Middle East Studies: University Response to Controversy Focuses On Systemic Failures

In a controversy that never seemed to stop snowballing, what began as a series of student complaints in a 20-minute, low-budget documentary grew into a tumultuous campus crisis that shook every part of Columbia this year.

Its shorthand name became "the MEALAC controversy," in reference to the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department at the center of the storm. But the fallout from the now-infamous Columbia Unbecoming film and its accompanying furor ranged far beyond any one department.

At stake were a number of contentious issues including the rights of students; the nature of political discourse in the classroom; the proper methods for handling students' grievances; and the broad, ambiguous, and frequently invoked principle of academic freedom.

The debate over these issues took place not just on Columbia's campus, but also on the news and editorial pages of major newspapers, on the Web sites of several prominent pro-Israel commentators, and in strongly worded statements from organizations like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The New York Daily News, in a jumbo front-page headline, called Columbia a "poison Ivy." Alan Dershowitz, the noted Harvard law professor, said Columbia's faculty is "loaded with extremists." Several outside pundits--though no students-- called Columbia an anti-Semitic university.

As the maelstrom in the media raged, Columbia's administration handled the controversy delicately, being careful not to take sides between the students raising complaints and the professors accused of misconduct. In a series of public statements, University President Lee Bollinger offered a nuanced defense of academic freedom but said that professorial autonomy has limits. Meanwhile, the University slowly revamped its grievance channels, resulting in the announcement at the end of this semester of an array of new policies that are meant to be clearer and more robust than the old procedures.

"There were too many instances when particular individuals in the administration or on the faculty didn't know where to turn to deal with a grievance," Bollinger said last month. It's hard to know how badly Columbia's reputation has been damaged or what the long-term effects will be on the MEALAC department and the professors under attack. But the hope of the administration--a hope shared by most students and faculty--is that in the future, when students raise complaints about what goes on in the classroom, people will know where to turn.

A Weighty Report

The first substantive step the administration took in response to the Columbia Unbecoming firestorm was to appoint, at the end of last semester, a five-member ad hoc faculty committee to investigate students' complaints about the MEALAC department.

For two months, the committee deliberated. When it finally released its conclusions in a 24-page report on March 31, it issued a harsh condemnation of Columbia's grievance procedures and advising channels, saying that for years, students' complaints about Middle East studies professors were ignored or mishandled. As a result, the complaints festered, and the MEALAC department became infected by suspicion, incivility, and an unhealthy, highly politicized atmosphere. "Columbia and Barnard students therefore found themselves in a thicket of confusing procedures," the report said, "few of which seemed likely to produce the desired outcome: an opportunity to attend to concerns about faculty and courses."

The ad hoc committee also said it found no evidence of anti-Semitism, and it addressed three specific, highly publicized allegations of professorial misconduct-- two involving assistant professor Joseph Massad and one involving professor George Saliba.

Of the three incidents, the committee found one to be "credible:" an incident in spring 2002 when Massad allegedly shouted at a student, Deena Shanker, BC '05, to get out of his class because she was defending Israeli military conduct. The committee said Massad violated standard norms of acceptable professorial conduct. Two other students interviewed by the committee corroborated Shanker's account, but Massad has staunchly denied it. Recently, 20 of Massad's former students who say they were enrolled in the class in question signed a petition denying the exchange ever occurred.

At the time the report was released, some students criticized the committee for addressing only three particular instances of alleged misconduct.

"The very least I'd expect of the committee is some sort of accountability," said Aharon Horwitz, CC '04, who appeared in Columbia Unbecoming and brought complaints before the committee. "Why did they choose to ignore so many incidents and only focus on the three most public incidences?"

Ira Katznelson, the Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History who chaired the ad hoc committee, defended the report, saying it was not the committee's intention to address exhaustively every incident it investigated.

"We took seriously and listened to everything we heard including issues that fell outside our remit," Katznelson said.

Indeed, the majority of complaints the committee heard concerned perceptions of bias in the Middle East studies curriculum, an area outside the committee's charge to investigate only specific claims of abuse or discrimination. Still, the difficulty in separating claims about classroom intimidation from claims about political advocacy or the teaching of lies and propaganda--especially in a department that has drawn fire for years because it is widely seen as heavily pro-Palestinian--has hovered over this controversy from the beginning.

Ultimately, the committee avoided any consideration of the Middle East studies curriculum, instead limiting itself to a detailed evaluation of the University's grievance channels. When the report was released at the end of March, it added urgency and direction to a process of revising Columbia's grievance procedures that had already been underway.

A Slew of New Procedures

On April 11, just two weeks after the release of the ad hoc committee's report, Bollinger announced a series of new grievance procedures intended to clarify and augment the pre-existing procedures. The changes included internal revisions to individual schools' policies, as well as several new University- wide measures. The administration also specified three grounds on which students may lodge a grievance about a professor's classroom conduct: the failure of a professor to respect differing opinions, the use of faculty authority to pressure students to support a political cause, and any behavior that has a harmful effect on the learning environment.

At the center of the new policies was the formation of a permanent five member faculty committee in Arts and Sciences. The committee, which will be chaired by biology professor Stuart Firestein but whose other members have not yet been chosen, will hear student grievances that could not be reconciled through more informal channels, like student advising, or students can bring grievances directly to the committee. The vice president for Arts and Sciences, Nicholas Dirks, will decide whether to adopt the committee's recommendations, and students can appeal the decision to the provost, Alan Brinkley, whose say is final.

The students who have raised complaints about the MEALAC department were generally supportive of the new grievance policies, while wishing that students' rights had been made more clear and saying that students--not just faculty--need to be involved in the evaluation of grievances.

"It's funny that you put a mechanism in place before you define a problem," said Ariel Beery, GS '05, president of the General Studies Student Council, and one of the leaders of a group of students defending the allegations of intimidation. "The problem is what the rights of students are. Students' rights aren't well defined."

Indeed, there appeared to be some initial confusion about the proper scope of the new grievance procedures, even among the central administration. On the day the procedures were announced, Bollinger and Brinkley told Spectator that the new standing faculty committee would hear complaints about classroom bias, but Dirks, in a separate interview, said that the committee was limited to hearing specific claims about abuse or intimidation and that bias should be addressed only through an internal academic review of a department's curriculum.

Since then, the administrators have reconciled their positions, saying the committee will hear any grievances brought before it but may refer the complaint to other individuals, like department chairs, if it feels the complaint is outside its scope.

"We can't draw a bright line between intimidation and bias, because there is no bright line between those two things," Brinkley said. "We have to let people express their grievances and their complaints, and then let the grievance process, at whatever level, try to figure out what the best way to deal with them is."

Beyond MEALAC

The Columbia Unbecoming controversy was centered on a few specific professors, most notably Massad, Saliba, and Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies Hamid Dabashi-- all of whom have drawn fire from pro-Israel groups like Campus Watch for years. But as the controversy grew, the ramifications broadened, and not just for the University's grievance policies.

One professor who has been adversely affected by the heightened scrutiny surrounding Middle East studies at Columbia is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature. Khalidi, a celebrated scholar of Syria, Palestine, and the Middle East, is based in Columbia's history department, not in MEALAC, and no students have voiced complaints about him.

But in February, just as the criticism in the media of Columbia's Middle East studies program was climaxing, the New York City Department of Education dismissed Khalidi from a professional-development program in which he had been scheduled to lecture city schoolteachers on Middle East politics. The impetus for the dismissal was an article in The New York Sun that published statements Khalidi had made calling Israel a "racist" and an "apartheid" state.

Khalidi has faced controversy at Columbia before--when he arrived here two years ago as a high-profile recruit from the University of Chicago, his Edward Said chair drew criticism because Columbia initially refused to release the names of the donors who funded it. When the University did release the donors, the United Arab Emirates was among them.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Khalidi is currently a finalist for a new chair in Middle East studies at Princeton, raising the possibility that the firestorm he encountered at Columbia prompted him to consider a move elsewhere.

The MEALAC controversy also had implications on other events this semester, even if it did not directly cause them.

The University announced in March the creation of a new chair in Israeli studies, which it hopes to fill by fall 2006.

Last month, in a move that seemed intended to quell recent criticism that Columbia is intolerant, Bollinger announced a special one-million-dollar fund to foster multicultural dialogue and awareness.

And in MEALAC, an advisory committee of faculty from outside the department has been brought in to assist in the department's governance. Dirks would say little more about that committee's role other than to confirm its existence, but the move to bring in faculty from other departments to help govern a department is unusual.