In response to last week’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting called to address academic freedom in the Palestinian territories, a letter signed by 69 faculty members was circulated to stress support for the issue to both Palestinian and Israeli scholars.
The letter was written in February and sent to University President Lee Bollinger as a reaction to the petition signed earlier that month by 120 faculty members urging the president to speak publicly on academic blockades in Gaza. Its writer, public health assistant professor Judith Jacobson, first disseminated the letter to the mailing list of Scholars of Peace in the Middle East, an international group she co-founded to connect scholars who believe that Israel has a right to exist as a democratic state. On April 23, the day of the faculty meeting on academic freedom, Jacobson delivered the letter to chair of the Executive Committee for the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, professor Katharina Volk. Philosophy professor Haim Gaifman, who signed the letter, later presented it at that meeting.
Since the meeting—held at the request of a special petition and aimed towards creating an advisory committee on academic freedom in Palestine—welcomed only faculty in the Arts and Sciences, Spectator did not obtain a copy of the document until the following weekend. The letter thanks Bollinger for his “past commitment to academic freedom” and lists arguments for why such a discussion should encompass scholars in the neighboring states of Israel and Palestine.
“We would also like to point out that both Israel and the academic freedom of Israeli students and scholars have been under attack for years,” the letter states. Alluding to those who organized Thursday’s meeting, it continues: “Our colleagues did not protest violations of academic freedom when a suicide bomber murdered seven students at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2002, or when eight students were murdered and 11 wounded at a yeshiva in Jerusalem last March.”
After Gaifman read the letter to the approximately 50 faculty in attendance on Thursday, he made a separate statement arguing against the practice of issuing faculty statements on political topics.
“University presidents are public figures who face the outside community, the trustees, the donors, the U.S. congress, and other government agencies. Not so the faculty,” he said in an e-mail.
“Faculty members and students have ample possibilities of organized, publishing ads, protesting on TV. The university encourages these and many other activities on campus by providing university facilities,” Gaifman continued. According to Middle East and Asian Languages professor Gil Anidjar, this opinion on how to tackle problems of academic freedom as Columbia faculty—the meeting’s central thrust—was shared by others.
In an interview on Monday, Jacobson said that seven of the signatories wished to maintain anonymity, a sign, in her view, of the way that the issue has become unnecessarily politicized. “That kind of speaks to the atmosphere they find themselves in,” she said.
Many of the letter’s signatories work on Columbia’s health sciences campus uptown, pointing to a divide witnessed in recent years among University faculty concerned about Israel-Palestine relations.
While a letter in 2007 praising Bollinger for his opposition to academic boycotts on Israel included signatures from doctors and health professionals affiliated with Columbia, the February Gaza petition drew mostly professors in the anthropology, English, history, and MEALAC departments.
Jacobson said she did not disapprove of the meeting’s exclusivity because the advisory committee organizers hope to create—precisely for dealing with Palestinian academic freedom—could exist only in the Arts and Sciences.
“That is where their strength lies,” she said. Yet she was doubtful that the organizers’ views accurately reflected those of the attendees. “The impression from what people told me is that support for their position [for forming an advisory committee] was not what they hoped it would be,” she said.
No official decisions have been made as to the status of an advisory committee. The Faculty of the Arts and Sciences is slated to reconvene for its last meeting of the semester on May 7.
Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks, who oversees the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, declined to comment on the issue, citing the meeting’s privacy.
Comments
We're looking for comments that are interesting and substantial. If your comments are excessively self-promotional or obnoxious you will be banned from commenting. Consult the comment FAQ and legal terms.