Academic freedom under fire from the right

Last Wednesday, Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad spoke at Cooper Union with antiwar activist Tariq Ali, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and Columbia student Monique Dols about the recent attacks on academic freedom, particularly at Columbia.

Massad has been under investigation by a committee looking into charges of bias and intimidation in the classroom. While the committee cleared the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures department as a whole, it singled out Massad in particular.

The most serious claim came from student Deena Shanker, who accused him of shouting at her, 'If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom!' However, the only student registered for the class who confirmed the exchange reported the incident differently. The committee said that they found it 'credible that Professor Massad became angered at a question ... and that he responded heatedly,' with no mention of him actually asking Shanker to leave.

Massad, along with three students whom the committee questioned, denied all three versions of the story. Furthermore, Shanker neither reported the incident in her course evaluation, nor filed a formal complaint. Rather than questioning the validity of her story, the committee concluded from this that the university's grievance procedure is inadequate.

The report focused on the accusations against Massad, but largely ignored the systematic campaign against him, what he called a 'witch hunt.' According to Massad, unenrolled students regularly sit in on his class, interrupt his lectures, harass and spy on him. He has also been the subject of repeated attacks from the New York Sun, the New York Post and well-funded Zionist organizations like the David Project.

This is not at all an isolated case. Professors around the country who dare to criticize Israel and the United States, like Ward Churchill and M. Shahid Alam, have faced similar pressure. Tariq Ali suggested that the driving force behind them is an attempt to 'impose the same balances on campuses that they've imposed on the media.' In some respects, it bears a frightening similarity to the repression of radicals during the McCarthy era in the '40s and '50s.

In a country with a political system completely dominated by the right and a notoriously one-sided media that, according to Amy Goodman, 'reinforces homogeneity,' universities are the one place where students can still hear dissenting viewpoints on many issues. That's not to call universities monolithic strongholds of radicalism, but they still actively encourage debate on topics that are taboo in Washington and on CNN, like Israel.

In response, many right-wingers have called for 'balance' of opinions in academia. Balance of viewpoints is certainly important, but here's an example of what they mean by balance: Columbia has six endowed chairs in Jewish studies, as well as several courses that address the Israel-Palestine conflict from a pro-Israel perspective. When the university finally established a chair in Arab studies in 2002, many pro-Israel groups attacked Columbia for not offering adequate 'balance.'

Part of the difficulty in protecting academic freedom, Massad said, is that 'destroying academic freedom is defined as defending it.' This is especially true regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where scholarship is often attacked as 'propaganda' and 'ideology.'

For instance, Massad has been criticized for calling Israel a 'racist state.' Now, it is widely accepted that Israeli soldiers forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Zionist historians like Benny Morris have unearthed documentation of indiscriminate killings, massacres of villages and even several cases of soldiers raping Palestinians, all with the tacit approval of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

Israel offers citizenship to Jews born anywhere in the world, but the thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from Israel are denied the right of return. This is not controversial. But calling it what it is - ethnic cleansing and racism - is 'bias.'

Terms like 'dissent' and 'academic freedom' have become so distorted that, for example, when the College Republicans' affirmative-action bake sale here at NYU is met with protest, they accuse the protesters of infringing on their First Amendment rights. I'll have to double-check this one, but I'm pretty sure the First Amendment covers both a protest against affirmative action and one in defense of it. But this is 'balance': right-wing protest is 'dissent,' whereas left-wing protests violate free speech.

This is not at all about advocating to silence conservatives. On the contrary, a free society cannot survive without an open exchange of ideas, including ideas you don't agree with. Repression of opinions does nothing but emasculate democracy.

Amy Goodman ended the event by quoting Ariel Dorfman, a survivor of the repression and slaughter in Chile after Augusto Pinochet took power: 'It can't happen here. There can never be a dictatorship in this country, we proclaimed to the winds of history that were about to furiously descend on us; our democracy is too solid, our armed forces too committed to popular sovereignty, our people too much in love with freedom.

'But it did happen.'