ping
Keep up the good work!
Columbia has a 'chair' endowed in the name of Edward Said. That's all I need to know about this 'university'.
Thank you for your comprehensive, well-written piece. I, for one, was unaware of (or had forgotten about) the Blasi commission.
I think that serious attention has to be given to the proper role of University administrators in correcting a biased department -- something that President Bollinger proudly announced he would not do. As I wrote on another thread, the administration is abrogating its responsibility to department heads, who basically are given a free hand to do anything that they want.
What would President Bollinger do about a head of a natology department who was stridently anti-abortion and only hired professors who shared his belief? What would he do about the head of an English department who believed that only homosexuals can produce meaningful works ofliterature, and only hired professors who shared his belief? What would he do about the head of an economics department who was a Marxist, only staffed his department with confirmed Marxist economists? What would he do about the head of a biology department who stridently opposed the theory of evolution and only staffed his department with confirmed creationists?
Particularly at Columbia, which is so proud of its core curriculum, it is a tragedy to see departments grow in a vacuum, independent of any corrective forces to draw them back into the mainstream. In fact, it is particularly galling that Palestinian arabs are the focus of this department, when there are so many things happening in the Middle East independent of the Palestinian arabs. It seems to me that the department not only is teaching incorrectly about Israel, but it is abrogating its own responsibility by ignoring Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and all the "Stans", where so much is occurring.
I had counselled patience in the past, in the belief that President Bollinger would flex his muscle and ultimately clean up the department, or that the Trustees (including Esta Stecher, who grew up an involved Jewish woman) would pressure the administration back toward fairness. Based upon his response since the report was ready to be released, I no longer have that confidence.
I hope that other alumni with bigger pocketbooks than mine, like Robert Kraft, are having closed-door meetings to try and rectify the situation.
In any case, your article can be a significant turning-point in raising public awareness of what is occurring there. Now if there only were the means to send it to Columbia alumni as a mass mailing (or a mass emailing)...
Excellent job.
and glad it got published in FrontPage Magazine. Their involvement, through Students for Academic Freedom, could be instrumental in straightening Columbia out. They have a good track record of bringing schools into the realization that they must reform. It doesn't hurt that in this case, as you point out, there are Congressmen on the side of the complaining students and also concerned about the skewed agenda of MEALAC.
Again great job.
In other news, this same panel found that Ward Churchill is a true American Indian, an original artist, a PhD, a brilliant scholar, ans a decent, patriotic American.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html
A front-page article on Thursday described a report by a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors. The report found "no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic," but it did say that one professor "exceeded commonly accepted bounds" of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel's conduct toward Palestinians.Of course, they have yet to explain the failure to compair the report, the mandate, and the Columbia Press release. Had they done so, they would see that the report is a whitewash and that they helped perpetuate the myth that the report investigated anti-Semitism and that all claims were investigated.
The article did not disclose The Times's source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.
Under The Times's policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. The Times insisted, however, on getting a response from the professor accused of unacceptable behavior, and Columbia agreed.
Last Wednesday night, after the article had been published on The Times's Web site, the reporter exchanged messages with one of the students who had lodged the original complaints. The student was expecting to read the report shortly. But because of the lateness of the hour, and concern about not having response from other interested parties, the reporter did not wait for a comment for later versions, including the printed one, after the student had read the report.
Without a response from the complainants, the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form. The response was included in an article on Friday. (Go to Article)