Columbia Unbecoming controversy
Many felt that Massad was the target of a witch-hunt for his pro-Palestinian views and that the controversy was part of a larger campaign to rein in academic freedom in the U.S.[7][8][9][10][11] Some argued that the students' perception of bias against Israel stemmed from their unfamiliarity with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the social conditioning of a strongly pro-Israel society.
Yet fundamentally, the difference between Massad's message and its more blatant and visually tangible manifestation are only subtle.Massad, in a speech at a large pro-Palestinian rally on campus on April 17, compared Israel with apartheid-era South Africa.
[20] He argued in an email sent to his students the day after that he was "morally bound to perform a public duty," but apologized for the inconvenience the cancellation caused and promised that it would be made up for with an additional session.
Dabashi's reply was particularly dismissive:[23] It is a sad and astonishingly degenerate development in the American academy when a Jewish rabbi, a Christian priest, a Muslim mullah, or any other figure of religious authority ventures to step out of his or her role as a preacher and interferes with the cornerstone of academic freedom at a university.
Those who are--namely our collectively acknowledged administrators, senators, and the overwhelming majority of our students--have found nothing wrong or remotely questionable in our conduct.Saliba, expressing much the same sentiment, urged Sheer: "Rabbi!
Their goal is to destroy any semblance of either in favour of subjecting democracy and academic life to an incendiary jingoism and to the exigencies of the national security state with the express aim of imploding freedom.
[citation needed] In another column on April 14 in the Spectator, Beery wrote:[36] Our educations are bound in intellectual Egypt, enslaved by the post-colonialist slant that has permeated our social sciences, while our institution is trapped by its old-fashioned bylaws into protecting the employment of those who espouse hateful and violent rhetoric... Will President Bollinger and future Provost Alan Brinkley be our gate and our key to a new and better University?
[citation needed][fn 1] On January 6, 2004, Sheer posted a letter to the Hillel site for the university, stating that the "principal anti-Israel voices" on Columbia were the faculty and academic departments.
"[34] Jonathan Calt Harris on May 4 compared Massad to a neo-Nazi and accused him of supporting terrorism against Israel, of believing in a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, and urged the university to deny him tenure.
Massad replied:[17] My principled stance against anti-Semitism and all kinds of racism is a matter of public record and cannot be assailed by defamatory ‘reports’ or by letters from the ADL that consider them credible sources.
The one that stirred the most controversy was lifted from an article called "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine" by Dabashi and published in Al-Ahram: "Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left…its deep marks on the faces of the Israeli Jews, the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other….
"[47] On October 20, the same day the Sun wrote about the film, Massad received a threatening email from a faculty member which he immediately forwarded to Brinkley: "Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned.
A colleague of the accused professors at MEALAC, Dan Miron, said he heard stories similar to those presented in the film every week, adding that the atmosphere in his department had "anti-Jewish overtones".
During the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which preceded the extermination of European Jews.
Meanwhile, in a statement to the Sun, Israeli Minister Nathan Sharansky, who had recently seen the film, told pro-Israel students at Columbia not to be ashamed because "you are representing the people and the state who are the champions of human rights."
[58] In December,[clarification needed] four Jewish students; Aharon Horwitz,[fn 6] Daniella Kahane, Bari Weiss, and Ariel Beery, formed the group Columbians for Academic Freedom (CAF).
On December 7, 2004, a group of approximately 50 students, faculty, and others, calling themselves the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Academic Freedom at Columbia, held a press conference to protest what they considered silencing of Israel criticism.
[17] Bollinger, however, defended the committee members: "Someone can take a position that I strongly disagree with and they can still be ... capable of looking into something like this objectively," adding that it was important to "avoid a witch hunt on one hand and a whitewash on the other."
"[69] On February 25, The Forward reported that Rashid Khalidi, a professor at MEALAC, not named in Columbia Unbecoming, had been barred by the New York City Department of Education from taking part in a 12-week program about the Middle East for public school teachers.
"[75] Phyllis Chesler, professor emerita at the College of Staten Island, in a speech enthusiastically received by the crowd, referred to the Palestine Solidarity Movement as "a group in my opinion that’s quite similar to the Ku Klux Klan, or to the Nazi Party".
The report found "no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic" and "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom.
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.
This led to a small group of students being able to disrupt them:[27] there is ample evidence of his willingness -- as part of a deliberate pedagogical strategy -- to permit anyone who wished to do so to comment or raise a question during his lectures.
One undergraduate in Professor Saliba's class told us 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."
In an article in the Electronic Intifada, he argued that "[t]he Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report suffers from major logical flaws, undefended conclusions, inconsistencies, and clear bias in favor of the witch-hunt that has targeted me for over three years."
[77] An editorial in the New York Times chided the committee for not having examined "the quality and fairness of teaching" of the professors:[82] But in the end, the report is deeply unsatisfactory because the panel's mandate was so limited.
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.Juan Cole slammed the editorial as "among the more dangerous documents threatening higher education in America to have appeared in a major newspaper since the McCarthy period."
[87] In 2011, Kenneth L. Marcus, founder of the pro-Israeli Brandeis Center, filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights against Barnard College, alleging that a Jewish student had been "steered" away from taking a class with Massad.
[93] In an article in 2015 in Mosaic Magazine titled "How to Fight Anti-Semitism on Campus", she lamented that Massad had won tenure "despite the sustained and strong opposition of student whistleblowers, concerned alumni, and others".
"[10] Columbia's former provost, Jonathan R. Cole, worried about a growing effort "to pressure universities to monitor classroom discussion, create speech codes, and more generally, enable disgruntled students to savage professors who express ideas they find disagreeable."
