“Dye A Log?” read the flyer. On the next line, “Dial Og?” Then, below and in smaller letters, “Can we talk about this?” The yellow flyers were littered around Columbia’s campus on a day in early February, advertising a panel discussion on current prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The session wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the circumstances were. A week earlier, Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon had cancelled an appearance at a Columbia conference at the urging of members of the Jewish community. The gesture was clear: this was the latest hostile act in the controversy over Columbia Unbecoming, a documentary produced by the pro-Israel organization the David Project and LionPAC, Columbia’s pro-Israel group, which alleges that professors in Columbia’s Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures Department have harassed pro-Israel students. Since its release in November, frightening tales swirled around campus: a student being told that her green eyes disqualified her from a claim to Israel, a former IDF soldier being asked how many Palestinians he had killed. Columbia established a committee to investigate the charges, but its members have been criticized for suspiciously close connections to the accused professors. By the time Ayalon announced his boycott, some students were so sick of the rancor that they decide to try for dialogue. So when the Union of Progressive Zionists organized a dialogue event, several Jewish and Muslim student groups signed on as cosponsors.
They weren’t the only ones. Also eager to participate was a new organization called Columbians for Academic Freedom, founded in December by students involved with Columbia Unbecoming. CAF seeks to ensure that the administration cannot, in their words, “whitewash over” the controversy. That’s not all they seek, though: CAF claims its broad mission is to promote free intellectual inquiry for all; in keeping with that, their charges against MEALAC are that professors have assaulted academic freedom by suppressing their views. \t
This approach has appealed to many, likely because it distinguishes them from groups like the David Project, which are bluntly pursuing Israel’s agenda in the classroom, and makes them appear to care mainly about students’ rights. But CAF’s campaign shows that this is not true: they fail to make the crucial distinctions between conduct and content that would demonstrate that their case is about harassment and not about Israel, leading to the unavoidable conclusion that CAF is trying to undermine academic freedom, even as they claim to champion it.
CAF cannot control the media, Columbia’s administration, or members of the Jewish community claiming to act on their behalf. They will not determine the outcome of the dispute. It’s possible that their efforts are more confused than calculated. But their campaign, at the center of the controversy, represents and facilitates the attack of all MEALAC’s detractors: while fighting under a banner of academic freedom, MEALAC’s accusers are actually spearheading an attack on it. Understanding their arguments’ murky logic is crucial to salvaging this value at Columbia–and perhaps across the country too.
CAF’s agenda is listed on their web site, which also hosts a blog. The most reasonable of their four demands is that Columbia investigate “the charges of abuse raised by students in the film Columbia Unbecoming.” Abuse is a serious offense and should not be tolerated. But a case against abuse is not necessarily a case for academic freedom–bad behavior and intellectual censorship are not the same thing.
If that request does not support CAF’s claim to advocate academic freedom, the other three invalidate it. Two of them actually seek to strengthen the tools of campus censorship under the guise of making Columbia a more respectful campus: they ask for a “zero-tolerance policy toward any harassment…in the classroom and on campus,” with a strengthened complaint system to enforce it. CAF also wants a “single standard and policy for ALL minorities and ethnic groups on campus,” and echoing this, they speak out frequently against racist and anti-Semitic graffiti on campus, apparently seeking to promote tolerance on campus while they promote freedom in the classroom.
Fighting prejudice is important, but these demands are unmistakable elements of a campus speech code–policies many universities have which, in the name of making minorities feel more comfortable, can open classroom discourse to being censored whenever someone is offended by it. Most advocates of academic freedom oppose speech codes on campus and in the classroom for that reason. In that light, CAF’s request signals that what they really want is for Jewish students to be explicitly included in a university speech code, for the university to protect Jewish students from ideas they dislike and professors who hurt their feelings. If they are fighting for tolerance on campus through elimination of disrespectful speech, then they are seeking censorship–making their campaign, in fact, an attack on academic freedom.
CAF’s final request actually asks the university to undertake censorship on their behalf. Like other Israel advocates, CAF requests that MEALAC “diversify” and overhaul its curriculum. This is a clear violation of academic freedom, the student group’s supposed raison d’etre. It also shows what they really want: They have repeatedly avowed that they oppose MEALAC’s conduct, not its content; including this in their platform proves that’s not so. If CAF cared only about academic freedom, or prosecuting a harassment case, it wouldn’t need to critique MEALAC’s syllabi. It can’t be ideal for an entire department to promote a single viewpoint, but this has not been proven true about MEALAC–and if it were, correcting it means deciding that violating academic freedom is less shameful than countenancing a biased department. It’s a decision the university could make–in fact, under pressure, Columbia has recently established an advisory committee to oversee MEALAC–but it cannot come under the rubric of academic freedom.
This request is not isolated. The students of CAF pepper their arguments with anecdotes that have more to do with content than behavior. Bari Weiss, a cofounder, recalls an exam that asked her to prove Israel is not a democracy, and then to demonstrate that Edward Said’s theses about Israel had been correct. “I just would have liked to have been allowed to argue with Said,” she says. It’s an understandable sentiment, but exam content can hardly harass, so the example doesn’t support a harassment case. It seem that Weiss is really objecting to what she sees as viewpoint discrimination, but there’s no evidence that this has occurred either. Exams are academic exercises–they don’t require students to believe the arguments they’re making, just to learn how to make them. Should a creationist biology student opt out of demonstrating that they understand evolutionary theory? Should a segregationist student refuse to learn the reasoning behind civil rights? And what if Weiss had argued with Said? To my knowledge, CAF has yet to show that any student whose paper contradicted a MEALAC professor’s views was punished for it. Students who oppose CAF, meanwhile, cite many examples of receiving excellent grades on projects that were highly critical of Palestinian nationalism and other ideas many MEALAC professors sympathize with. Finally, even if discrimination occurred, regulating against it is nearly as problematic as the crime is: professors would be open to accusations of prejudice from anyone dissatisfied with their grade; it is hard to imagine classes functioning under those con
ditions.
Some civil libertarians, notably Nat Hentoff, have joined CAF in declaring that MEALAC should be overhauled. In a Village Voice column, Hentoff concluded that “The answer to this dilemma is for [Columbia president] Lee Bollinger to provide an actually diversified Middle East studies department. It’s not about bringing in pro-Israel professors, but scholars who teach—not inculcate.” Hentoff bases this on the belief that MEALAC imposes a pro-Palestinian “orthodoxy” on students and suppresses alternate perspectives. This is a serious charge, but it’s far from being proven true: even CAF students cite a mixed MEALAC experience, agreeing that such professors as Rashid Khalidi are highly tolerant of alternate views. Even if a few are not, they could never truly “indoctrinate” in a modern university: students can drop courses at will and have access to a wide range of media and viewpoints. CAF’s very existence proves that indoctrination isn’t succeeding. If MEALAC classes are generally is slanted toward the pro-Palestinian, it is a minority perspective in American media and politics–making MEALAC a place where students will likely become more open-minded, not less.
To be fair to the CAF students, they are really just a collection of individuals who continue to feel passionately on the subject. They are sincere about their cause, and they may not know exactly what they want. When asked their goals, Weiss muses that she just wishes respectful dialogue were the norm at Columbia. They don’t mention the agenda points posted on the web site at all, and when queried about them, they vacillate–unsure, it seems, of not only whether they stand behind their web site but of what the site says.
But confusion is dangerous when you’re enabling a campaign to control academic dialogue on Israel, the effects of which are already lasting. MEALAC professor Joseph Massad is not teaching his most highly criticized class this semester, and Khalidi was recently removed from the leadership of a Middle East Studies training program for New York City public school teachers. Columbia recently created an advisory committee to help run MEALAC. Whether or not CAF supports these developments, they are being undertaken in their name and draw inspiration from their arguments.
Most disturbingly, in February the Israel on Campus Coalition launched a national hotline for reporting report anti-Israel bias in the classroom and on campus. The Jewish community, it seems, is becoming more concerned with sheltering its youth from controversial ideas–and sheltering Israel from critique–than it is with free thought. This sends the frightening message to young Jews that when they hear something that offends them, the proper response is not to intelligently consider or refute it, but to report it to an anonymous 800-number. If allowed to continue, such developments will quickly sound a death-knell for academic freedom–and in the process, do a supreme disservice to the next generation of American Jews, who are perfectly capable of thinking for ourselves.
