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Dissent WIthout Dignity

by Colin Probert
April 08, 2003

I ought to be able to feel proud of my school. The most basic justification for this entitlement is that I pay tuition to attend, and that by accepting these funds the University agrees to hold itself to a standard by which it continues to earn them. However, perhaps more significantly, I believe that Columbia has a duty to maintain my confidence in the scholarship it offers, since the academic background it provides contributes to the future success of its students (from which the University benefits as well). Today I remark with some sadness that I do not feel proud of my school, for it has failed in both of these charges. Indeed, Columbia University has handed over its dignity to Nicholas De Genova.
Crucial to the idea of undergraduate scholarship is the role of the educator: an intellectual who encourages and respects independent thought. Before he was a demagogue, Nicholas De Genova was, in fact, an educator, but his plea for a "million Mogadishus" was neither intellectual nor respectful. Instead, it was filthy and abusive, a verbal mortar shell lobbed indiscriminately from a distance too remote to be challenged by any honest standard. When De Genova gagged up Husseinian propaganda all over the interior of Low he did so as a member of the faculty, polluting the peaceful message of the "teach-in" with a craving for the deaths of millions of Americans--some of whom are parents of Columbia University students. This is a profound betrayal of trust between student and teacher, and it is unacceptable at a place such as this.

One of the cruelest realities of war is what it does to independent thought, brutalizing minds with a storm of propaganda until every free-thinking individual has been beaten into one simplistic position or another. To be sure, this condition is troubling enough without having one of our own faculty members perpetrating the beating; times like these demand that we not abandon our reason and conscience, yet that is exactly what De Genova did. His tirade was far from logical and far from conscientious, instructing us all that murder was not only necessary, but heroic. Words like "outrage" are meant for times like these.

Indeed, De Genova has proven himself more vicious than intellectual, and he has failed his students on a multitude of levels--from personal to professional. The administration is wrong to keep him on the payroll when it has a choice. Money talks--and what it's saying is undignified.

No doubt, however, many would prefer to let De Genova off the hook for his failures, and retreat into the mercurial ideal of academic free speech. While I admire President Bollinger's dedication to this principle, it does not miraculously transform the language of hate into intelligent dialogue; those who thrive on the former have no place on a campus built for the latter. Of course it is true that the professor has first amendment rights--no one is suggesting that he should suffer any legal penalty--but that does not exempt the administration from its obligation to enforce standards of employee integrity. The fact that the event at which he spoke was labeled a "teach-in" does not somehow render De Genova's appeal to violence academic. One can dissent without being filthy and, in failing to do so, he abandoned every pretense of candid rationality that the "teach-in" label was designed to connote. If he had called for the butchery of Russians because they were Russian or Australians because they were Australian, he would have found himself out on Broadway so fast the traffic wouldn't have had time to stop; it should be no different with Americans.

Similarly, if he had stood in front of those hundreds of attentive faces and unveiled some sick brand of Constitutionally-permitted pornography--undoubtedly a lesser evil than the carnage of Somalia--he might not have made CNN, but he surely would have been fired. Such an act would not meet the guardian standard of academic free speech, so why is his call for "fragging"--the assassination of a higher ranking soldier by a lower ranking one--so protected? The answer is: it's not, it shouldn't be, and any attempt at such a categorization is merely a plug for an agenda that the president is very concerned with, regardless of the relevant facts.

Like any other sort of smut, De Genova's comments deserve the protection of the Bill of Rights but not that of academic free speech; he overshot political opinion and spouted off perversion. Praise of a massacre is below the dignity of the students here and should be below the dignity of the University itself--his were not the words of an educator. Whatever your feelings on the war, you cannot call his remarks responsible, you cannot call them intellectual, and you cannot call them academic. As such, you shouldn't have to call him "professor."

I think that we all deserve better than that.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.

Excellent letters, am1st.
When she's up to it, I hope to see Jessica Lynch confront
Columbia University Professor DeGenerate, regarding what
he had hoped would befall her as well as her deceased compatriots,
at the hands of Saddam's regime.

Keep the fire burning. The man has to go.

But, one point. What the professor did does, IMHO, breach legality. To advocate the fragging of officers by their subordinates in a time of war and to do so to students on campus and call the same "patriotic" is purely seditious ... and sedition is illegal.