Non-academic debate By URIEL HEILMAN
Deena Shanker was a freshman at Columbia College when she first encountered what has now famously been portrayed as the Ivy League university's problem of rampant bias, hostility and vilification of pro-Israel students and viewpoints in courses on the Middle East. She was in a class called "Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies," taught by Prof. Joseph Massad, and in a discussion in the spring of 2002 on Israel's military incursions into Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Shanker said she raised her hand to point out that Israel often issued public warnings prior to its bombings to warn Palestinian civilians in the area. Massad, she said, exploded with rage. "If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people then you can get out of my classroom!" Massad shouted, according to Shanker's account. ....
But the incident Shanker said she experienced does not seem to have been an isolated one. Week after week over the past several months, a growing number of Columbia students have come forward to detail charges that classes in the school's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department (MEALAC) have become a forum for anti-Israel vitriol.
They say professors routinely use their positions to promote anti-Israel activism, discourage free intellectual discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict and denigrate students sympathetic to Israeli policies. The result, they say, is a hostile academic environment in which it is impossible for students to express their opinions freely.
There are stories of one professor demanding of an Israeli student "how many Palestinians have you killed," of another taking his class to participate in a pro-Palestinian demonstration, and of a third telling a class that "The Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi." Aside from Massad, Prof. George Saliba, an expert in the history of Islamic science, and Hamid Dabashi, professor of Persian literature and the sociology of culture, have been accused of academic intimidation and bias. ....
Ever since the accusing students went public with their criticism of the professors - in part with the encouragement and financial support of groups outside the university - a host of Columbia students, alumni, trustees, Jewish organizational officials and even a US congressman have demanded that Columbia rein in its delinquent teachers. Faced with the growing controversy, university officials have met with aggrieved students, set up an ad hoc committee to review the allegations until a more permanent one can be established and pledged to overhaul Columbia's grievance process for students charging professors with inappropriate academic conduct. ...
But critics are already charging that the university committee appointed to investigate student claims of bias and intimidation is tainted. They say it is stacked with faculty members who are hostile to Israel - some are signatories to a petition demanding that Columbia divest from companies that sell military equipment to the Jewish state - and who have personal relationships with the professors they have been asked to investigate. ....
Rabbi Charles Sheer, who recently retired as Columbia's Jewish chaplain after 34 years, says the larger problem is that Columbia students are being taught distorted views of the Middle East. "It's an academic question," Sheer says. "It's not that easy for the university to clarify whether the students were intimidated. It ends up being a kind of 'he said, she said' thing. But that's not the point," he says. "The point is you have to step back and see if the future State Department members, who are going to be trained at Columbia - because many of them are trained at our university - are they getting an education that's a balanced one?"
According to Shanker, a MEALAC major, the bias was most obvious in Massad's classroom. "If you counted the number of times that Massad called Israel a Jewish supremacist racist state, it's unbelievable. He teaches that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the dissolution of the State of Israel," Shanker says. "The focus is on the intimidation, but people should be focusing on the fact that he's teaching things that aren't true."
BOLLINGER ACKNOWLEDGES that Columbia has work to do when it comes to presenting the full picture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East as a whole. Already, Bollinger says, he has added new faculty and programs focused on Israel, raised funds for the endowment of a new university chair in modern Israeli and Jewish studies, and invited scholars from Israel to come teach at Columbia.
"How are we doing and how can we improve our teaching and research on subjects involving the Middle East and Israel-Palestinian issues in particular?" Bollinger says. "I see that as the most important outcome of this." Bollinger's response also has been seen by some as a reaction to threats by alumni and donors to withdraw their financial support from the university if Columbia does not resolve these charges satisfactorily.
Massad agrees that the MEALAC department is unbalanced, but he believes it actually favors studying Israel. MEALAC, he says, is charged with covering one billion south Asians, 300 million Arabs, tens of millions of Turks, Iranians, Kurds and Armenians, and six million Israelis. To that end, MEALAC has devoted three full-time professors to cover Israel and Hebrew, four full-time professors to cover the Arab world, and two full-time professors to cover South Asia. The proportions hardly seem fair.
But Pipes and others say that misses the point: It's not the number of professors studying Israel versus other areas, but the political orientation the professors bring to the classroom that matters. "I'm not interested in having Israel studies; I'm interested in having balance in Israel studies," Pipes says. "Where it counts - diversity of opinion - it's locked down and it's one outlook."
In the meantime, the controversy has become an all-out political war for the soul of Columbia's Middle East studies department.
