COLUMBIA'S COVERUP
NY Post
April 5, 2005
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger seems intent on denying the pervasive anti-Israel bias in his school's Mideast Studies department.
Which is why he's doing everything he can to pass off a just-released whitewash of student harassment complaints as a "thorough and comprehensive" report.
In December, Bollinger created an "ad hoc committee" to probe charges by pro-Israel students that they were intimidated by pro-Palestinian professors in the university's Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures department.
He took this step only after the school was publicly shamed by the release of a videotape that featured a number of troubling student testimonials.
In one, a young man — an Israeli army veteran — recalls being asked by a professor how many Palestinians he had killed. In another, a woman says she was ordered to leave class if she was going to "deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians."
But one look at the panel's conclusions and it's clear that Columbia never wanted a serious inquiry in the first place. The report, released last week, gives short shrift to student complaints — considering only one of about 60 to have any merit — while zinging "outside advocacy groups" and pro-Israel students who supposedly "spied" on professors.
Now, Columbia may not be happy with those who shined a light on its faculty's malfeasance, but blaming the whistleblowers is hardly appropriate.
The school further harmed its credibility when it sought to control press coverage of the report by leaking it to a sympathetic New York Times.
By one account, Columbia gave the Times access to the document in return for a promise to not talk to the students who brought the complaints in the first place. (Sure enough, the Times' first story on the report contained no quotes from the students.)
But, again, the committee's ultimate direction was obvious from the start. Indeed, the conflicts of interest among its members were downright laughable: At least two had signed a petition calling for divestment from Israel, another had written that Israel is to blame for global anti-Semitism and yet another was the thesis adviser of one of the accused professors.
So much for balance.
To regain its credibility, Columbia needs to start examining in earnest the problem of bias among its professors of Middle Eastern studies.
No, not a witch hunt — but a review of the qualifications of a group of faculty members who seem to have been recruited and rewarded on the basis not of their scholarship, but of their politically correct hatred of Israel.
Another step would be to return the money from the government of the United Arab Emirates — where the Holocaust is denied on state TV — which funds Columbia's Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies. (Harvard recently gave back money from the same source.)
Columbia has to start somewhere. With this report, it has only gotten itself deeper in the hole.
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