To the Editor:
Re “Mideast Tensions Are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia” (news article, Jan. 18):
The most serious charge against Prof. Joseph Massad of Columbia is that he violated the academic freedom of one of his students by conditioning class attendance on her willingness to agree with his perspective on controversial events.
According to the student, and at least one other witness, she raised her hand during a discussion of Israel’s incursions into the West Bank to point out that Israel often issued warnings to civilians before its bombings. Professor Massad reportedly replied, “If you’re going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people, then you can get out of my classroom.”
If Professor Massad indeed made such a statement, which he denies, then he violated the student’s academic freedom to express views contrary to his. Columbia has a duty to determine if this serious accusation is accurate and to take appropriate action if it is.
Alan M. Dershowitz
Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 18, 2005
The writer is a professor at Harvard Law School.
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To the Editor:
I had the privilege of attending Prof. Joseph Massad’s “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies” class in 2001 while a student at Barnard.
Professor Massad was unable to speak more than five sentences without being interrupted during his lectures. It got to the point where several of us wished he would tell students to stop interrupting his lectures, but he never did. Professor Massad made sure that every voice was allowed to be heard in his classroom.
To every interruption he listened calmly and responded kindly. He never once belittled, made fun of or intimidated any student in his classroom while I was there. In fact, it was those he disagreed with the most whom he often seemed to have the closest relationships with.
Joseph Massad was one of the finest professors I encountered during my time at Barnard and Columbia. I may not have always agreed with him, but he always had my utmost respect, and I know I had his as well.
Rachel Bloom
London, Jan. 18, 2005
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To the Editor:
Our documentary “Columbia Unbecoming” has sparked not an “academic squabble” but a fundamental debate about the use of the classroom for propaganda.
The issue extends beyond Columbia professors’ denouncing Israel’s right to exist. The hyper-focus on Israel-Palestine obscures any academically credible understanding of the region by discounting the plight of ethnic, religious and racial minorities in the Arab world.
Professors hostile to Israel obstruct the study of - and Americans’ natural instinct to help - the Arab region’s victims and second-class peoples: the black slaves of Mauritania, the Iranian Bahai, African Muslims now slaughtered in Darfur, Christians in Iraq, Sudan, Egypt and Lebanon, not to mention women, gays and dissidents. Columbia’s Palestinianism is, apart from a being a bias against the Jewish state, a weapon of mass distraction.
Charles Jacobs
President, The David Project
Boston, Jan. 18, 2005
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To the Editor:
“Mideast Tensions Are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia” is a chilling, but important, article about a growing problem within the halls of academia.
If the bullying, intimidation and sometimes hateful rhetoric documented by the David Project’s film “Columbia Unbecoming” was not targeted against Jewish students, but instead members of other minorities, we’d probably be reading about faculty dismissals and the triumph of diversity over bigotry. (Imagine the university’s response to a professor asking a Palestinian student, “How many Israeli schoolchildren did you kill?” or “Did you celebrate on 9/11?”)
I pray that Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, and his investigative committee will shed more light on the not-so-thin line between hate speech and free speech and determine with wisdom and fairness how our institutions should deal with abuse when it comes from those we’ve entrusted to educate our young.
Naftali Robert Friedman
New York, Jan. 18, 2005
