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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
A witch hunt against a Columbia professor, and the New York Times' disgraceful support for it, represent the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades.
Apr 22, 2005 | A member of the U.S. Congress calls for an assistant professor at a major university to be summarily fired. The right-wing tabloid press runs a series of vicious attacks on him, often misquoting him and perpetuating previous misquotes. Opinion pieces attacking "tenured radicals" and questioning professors' patriotism use him as their centerpiece. All of these attacks are spurred by a propaganda film made by an advocacy group, in which anonymous accusations are made and the professor is not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.
It is not 1953, the Congress member is not Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and the professor is not being accused of being a communist. No, it is 2005, the Congress member is Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and the professor is being accused of being anti-Israel.
The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved.
The targeted professor is Joseph Massad, of the Middle East Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University. Massad is the author of "Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan" (Columbia University Press, 2001), and of a forthcoming book treating the sexual depictions of Arabs in colonial literature, "Desiring Arabs." He is well-published, and his first book received rave reviews in journals such as Choice and the American Historical Review. His career would have been no more controversial than that of any academic historian working on Argentina or Uganda, had he not been a Palestinian-American teaching about Israel and Palestine in New York City. Nor, had he been critical of Argentinean or Ugandan policies, would any eyebrows have been raised in the United States.
The attacks on Massad, and two other professors in the department, were led by off-campus right-wing Zionist organizations aligned with Israel's Likud Party -- notably a murky Boston-based organization called "the David Project," which produced the film in which the accusations were made. (In fact, according to an in-depth report by Scott Sherman in the Nation, there is no single "film"; at least six versions exist, and it has never been screened for the public. When the Nation asked to view it, the David Project refused to make it available. Its head, Charles Jacobs, also refused to provide details to the Nation about the group's financial backers or its ties to professional pro-Israel lobbyists.)
Almost none of the allegations against Massad (anti-Semitism, mistreatment of students, likening Israel to Nazi Germany) came from students who had taken his courses. In the most serious case, an allegation that Massad angrily told a student, "If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom," the charge was corroborated by one other student and one auditor, but three other individuals present said they had no recollection of the episode taking place, and it did not appear in Massad's teaching evaluations.
Columbia president Lee Bollinger appointed an ad hoc faculty grievance committee to look into the accusations. After a lengthy investigation, the committee issued a report. It found Massad not guilty of anti-Semitism or of punishing pro-Israel students with poor grades. (Indeed, it singled him out for unequivocably denouncing anti-Semitism.) In the case of the incident described above, it found it credible that "Massad became angered at a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved, and that he responded heatedly. While we have no reason to believe that Professor Massad intended to expel Ms. Shanker from the classroom (she did not, in fact, leave the class), his rhetorical response to her query exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism." In his response to the report, Massad denies that this incident took place, pointed out logical fallacies in the report's reasoning, and criticized it for failing to connect the charges with the organized political campaign against him.
Although it was little noted in the press, the report did indeed acknowledge that Massad in particular and the department in general had been the target of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. It noted that for several years, after pieces appeared in the tabloid press blasting the department as anti-Israel, many non-students, clearly hostile and with ideological agendas, had been attending classes in the department, interrupting lectures with hostile asides and inhibiting classroom debate. One individual began filming a class without permission. Chillingly, the report noted, "Testimony that we received indicated that in February 2002 Professor Massad had good reason to believe that a member of the Columbia faculty was monitoring his teaching and approaching his students, requesting them to provide information on his statements in class as part of a campaign against him."
Whether the disputed charges against Massad, fomented by outside groups with obvious agendas, merited a major investigation by Columbia is a matter of debate. Many students and faculty at Columbia believe the investigation should never have been launched in the first place. Having undertaken the inquiry, however, the ad hoc committee rightfully understood that its charge was narrow -- that its mandate was to investigate "conduct": that is, behavior and "civility," not views. To prescribe some views and ban others would contravene the most deeply held values of academic life. As the report noted, "We are committed, individually and collectively, to the right of all members of the Columbia community to hold and espouse a range of opinions, including those that make others uncomfortable. We focused our attention on conduct, and on the relationship between that conduct and the obligation for all of us to maintain a civil and tolerant learning environment."
Even the narrow charge is problematic. The line separating "views" and "conduct" is difficult to demarcate in any objective way, and the place of "civility" in university teaching is not self-evident. In the film "The Paper Chase," John Houseman played the curmudgeonly Professor Kingsfield, who routinely used personal humiliation of first-year law students as a pedagogical tool. Whether one agrees that such a method is useful or valid, it is certainly the case that the Kingsfield character was modeled on real-life professors, some of whom inspired great loyalty in their students, who felt well-served by some sharp words when they were guilty of woolly thinking. The notion of an ad hoc grievance committee investigating John Houseman for suggesting that students' heads are full of mush is faintly ridiculous, but it is the sort of procedure to which Massad was subjected.
