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April 30, 2004/Iyar 9 5764, Vol. 56, No. 32
Columbia panel investigates Mideast studies
ADAM DICKTER
New York Jewish Week
NEW YORK - A committee appointed by the president of Columbia University for months has been quietly probing allegations of bias and intimidation by faculty, particularly in Middle East studies, The Jewish Week has learned.
The panel convened by President Lee Bollinger comes at a time when Jewish students have complained that Middle East classes are unbalanced and that faculty members have used their authority to promote anti-Zionist activism.
"We want to make sure that classroom time is not devoted to politics or preaching by professors," said Vincent Blasi, a Columbia Law School professor who chairs the committee.
Rabbi Charles Sheer, the campus Hillel director, testified before the commission in February. "They wanted to know my perceptions and what I have heard from students, about how the Middle East was being presented on campus," he said.
Blasi said the committee had resulted from "a series of events," including a controversial teach-in on the Middle East in 2002 and a protest against the war in Iraq one year ago. Some professors reportedly canceled their classes in order to attend the teach-in, and they urged their students to attend as well.
"It's very important that professors not claim to be speaking for the university when they are speaking their own position on a broad range of issues," said Blasi.
Columbia provost Alan Brinkley mentioned the ex-istence of the committee in an e-mail response to a Jewish Week inquiry about alle-gations of bias in the university's Middle East and Asian Language and Culture Department.
Sheer and several students interviewed said they felt a "slant" against Israel both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities.
In his comment, Brinkley said: "I certainly do not agree that the general atmosphere on campus makes it difficult to support Israel. We are, of course, concerned about charges of bias and in-timidation in the classroom, and the president has appointed a committee to consider, among other things, how we might respond to such problems within the frame-work of our strong com-mitment to free speech."
Blasi is an authority on the First Amendment who has written extensively on free-speech issues.
Columbia has recently hired an array of teachers who have come under fire by pro-Israel activists. They include Rashid Khalidi, a former aide to Yasir Arafat who was appointed to the university's Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies, named for the professor who drew notoriety after posing for a photo at the Lebanese border throwing stones at an Israeli guard booth. Said died last year.
A more recent hire is Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland and a human rights commissioner with the United Nations now teaching in the Department of International and Public Affairs. She has been criticized for remarks seen as supporting Palestinian violence and for participating in a human rights conference in Durban, South Africa, perceived to be slated against Israel.
"Columbia is the 1927 Yankees of radical work on the Middle East," said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. "You have a substantial body of extremism in the Middle East studies at Columbia, and almost nothing else to balance it."
For months Columbia, under pressure from watchdog groups, refused to release the sources of funding for the chair, but did so this month. Among the donors was the United Arab Emirates.
Noting that the institute received about $1 million in federal subsidies, Pipes said, "It's disturbing that someone overseeing U.S. taxpayer money is indirectly on the payroll of another govern-ment."
Because Middle East passions take on new di-mensions in the age of the war on terrorism, some members of Congress - strongly en-couraged by Jewish organ-izations - have called for federal monitoring of anti-Israel activity on campus, which they hope will lead to greater diversity of opinions.
But some, including former Moment magazine editor Leonard Fine, have denounced this approach.
"It's an unprecedented intrusion of a government agency into the academy," said Fine. "It raises thereby many more problems in and of itself than it proposes to resolve."
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