[Peace-discuss] The Clash of Ideas at Columbia (7 Letters)

[David Green]

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April 11, 2005
The Clash of Ideas at Columbia (7 Letters)
 



To the Editor:

Re "Intimidation at Columbia" (editorial, April 7): 

The essence of a university lies in not sanctioning
professors or students for the content of their ideas
- even when some find them offensive. Universities
permit radical ideas because they demand rigorous
proof before accepting ideas as facts.

Columbia does not operate in the way you describe.
Individual departments do not have the "power to
appoint and promote faculty," and therefore cannot
have that power "wrested away" from them. The tenure
review process is carefully designed to exclude a
candidate's department from wielding any power over
the final tenure decisions.

A close reading of the faculty committee's report
would suggest that assertions against Joseph Massad, a
professor in the Middle Eastern studies department,
have not been proved and that sharp disagreement
exists among students about whether the incidents in
question even took place. 

Akeel Bilgrami
Jonathan R. Cole
Jon Elster
New York, April 7, 2005
The writers are, respectively, a professor of
philosophy; a professor of the university and a former
provost; and a professor of social sciences at
Columbia University.

•

To the Editor:

"Intimidation at Columbia" conflates two different
issues under the rubric of intimidation: charges that
certain faculty members have behaved in an
unprofessional manner toward students, and the ideas
of those teaching Middle Eastern studies at Columbia.

Professors who do not treat students properly should
be reprimanded. But for a student to encounter
unfamiliar or even unpleasant ideas does not
constitute intimidation. 

Exposure to new ideas is the essence of education.
Your call for the university to investigate "the
quality and fairness of teaching" and "complaints
about politicized courses" because students do not
like the professors' ideas opens a Pandora's box that
can never be closed. 

Would you favor an investigation of every class on
campus that deals with a controversial issue - for
instance, whether I give enough class time to the
pro-slavery argument, or whether economists present
globalization in too flattering a light? 

The autonomy of professors in designing and teaching
their classes is the foundation of academic freedom.

Eric Foner
New York, April 7, 2005
The writer is a professor of history at Columbia
University.

•

To the Editor:

Your April 7 editorial about Columbia University
doesn't address the real issue of the controversy: the
threat to the integrity of the university by the
intervention of organized outside agitators who are
disrupting classes and programs for ideological
purposes. These agitators pose a threat far more
serious than anything Prof. Joseph Massad may or may
not have done. 

If university administrators and concerned citizens
allow this behavior to continue, then the qualities
that make American universities great - free inquiry
and academic freedom - will be sacrificed to achieve
an illusory calm. 

Joan W. Scott
Princeton, N.J., April 7, 2005
The writer is chairwoman of the committee on academic
freedom and tenure, American Association of University
Professors.

•

To the Editor:

While many of us at Columbia feel that the
unsophisticated polemic scholarship and classroom
behavior of several pro-Palestinian professors are
deeply troubling, I question your assertion that "most
student complaints were not really about
intimidation."

As students, we cannot rightly expect that we will
agree with every argument made by each professor we
take classes from, but we should feel safe enough to
critically evaluate our professors' arguments without
fear of retribution (psychological or otherwise). 

Indeed, the shame of the committee's report lies not
in what the report didn't find, but in what it did:
somewhere along the way, Columbia started looking out
for itself and stopped looking out for its students.

Alexander Rolfe
New York, April 7, 2005
The writer is managing editor of Columbia Political
Review.

•

To the Editor:

Yes, the Columbia committee investigating charges of
professorial intimidation decided that there was no
evidence of anti-Semitism in any of the incidents it
investigated. 

But this committee, many of whose members have
expressed anti-Israel views, has a different notion of
anti-Semitism than many Jews do, on campus or off. 

The Israel bashing surrounding the alleged incidents
of intimidation is not the benign exercise of academic
freedom whereby Israeli policies are criticized as
part of instructive discussions about different
political or social systems. Rather, Israel's very
legitimacy to exist is denied. Its leadership and its
army are reviled. 

Should not these strident attacks make Jews
uncomfortable? Railing against the very concept of
Jewish statehood and Jewish self-defense is correctly
seen as anti-Semitism.

Leonard M. Druyan
New York, April 7, 2005
The writer is a senior research scientist, Center for
Climate Systems Research, Columbia University.

•

To the Editor:

All people are biased. There is nothing wrong with
faculty members at Columbia University having a
pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli policy bias, so long as
they don't intimidate or punish students with opposing
views.

The reality is that many professionals in this
country, from corporate executives to politicians,
bear an anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli bias. We should
welcome those with pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli
policy bias as a counterbalance adding to the
marketplace of free ideas. 

Andrew M. Alul
Chicago, April 7, 2005

•

To the Editor:

As you observe, the ad hoc faculty committee
investigating alleged intimidation of students had a
limited charge. Its charge was investigative, to
assess the credibility of certain claims. Its charge
was not judicial. 

No one was "judged clearly guilty" of anything.
Moreover, the report also concluded that at least one
faculty member was unceasingly harassed and
threatened, mostly by people not enrolled in his
classes, many of whom were not members of the
university. 

As an American, a Jew, a scholar and a teacher, I find
graver danger in such activities than in anything that
has been documented concerning any Columbia faculty
member. 

Jonathan Arac
Pittsburgh, April 7, 2005
The writer is a professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University.



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