NEWS
Film implicates improper staff behavior
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Also by Sundeep Malladi:
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by Sundeep Malladi
Thursday, January 20, 2005
A recent film created by the David Project, a pro-Israel group centered in Boston, has brought to light allegations of racist attitudes of pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University.
According to David Project Executive Director Ralph Avi Goldwasser, the film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” features 14 Jewish students at the university who claim three pro-Palestinian professors humiliated and menaced their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in and outside of their classrooms.
According to The New York Times, professor George Saliba told a now-graduated student since she had green eyes, she was not a true ancestral descendant of Israel.
In another, professor Hamid Dabashi was admonished for canceling class to attend a Palestinian rally. However, The New York Times also found only six of the 14 students have first-hand accounts. Both professors taught classes covering political science in the Middle East region.
“Thirty students who were very frustrated wanted help [get] their message to the alumni,” Goldwasser, also the film’s executive producer, said in a phone interview. “We basically provided students a platform.”
The film was kept private for six months and shown only to the administration, but when students realized the university would not act, the film went public in October.
However, Professor Joseph Massad, a junior professor targeted by the film who also teaches politics and is up for tenure, has fired back in a recent online statement.
“[It] is the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel,” Massad wrote. “Pro-Israel groups are pressuring the university to abandon proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship and want to force the university to silence all critical opinions.”
Several other professors echoed Massad’s call for defending the academic rights of professors to express their thoughts in class. Massad has seen support from several petitions — some online — demanding he be allowed to keep his job in the name of academic freedom.
Jennifer Loewenstein — a Jewish-American speaker, founder of the Madison Rafah Sister City Project and one of the more than 1,400 people who signed Massad’s petition — said she “personally feels” that as long as there is no discrimination in terms of grading, studies and learning, then a professor should be able to say whatever he or she wants.
“The whole purpose of a university is to provoke discussion and debate to make people think and question the things they’re all about. This is what learning means: to question and try to refute arguments you’ve heard,” she said.
Loewenstein, who grew up in a Jewish household and has lived in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and traveled throughout the West Bank, said oftentimes Jewish students can be shocked by what they hear from pro-Palestinian speakers or professors.
“Most Jews grow up getting propaganda about Israel and about Jews from the time they are capable of going to school. They get all kinds of mythology,” Loewenstein said. “It denies that Israel is a military superpower, it denies the fact of the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes in 1947 and ‘48.”
Others believe the dilemma at Columbia is part of a larger trend to paint Israel as helpless. Rashid Khalidi, the director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, said the press has blown the story way out of proportion.
“There is a campaign against the Middle East field [by the press] that is not restricted to Columbia and that this issue at Columbia has been picked up as part of that larger campaign,” Khalidi said.
Goldwasser disagreed, however, saying the media was not pro-Israeli, saying many are in “favor of Palestinians because they are underdogs.”
Despite this, Massad recognizes a possible flaw in the recent predicament at the New York university.
“[Columbia] must defend the need for debate and critical consideration of all such questions, whether in public or in the classroom. Anything less would be the beginning of the death of academic freedom.”
Anonymous (January 20, 2005 @ 11:20pm):
"Jennifer Loewenstein...said she 'personally feels' that as long as there is no discrimination in terms of grading, studies and learning, then a professor should be able to say whatever he or she wants."
Much as I hate to agree with that idiot, she's right in this case. No matter how objectionable their personal views, as long as professors present objective facts in their class lectures and do not discriminate (either in grades or recommendations) against students with whom they disagree, they should be allowed to say whatever they want* in public lectures, interviews with the press, or on their own time.
* Within reason, of course. Their are still laws against death threats, for example, or shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater that isn't actually burning. Just because someone is a professor, doesn't mean that he or she gives up the right to free speech. But it also doesn't grant extra freedom -- incitement to violence, no matter the circumstances, is still wrong.
