The ad-hoc grievance committee set up to investigate charges of classroom intimidation and anti-Semitism in the MEALAC program at Columbia has issued its report. From a quick read, its main findings are:
(1) That there is no evidence of anti-Semitism in the program, and that one of the professors who has come in for the most criticism (Joseph Massad) has repeatedly made it clear that anti-Semitic views are unacceptable in class.
(2) That of three documented incidents, one shows evidence of a professor (Joseph Massad) going “beyond commonly accepted bounds” in criticizing a student, one falls into a gray zone (it isn’t clear that the professor knew he was interacting with a Columbia student), and one is probably in large part a misinterpretation by the relevant student of what the professor said.
(3) That Massad repeatedly used a “tendentious and highly charged vocabulary in class”, but demonstrably encouraged discussion between vigorously opposed viewpoints in the classroom, to the point that many students complained that he “allowed a small but vociferous group of fellow students to disrupt lectures by their incessant questions and comments.” Massad further maintained a consistently respectful attitude to students outside of class.
(4) That Columbia has serious institutional problems – it provides no good channels for either students or professors to express political grievances about teaching etc. It handled this controversy poorly. This is in large part what allowed outside groups (Campus Watch, the David Project) to become interlocutors. Outside auditors disrupted classes, tried in one instance to videorecord a class, and contributed to a general feeling of being watched and constrained that inhibited the free flow of ideas. One student stated that “she was afraid to defend her views in the classroom ‘for fear of attack from students but also from reporters who may continue their investigations of our school undetected.'” The report also deplores the behaviour of “faculty [who] were apparently prepared to encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor’s classroom statements. ”
I’m prepared to take this report at its face value, especially given that the committee was chaired by Ira Katznelson, who’s a first rate scholar, with a longstanding commitment to intellectual honesty. Others, I suspect, especially those involved in Campus Watch and the David Project, will characterize it as a whitewash. While the report doesn’t address their role directly (it’s concerned with the behaviour of Columbia’s faculty, and with Columbia as an institution), they don’t come out of it looking very pretty. Via Inside Higher Ed.
{ 31 comments }
John Emerson 03.31.05 at 10:30 am
“This is in large part what allowed outside groups (Campus Watch, the David Project) to become interlocutors.”
Campus Watch doesn’t need a reason. They would have found a target someplace.
Russkie 03.31.05 at 11:27 am
My instinct is to think that this is a whitewash – with a dollop of “Don’t complain anymore if you know what’s good for you”.
Thanks to the internet, it’s quite likely however that there will be a good, fact-based responses to the report available in the coming days and we’ll be able to judge for ourselves.
des von bladet 03.31.05 at 11:40 am
Why do liberals hate witch-hunts?
Russkie 03.31.05 at 12:09 pm
Nat Hentoff wrote about this in the Village Voice a couple of weeks ago – and has some good information on the Columbia administration’s handling of the affair and the adhoc committee. He’s not impressed.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0510,hentoff,61802,6.html
Sebastian holsclaw 03.31.05 at 12:58 pm
The Village Voice is notoriously right-wing of course.
Seth Finkelstein 03.31.05 at 1:10 pm
Well, Nat Hentoff is not exactly a paragon of disinterest in these matters.
Rob 03.31.05 at 1:15 pm
Wow Sebastian! Thats like linking to a Safire column and saying even the liberal New York Times agrees with me!
Fergal 03.31.05 at 1:18 pm
Well, Nat Hentoff is not exactly a paragon of disinterest in these matters.
Neither are the members of the committee, apparently. Hardly “ad hoc”.
Russkie 03.31.05 at 1:25 pm
I’m prepared to take this report at its face value, especially given that the committee was chaired by Ira Katznelson, who’s a first rate scholar, with a longstanding commitment to intellectual honesty.
This seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that the others on the committee are not first-rate scholars and are not committed to intellectual honesty – ie. that the committee includes the thesis advisor of one of the profs being criticized as well as a couple of a “Activist” campaigners for withdrawing Columbia’s investments in companies that do business in Israel (eg. Intel).
Others, I suspect, especially those involved in Campus Watch and the David Project, will characterize it as a whitewash. While the report doesn’t address their role directly (it’s concerned with the behaviour of Columbia’s faculty, and with Columbia as an institution), they don’t come out of it looking very pretty.
So why not appoint some members of Campus Watch to evaluate Columbia’a accusations against them. I’m sure it would be just as edifying as this report.
If you read the Hentoff article it seems that Katznelson was interested in an investigation of the complainers from the very beginning.
Anyone who has the patience will be able to read th e responses of David Watch et. al. in the coming days and decide for themselves. The lazy people will just quote the Columbia report and the NY times (which promised Columbia they wouldn’t interview the students who made the initial criticisms).
Luc 03.31.05 at 1:26 pm
The appropriate quote from Nat Hentoff is –
The bias adjustment dial may go to eleven but it has no zero point.
Russkie 03.31.05 at 1:33 pm
Please bring back comment preview
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.31.05 at 1:36 pm
Righto, the outsider is full of bias but the internal school committee is very fair despite being peopled by those with conflicts of interest! Makes perfect sense. There certainly weren’t professors in less interested disciplines who could have been appointed.
Seth Finkelstein 03.31.05 at 1:57 pm
Call it a demonstration of the effect that putting many “biased” viewpoints into an argument just produces more fodder for the partisans everywhere, not anything approaching truth.
Chris 03.31.05 at 2:09 pm
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. If it meant what he thinks it means, namely that anyone who has an opinion one way or the other about Israel/Palestine is disbarred from judging cases like this then there would be no way of constituting any kind of committee or tribunal.
I take it that this investigation was into allegedly improper behaviour by some professors and not directly about the rights and wrongs of Israel/Palestine. I’m sure Columbia has any number of professors who both have strong views on the Middle East and a good grip on the ethical limits of professorial conduct.
Louis Proyect 03.31.05 at 2:44 pm
Mamdani Uproar: Scion Of Ed Said Rocks Columbia
by Andrew Rice
On a recent Tuesday evening, Mahmood Mamdani, a bookishly handsome and relentlessly incendiary political theorist, spoke at a forum on the subject of academic freedom held at Columbia University, where he teaches.
Not long ago, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, he wrote that “the neoconservatives are a twin of al Qaedaâ€â€”the kind of rhetorical Molotov cocktail seldom tossed by the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On this evening, he was about to throw another one: into the already highly emotional battle at Columbia over anti-Semitism at the university.
Among the graduate students and faculty members that packed the top-floor conference room that night was a young correspondent from The New York Sun, which had ardently been fanning the story of the handful of Jewish students who have said they were ridiculed for expressing support of Israel in some classes taught by professors in the school’s department of Middle Eastern Studies.
The first speaker, a former university provost, gave a windy speech warning of a “rising tide of anti-intellectualism.†Then Mr. Mamdani rose, and announced he was planning to confront the issue directly. He was wearing a smart dark suit, his royal blue shirt open at the collar, his curly gray hair slightly mussed.
“The accusation involved is the worst you can hurl at anyone in contemporary American society,†he said, his voice audibly seething with indignation. Mr. Mamdani, who is from an Indian Muslim background, had not been accused, but he was passionate in his belief that outside groups, “with skills honed elsewhere in the Empire,†were mounting an attack on his university, his rights.
He posed the rhetorical question: What is academic freedom?
“First and foremost, it is the freedom of a professor to go against the grain. To commit heresy,†he said. “Any student who enters a university should be prepared for the discomfort that comes from having his or her most cherished truths questioned.â€
With unwavering self-assurance, Mr. Mamdani has taken aim at a lot of cherished truths lately. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani, 58, was new to America and barely known outside his narrow academic discipline, African studies.
Since then, he has willed his way into the thick of the debate over the War on Terror, casting himself as a public intellectual for the jihadist age. Last year, he published a popular book on the roots of Middle Eastern extremism. He chats with highbrow talk-show hosts like Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose. His views have been attacked by The National Review and are dismissed by some Middle East experts, but he has won praise from academic heavyweights like Noam Chomsky, the economist Jeffrey Sachs and Columbia’s late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a friend and admirer, who played a crucial role in assuring that Mr. Mamdani’s book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, ended up at his own major publishing house, Pantheon Books. Admirers say the book carries on the tradition of his revered (and sometimes reviled) patron; everybody at Columbia agrees that Said’s legacy is threatened. What happens next will test that ambition– and test many other things at Columbia besides.
full: http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage3.asp
Nate Roberts 03.31.05 at 2:46 pm
If anyone is interested in reading Joseph Massad’s statement to the ad hoc committee:
http://www.censoringthought.org/massadstatementtocommittee.html
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.31.05 at 2:53 pm
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. The committe found “no evidence of any statements made by faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic” despite the professor of Persian studies who wrote that Israelis have “a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”
“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.
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.31.05 at 2:58 pm
The above is why it is so interesting that Henry is quick to dismiss charges from the outside as biased while so quick to embrace the equally (if not more) self-interested statements from the anti-Israel professors.
Luc 03.31.05 at 3:32 pm
They did not, but that is beside the point isn’t it?
james 03.31.05 at 3:47 pm
Refusal to release the report to the general public screams cover-up.
Jack Lake 03.31.05 at 4:00 pm
The comments are disappointing. Why side with anyone? What is clear as a California sunny day is that Columbia has done an Abu Ghraib investigation. Whether there is wrong doing or not, an establishment/insiders committee should not have been chosen. When I sit in judgment of a colleague, I should not be trusted to be objective!
Have a new committee of well respected, unbiased, fair minded and not related to Columbia individuals do the job.
Leo Casey 03.31.05 at 4:23 pm
>> I’m prepared to take this report at its face value, especially given that the committee was chaired by Ira Katznelson, who’s a first rate scholar, with a longstanding commitment to intellectual honesty.
Leo Casey 03.31.05 at 4:27 pm
For some strange reason, all my commentary on the quotation was excised from the last post.
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.
Jackmormon 03.31.05 at 8:28 pm
Leo,
Jean Howard was also on the ad hoc committee, and she has an excellent reputation on supporting labor rights for graduate students. If these two issues should be discussed together, that is.
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:
lee scoresby 04.01.05 at 1:35 am
Leo – Ira did *what*? Can you point me to any discussion of Ira’s role in working against unionization? I’m really very shocked and saddened if that’s the case.
lee scoresby 04.01.05 at 1:41 am
Never mind – took about 5 seconds on google. *Sigh*
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.
Nate Roberts 04.01.05 at 8:57 am
If anyone takes the time to read Joseph Massad’s lengthy statement almost none of which has in any way been contested on factual bases, it will be clear that the Columbia Spectator cannot in any way be called “balanced.” Nor, speaking as a Columbia student, can it be said to represent a general “student” perspective –though, yes, it does represent the work of (certain) students.
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
Tam 04.01.05 at 10:42 am
JackMormon
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
Nate Roberts 04.02.05 at 4:12 am
Tam,
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.
Tam 04.02.05 at 5:24 am
No, Nate, I don’t agree. It was one of the daftest things I have ever read.
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.
Nate Roberts 04.02.05 at 6:07 am
Tam,
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!
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