From all accounts, Massad is a passionate and outspoken but fair and dedicated teacher. The Nation quotes a doctoral student in Massad's department as saying, "In Massad's class, the most prolific contributors to class discussion were students who disagreed with him, and many did not hesitate to interrupt him to make their point." The ad hoc report noted: "Outside the classroom, there can be little doubt of Professor Massad's dedication to, and respectful attitude towards, his students whatever their confessional or ethnic background or their political outlook. He made himself available to them in office hours and afterwards. One student, critical of other aspects of his pedagogy, praised his "warmth, dynamism and candor" and his unusual accessibility and friendliness. One of the group of students who questioned him regularly and critically in class told us of their friendly relations outside class where their discussions often continued. A student who has complained that he was mocked in class by Professor Massad in the spring of 2001, was still in email contact with him one year later."

One would have thought that the ad hoc report would have closed the door on this whole sorry affair. But almost worse than the McCarthyite accusations was the response of the New York Times. Incredibly, the Times slammed the ad hoc committee for not being inquisitorial enough. Not satisfied with an investigation of conduct or classroom civility, it wanted Massad's views put under the microscope. The Gray Lady apparently wanted him sent for reeducation, for all the world as though he were a Right Deviationist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and as though America's newspaper of record were a Maoist inquisitor.

The Times' editorial read, "But in the end, the report is deeply unsatisfactory because the panel's mandate was so limited. Most student complaints were not really about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than it has heretofore."

The New York Times editorial is among the more dangerous documents threatening higher education in America to have appeared in a major newspaper since the McCarthy period, when professors were fired for their views on economics. (At the University of Michigan in the 1950s, two professors were fired for belonging or having belonged to the Communist Party, and one professor was let go for favoring "Scandinavian economics.") "Quality of teaching" is one thing -- no one defends unqualified teachers or mere propagandists. But no substantive allegations regarding the poor quality of scholarship, or "lack of rigor" in the department, have been made against Columbia's Middle East department -- for the simple reason that such claims have no foundation. The Times' invocation of "scholarly rigor" is really a thinly veiled demand that professors follow what it defines as an acceptable, "fair" pedagogical line.

But as soon as the "fairness" of views is made the criterion for retaining a teacher, the door is opened to witch hunts and chaos. No two students will agree on what is a "fair" view of a controversial issue. The substantial Arab-American community of Dearborn, Mich., not to mention many liberal American Jews, would probably find almost every course taught in political science departments in the United States on the Arab-Israeli conflict to be hopelessly biased against the Arabs and Palestinians. Why are they less worthy arbiters than the editorial board of the New York Times?

When I have taught the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict at the University of Michigan, I have had fair numbers of Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans and Jewish-Americans in my class. My class evaluations have overall been good to excellent, but I always have a handful complaints from both sides. Some Arab-Americans blast me for naively accepting key claims of Zionism when I argue for Israel's right to exist. Some Jewish students stridently insist that Jerusalem belongs solely to Israel and that is that.

The fact is that you will never get agreement on such matters of opinion, and no university teacher I know seeks such agreement. The point of teaching a course is to expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help them think critically about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their own, original arguments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures. That is why the New York Times editorial is so wrong, and so dangerous. University teaching is not about fairness, and there is no body capable of imposing "fair" views on teachers. It is about provoking students to think analytically and synthetically, and to reason on their own. In the assigned texts, in class discussion, and in lectures, the students are exposed to a wide range of views, whether fair or unfair.

Elected bodies throughout the United States, dominated by the Christian right, are now considering radical programs such as imposing the teaching of "intelligent design" in biology classes, or abolishing academic tenure (the practice of not firing professors for their views). Even Congress has succumbed to the pressure: The House of Representatives passed an outrageous bill, HR 3077, mandating that area studies programs that receive federal money must "foster debate on American foreign policy from diverse perspectives" -- a heavy-handed attempt to mandate pedagogy that supports the American administration in power and supports Israeli policies uncritically.

The New York Times is a bastion of liberalism and Enlightenment values in an increasingly hysterical and intolerant time. But it has lent this burgeoning movement legitimacy by calling for official oversight of views in the classroom. Its editors should stop to consider that any society that censors Joseph Massad's teaching is unlikely to stop there. The next step will be to censor the newspapers as well. "Unfair," "liberal" views such as those apparent in many New York Times articles and editorials may be put under scrutiny by the same sort of people who want a party line installed at Columbia.

Recent Stories