Posted on 04/09/2005 7:58:19 PM PDT by Land_of_Lincoln_John
Columbia Unbecoming is on the whole just a series of complaints having to do mainly with manner or etiquette in the classroom, but the real issue has to do with the meager and politicized content that professors choose to teach. As Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies department at King’s College, University of London, implied on March 6 in Uris Hall, Massad’s classroom hysterics are not the real problem. The real problem is a polite and affable man like Professor Khalidi, who nevertheless peddles political propaganda in class, propaganda masquerading as real scholarship.
Two articles in the March 23, 2005 issue of the Columbia Spectator are typical in that they contain a defense of the status quo at Columbia and a dismissal of the charges in Columbia Unbecoming, on the grounds that this film or more generally this fiasco has politicized classroom discussion at our university. This way of proceeding is patently dishonest to anyone who has been aware of the already explicitly politicized nature of American academic life, especially in the humanities, since the 1970’s. It is not the students in Columbia Unbecoming who have politicized the MEALAC department. This department, like nearly all others of its kind at other universities, and like other departments within Columbia itself, has already long ago replaced disinterested scholarship with political activism. Now that others who disagree have entered the political arena and wish to struggle against entrenched activists like Massad or Khalidi on their own terms, these professors and their allies are speaking of academic freedom. But the academic defenders of academic freedom cannot be trusted once we consider the following recent events.A few weeks ago Harvard’s faculty of the arts and sciences passed an unprecedented no-confidence motion against President Lawrence Summers. Why? Last January Summers raised some very reserved questions to a private body of faculty, about whether there might be innate differences between men and women with regards to both intellectual abilities and preferences. Despite considerable studies on just this subject since at least the 1970’s—a fact well known to anyone outside the sanctimonious and provincial humanities faculties—Summers’ questions were deemed too free for academic discourse. To start, a professor in the audience stormed out and claimed nearly to have fainted, or worse (Summers maybe should have been more sensitive to the tender feelings of women in the audience).
Despite self-abasing Soviet-era-style public apologies, on three different occasions, Summers nearly lost his job—he still might—and was bullied into appointing two different task-force groups to investigate the matter of women’s employment in the sciences at Harvard. The presidents of three other universities have written to express disapproval of his having raised questions. In the face of this academic abuse of disinterested inquiry, this stifling of Summers’ legitimate intellectual questioning, did the defenders of Massad’s academic freedom at Columbia rise to defend Summers? Could one even imagine them doing so?Consider another, less-well-known incident.
Last September 15, at DePaul University in Chicago, Professor Thomas Klocek entered a discussion with students who ran a booth for the organization Students for Justice in Palestine. The disagreement was heated, but by all accounts the most Professor Klocek may have done is to resolutely stand up for Israel in the face of equally resolute accusations. The students at the booth, however, felt aggrieved and filed the usual litany of complaints, chief among these being of course racism. Professor Klocek has been suspended by DePaul—and again, none of the champions for academic freedom among Columbia’s faculty or administration has said a word about this. As a matter of fact, it is an event altogether ignored by academia at large—we are to assume professors at other universities have been too busy sending letters to Harvard to complain against Lawrence Summers’ heresy.
Professor Massad’s behavior in the classroom—not to speak of private meetings or political rallies—has been far worse than Summers’ or Klocek’s, but far from being suspended, he is being defended and honored by other professors. He will not be censured or punished. These inconsistencies do not really amount to hypocrisy, because hypocrisy would mean that Massad’s allies believe in academic freedom but do not apply it consistently.
Rather, I deny they believe in academic freedom at all. In academia, it is a phenomenon that has become routine, as one can judge for example from the use of multiculturalism. Academic multiculturalism has never had anything to do with the careful scholarly study of non-European cultures, but with the lionization of intellectual figures like Frantz Fanon or Edward Said. It is not a scholarly school of exegesis, but a political movement founded with the intent of forwarding a narrative of Western and capitalist oppression and third-world victimization.
Far from having anything to do with the careful study of content, of say, Confucian classics or the intricacies of the relationship between Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan, important subjects that take years of mastery of foreign languages and the close reading of primary texts, a multicultural class is more likely to be focused on the jargon-laden theories of mostly Western, post- or crypto-Marxist intellectuals. In fact the scholarly study of foreign cultures is itself often considered an “imperialist” act on the part of Eurocentric Orientalists.
The expression of this agenda in the MEALAC department and its analogues at other universities is anti-Zionism, since Israel is considered the last bastion of Western colonialism. To this party of thinking, academic freedom does not mean freedom for the likes of Summers or Klocek, but only for Massad and Ward Churchill. It is “diverse” to invite Churchill to speak, but not “diverse” to allow Summers to raise questions in private.
The fake issue of diversity is being manipulated to allow a routine abuse of academic integrity in the name of a nebulous academic freedom. In general, the attempt to paint the ideas of the likes of Churchill or Massad as radical, unique statements of dissent that must be carefully nurtured by the university in a homogenous society increasingly ruled by fear is itself a piece of transparent and even risible propaganda. Massad’s ideas are neither unique nor radical or interesting. One can find the same radical ideas posted on little stickers in subway stations, or blared out over megaphones in Union Square: one need not pay to hear them in class. Students take an enormous financial burden to attend a university like Columbia for four years, and they deserve better than the shrill slogans of a Massad or Churchill.
Columbia has an obligation to provide a high-quality education to its students, an education full of rich content, not to subject its students to unprofessional bullying in the classroom and then to graduate incompetents well-trained in the conventional pieties of the day. The provincialism and lack of general knowledge among graduates of this country’s best universities is unbelievable, and this is a result of an academic life that has been more concerned with indoctrinating students with pseudo-Marxist pablum than training them to be careful thinkers and readers with a broad base of knowledge. This is especially worrisome in Middle Eastern Studies departments: given the chaotic situation in that area, a generation of students trained in the languages and rich history of this region, with its conflicting traditions and overlapping hierarchies, is desperately needed. It is neither good scholarship nor prudent practice to graduate another generation of students trained mainly in moral indignation, obsessed with the small state of Israel and with the details of politically motivated academic fictions like the “formation of Palestinian identity."
Departments like the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race—which offers a course of study recently approved by hunger strike—with names redolent of 1930’s era Blut und Boden movements and theories, are not the way to go. Tenured professors, secure in their position, aware of what constitutes good scholarship, and who are witnesses to this routine abuse of academic integrity in the name of very temporal and very conventional political projects can and ought to do something.
See how anti-Israel professors run roughshod over those who dare to disagree.
Ping
Costin Alamariu writes better than 99% of the professionals working as journalists today. He makes Maureen Dowd and most of the writers at the NY Times sound like amateur idiots--not that that takes much doing, but it's impressive in someone still quite young.
This article really nails it, and it focuses on the main reason why I HATE politically correct professors. Not just because I differ from them politically, but because they are ignorant buffoons who shortchange their students and dumb down our country by teaching Marxist pablum.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/massad/#response
BTT!
Columbia Unbecoming http://www.columbiaunbecoming.com/default.htm
Wed April 13 8:00 pm at
the JCC of Fort Lee NJ
1449 Andersen Avenue in Fort Lee N.J.
(201) 947-1735.
Rachel Fish - NY Regional Director of The David Project.
Charles Jacobs - President of The David Project.
Leonard Cole - Director of the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey
(and Columbia Alum).
Very well written op-ed!
"Departments like the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race"
These are designed for lazy, and somewhat stupid people
who want to get decent grades. Who could flunk out of this??
Costin is a student, too. A star in the making?
Yes, I think so. I googled him, and he seems to have won some sort of prize and led his class in high school. This is the best piece of undergraduate writing I've ever seen. Beautiful style, not a word out of place. This guy is extremely impressive, definitely someone to watch.
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