Columbia Implodes!
LGF
Here’s a must-read at the Village Voice (yes! really!) by Nat Hentoff, about Columbia University’s secretive, opaque, whitewashed investigation into the bullying Arabist professors of their Middle Eastern studies department:
(Hat tip: NC.)
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Columbia Implodes!
Jimmy Breslin wrote a novel, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, that came to my mind while covering what is now an international story about charges that some professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) bully and intimidate students who don’t agree with them. Since one of my beats is education—from pre-kindergarten on—I have covered a number of dysfunctional college and university administrations around the country. But the handling of this controversy by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, and provost Alan Brinkley is a model of how to confuse and worsen a situation while trying to resolve its core problems.
In December, Brinkley and Bollinger appointed a special committee to investigate the charges by students in the film Columbia Unbecoming, which brought to widespread light the bullying bias of certain MEALAC professors that has been known on campus for a long time.
Susan Brown, a spokeswoman for Columbia University, told the online edition of The Jerusalem Post: “We take student concerns of this nature very seriously and believe the ad hoc committee will evaluate these charges in a rigorous and utterly objective manner.”
As I will show next week, this is largely a rigged rather than an objective committee, and if I were to appear before such a committee, I would demand that I be able to bring my own tape recorder.
But first, let’s look at a session of this “rigorous” committee as provided to me by students belonging to Columbians for Academic Freedom, some of whom appear in the film Columbia Unbecoming.
As the members of Columbia’s investigating committee were seated at a roundtable, before a student witness, Professor Ira Katznelson, presiding, said, “There will be two reports [by the committee]: an internal report by the committee, which will be full and frank and detailed, and a public summary.”
I left a message for Columbia spokeswoman Susan Brown, asking why the Columbia community and the general public would not also be getting a full and frank report. My call to her was not returned.
Professor Katznelson was asked by one of the students in Columbians for Academic Freedom whether there’d be a tape recording of the committee’s sessions.
The answer: “Notes will be taken by a professional note-taker but a tape recording will not be made.”
The student asked: “Will they be kept internal or will they be transparent to the public?”
The answer: “The notes are for the use of the committee.”
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