Universities don’t make a habit of publicizing their cultural differences to the surrounding communities that support them. However, the situation in the Middle-Eastern-studies corner of our local branch of the academy escaped to the public’s attention because of the above-mentioned episodes of harassment. It seemed reasonable to many of the trustees, alumni, donors and other “outsiders” who have now gotten involved that affiliated Jews and others of pro-U.S. or pro-Israel views at Columbia needed a place to learn about the Middle East where they would not encounter hostile bias or ill treatment. But what many have not understood is that this problem cannot be eliminated without breaking the intellectual monopoly that exists within MEALAC.
This need is not limited to MEALAC or to Columbia’s affiliated Jews. Homogeneity of views is the rule in academic departments teaching the humanities and social sciences. Such homogeneity, in general, leads to smugness, which escalates to arrogance, and then produces intolerance and harassment of those who disagree. There is no question, however, that the problem has been particularly acute in MEALAC. The only cure is the cultivation of intellectual diversity in the staffing of the department. With the breaking of the stifling intellectual orthodoxy that dominates Columbia and similar institutions, true intellectual diversity would also begin to bubble up from within. This wholesale unraveling is the ultimate nightmare of the apparatchiks who rule the present order.
Importantly, experts of any ethnicity can perform this vital function. There are, specifically, many examples of Arab and Iranian scholars whose recruitment could be considered a triumph: for Columbia, for the United States, and above all for the students (and many examples of Israeli scholars whose recruitment would provide no such benefit).
To date, this proposed solution has been explicitly rejected by the administration. President Bollinger’s March 23 address on this subject was quoted by The New York Times as follows:
“We should not accept the idea that the remedy for lapses is to add more professors with different political points of view, as some would have us do,” Mr. Bollinger said. “The notion of a balanced curriculum, in which students can, in effect, select and compensate for bias, sacrifices the essential norm of what we are supposed to be about in a university. It’s like saying of doctors in a hospital that there should be more Republicans, or more Democrats. It also risks polarization of the university, where liberals take courses from liberal professionals and conservatives take conservatives classes.”
Doctors don’t teach politics, of course. It seems those who do teach politics at Columbia will remain those who are willing to present only the current unipolar, therefore unpolarized, view of it. But in the interest of self-preservation, they apparently will be expected to avoid those most arrogant improprieties that attracted the current unwelcome attention.
The Columbia chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East put together an all-day conference on March 6 whose purpose was to encourage Columbia professors to break out from the fear of social ostracism that has suppressed the expression of independent views here and to encourage the meaningful reform whose necessity has now become so evident. We clearly have much work still ahead of us.
We would like to make one thing absolutely clear: We do not endorse any attempt to seek the firing, or the restriction of the freedom of expression, of those with whom we disagree. This is a straw man, likely deliberately raised. We believe that the solution to the problem of bias, intolerance, suppression and harassment in MEALAC can only come through expanding the department with scholars who hold different views, including pro-American and pro Israel views, not by any attempt to hold the current professors to anyone else’s standards of academic objectivity or civil discourse. Such attempts would be futile in the current environment and would attract the cynical charge of McCarthyism, an accusation that we reject and that is clearly more appropriately made against the institutional regime that we oppose.