned the atmosphere in all departments here—and so to avoid such unpleasantness in the future, the university must make it easier for students to make more effective complaints within the academy. I’m not sure how exactly the university will propose to do this (students feel a lot of grief for wildly different reasons), but now the pressure is most definitely on.

Anyway, to get a more balanced, student perspective on the committee’s report, check out the Columbia Spectator’s article on it.

Here’s their lede:

In a strong indictment of Columbia’s grievance procedures and advising channels, the ad hoc faculty committee investigating students’ claims that they were intimidated by some Middle East studies professors described a pattern of mishandled complaints and widespread confusion over how to address students’ concerns about what goes on in the classroom.

The committee’s report, obtained by Spectator last night and expected to be made public today, also identified one instance in which assistant professor Joseph Massad “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” when he made an angry outburst to a student defending Israel’s military conduct.

I said:

I once would have said the same thing about Ira Katznelson.

But that was before he violated a great many of the values and principles upon which he had based his scholarship by deciding to carry Columbia University’s dirty water in their efforts to deny their grad assistants the right to unionize.

Now I have a hard time accepting anything he has to say in the defense of Columbia University.

Have a new committee of well respected, unbiased, fair minded and not related to Columbia individuals do the job.

The committee found that a comment stating that an Israeli with green eyes could not have a legitimate claim on Israeli land was not racist.

They did not, but that is beside the point isn’t it?

“Sebastian doesn’t appear to understand what “conflict of interest” means. “Conflict of interest” means that people have a personal stake (financial, friendship, family relationship etc) in the outcome of a case.”

I understand the term. It is improper to have a racist investigate charges of racist statements because he has a personal stake in not finding actions much like his own objectionable. It is poor form to have vehemently anti-Israeli professors judge harassment of Israeli and Jewish students because they have an interest in not having their own actions defined as harassment. They have trouble accurately investigating the issue because they have a personal interest in finding that there was no harassment. That is classic conflict of interest. Arguably almost all internal investigations have an interest in downplaying damage to their own institution. But such problems are greatly magnified when the behaviour of those investigating the problem is likely to be called into question by negative findings.