Columbia University
Vice President, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
About 15 years ago, the daughter of some friends came to me for advice. She was graduatingfrom Harvard, had majored in English, and she wanted to go into book publishing. Because Ihad worked in publishing before I went to public health school, she came to me to talk aboutjobhunting. I did the best I could, but I was surprised. I had been sure that with her Phi BetaKappa key, terrific grades, and parents who could afford it, she would go on to graduateschool. When I asked why she didn’t, she gave me a stricken look and said, “Oh, no. I can’t.You don’t know what it’s like.” She was right. I didn’t then, but I do now.
It was different in my day. I went to Brown and graduated in 1964, having majored incomparative literature.
In that era, old-fashioned anti-Semitism, although still present, was fading. Walls werecoming down. Brown and other ivies were admitting substantial numbers of Jewish students,although there was still some discrimination about financial aid. Jews are rich and stingy,don’tcha know?
On the plus side, classes in those days were rarely too large for discussion. And to the extentthat we were interested, we discussed. If I came to class having done the reading, and wantedto try out an eccentric interpretation of a poem, I never hesitated to do so. It was OK, evenappreciated, as long as I could show that I knew what I was talking about.
To go even further back in time, our rabbi when I was growing up was Roland B. Gittelsohn,who had become famous for a sermon he gave during World War II at Iwo Jima. He taught usthat if any group’s rights were in danger, Jews’ rights were in danger. His example was, ofcourse, the Nazis’ treatment of the Gypsies, and the Jews’ failure to protest.
With his encouragement, and that of people like Dr. Spock, and Abraham Joshua Heschel,and Tristram Coffin of Yale, my generation became civil rights activists, and then anti-Vietnam war activists, and we thought every leftward leaning person wore a halo. Then cameJune 1967. A bunch of guys I knew were preparing to head over to Israel to fight, and then,before they could get on a plane, the 6-day war was over.
Wonderful, I thought. Now I can relax, right? Wrong. Within days, it seemed, the left hadturned against Israel. The Israelis were doing terrible things in Ramallah, my friends told me.I had never heard of Ramallah.
So I stopped talking about Israel and concentrated on the Vietnam War until my buddies onthe left started supporting North Vietnam. To me, there was an enormous difference betweenwanting the United States to get out of Vietnam and encouraging people to kill American soldiers.
Luckily, around that time I got married and started having babies. That got me off the hook.Then the babies became big boys, and I went to graduate school. A few weeks before my younger son graduated from college I got my doctorate and joined the Columbia faculty in the Mailman School of Public Health.
And for several years after that, I still didn’t know what it was like downtown. The medicalschool, the public health school, and most of the other professional schools have been largelyalthough not entirely sheltered from what has been going on not just in the Middle Eastern studies departments, please note, but more generally in the social sciences and the humanities. In retrospect, I think I understand what happened. In the 1960s, faculty and students embarked on advocacy in the context of the Vietnam War. We believed that when a professor expressed his or her opinions instead of hiding behind a façade of objectivity, that facilitated an honest and open exchange and thus the pursuit of truth. The professor’s ideas went onto the table for discussion, instead of being taken on faith. All ideas were up for grabs. It seemed like a good thing.
But then, when I wasn’t paying attention, along came the brilliant and charismatic Edward Said, whose special mission was to use the tools of liberal education to undermine western civilization. From his base in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, he dispensed what is now called postcolonialism to a generation of academics and students in thehumanities and social sciences. He convinced them that being an American of European descent was an insuperable obstacle to understanding the terrible suffering and oppression experienced by the Third World. He also said, famously, “Facts don’t count; only emotions count.” He espoused the Palestinian cause, claimed to be a Palestinian, adopted a sort of Euro-Palestinian persona, and helped a great deal to make the demonization of Israel fashionable, although, as the saying goes, some of his best friends were Jews.
At the same time, the number of foreign students and faculty on most campuses was growing dramatically. Part of that growth was due to what Martin Kramer describes in his remarkable book Ivory Towers on Sand; federal funding became available for global area studies, including Middle Eastern studies. The purpose of that funding was to teach students foreign languages and cultural competence so that those who were interested could use those skills in government service. This Title VI funding was increased dramatically after 9/11. And who better to teach our young about the third world than people who come from there, especially given our incurable inability to understand the sufferings of the third world.
And because of that inability, we had to believe what they told us implicitly, because only they had a handle on the truth, and we are benighted westerners or worse still, Jews.
As Rachel Fish and her colleagues in the David Project have pointed out, many foreign professors as well as students have come from parts of the world with a strong tradition of anti-Semitism. Many of these parts of the world also have no tradition of free speech or other human rights. In many universities abroad, professors in their classrooms and departments are like tin gods, and questioning what the professor says is a major nono. But American universities used not to be like that, and that is why they used to be the best in the world.
Flash forward to spring 2002, three years ago. One of my buddies, the departmental administrator at work, asked me to join an on-line listserv called Professors for Peace. I asked why, and he said, So you can respond to the lies. I said, you mean about Israel? It’s not reallymy area of expertise. He said, Just do me a favor and do it.
So I did it, and I was stunned by the barrage of poison that was being spewed day after day on the Internet. It is still not my area of expertise, but every once in a while someone would tell a preposterous lie, and I would catch it and let out a little squeak of outrage. At one point, someone quoted a Columbia professor, Gayatri Spivak, about the beauty of suicide bombing. And I let out one of my pathetic little squeaks to the effect that that was not my idea of beauty. But I kept wondering, Where are all the other Columbia professors? Why aren’t they on the job here?
After a month or so, someone named Ed Beck from Harrisburg PA emailed me off the listserv and suggested that we start our own listserv. I asked, Wouldn’t we be preaching to the choir? He said, If we are, it will be more rewarding than being preached to by haters. And I had to agree. That was the beginning of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
In the fall of 2002, I got a small group of faculty together to talk about anti-Semitism and the lack of support for Israel on campus. My colleagues on the Morningside Campus confirmed some rumors that I had heard about a few swastikas in bathrooms and so on. But they also said that was just kid stuff and that there was no real anti-Semitism at Columbia. So we agreed to keep in touch in case something happened, and 15 minutes later the Divestment Petition appeared.
About 20 members of the Department of Anthropology promulgated the petition. Note that it was Anthropology, not Middle Eastern studies. Here is what they wrote:
Deeply concerned about the brutality of Israeli military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a group of Columbia and Barnard faculty have decided that, like our colleagues at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, University of California, and the University of Pennsylvania, we should not remain silent…. The anti-Apartheid campaigns of boycott and divestment played a critical role in dismantling the former South African regime. We believe that a similar, if more targeted, strategy of divestment vis-à-vis the Israeli state is called for at this historical juncture. In limiting our divestment campaign to companies that manufacture and sell arms to Israel, we have focused on a fundamental problem in the conflict today: the use of Israeli military force on a civilian population. We are convinced that pursuing a military solution to what is, at heart, a political problem, can only serve to escalate the conflict and create more human suffering for all…
—Columbia/Barnard Faculty Committee on Divestment
Doesn’t that sound principled and noble? Deeply concerned about the brutality ofcheckpoints, but not about the petty annoyance of suicide bombing. Dismantling as the goal. The fundamental problem is the use of Israeli military force on a civilian population. As if Israel’s civilian population does not count.
Furthermore, although divestment campaigns had been undertaken at all those prestigious institutions of higher learning, none had succeeded, but my colleagues did not bother to mention that fact.
In addition to the signers from Anthropology and MEALAC, many of the faculty signers of the divestment petition came from English and Comparative Literature, Edward Said’s old department. Some came from History and Sociology, and the rest from a random sprinkling of departments.
With encouragement from Rabbi Charles Sheer, who, until this year was the head of Columbia Hillel, a group of faculty and students put together an anti-divestment petition. I won’t read you ours; it is too long, and as you probably know, we succeeded. The divestment petition got, if I remember correctly, less than 1000 signatures,including106 faculty, while the anti-divestment petition got more than 30,000,including more than 360 faculty.
But divestment campaigns continue in the universities and churches. We now know that the campaigns are part of a strategic plan formulated by the International Solidarity Movement, apparently backed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and supported by Arab governments.
The fact that divestment campaigns have recently failed at Brown University and the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, and that the Presbyterian Church is rethinking the decision to divest that it made a few months ago does not mean that their proponents are giving up. They are assessing their progress and looking for soft spots. The values of most Americans are not on their side, but they have time and resources.
It is important to remember that although much of the Middle East is undeveloped, it is not poor. Even the Palestinians, or at least their leaders, are not poor. If you are not really trying to provide services for your population, and you are getting handouts from the European governments, you can put together enough cash, even after your suicide bombing expenses, to fund several professorial chairs, as well as to send to American universities a number of students whom you have trained in the fine art of propaganda.
The sources of funding for the Edward Said chair at Columbia, now occupied by my poor, maligned colleague Rashid Khalidi, included, in addition to the United Arab Emirates, a number of sources close to the PLO. You can argue, as Martin Kramer does, that people without a specific interest are unlikely to fund Middle East studies. That is true.
But the beneficiaries of this largesse argue vociferously that the Title VI money they receive from the federal government does not require them to prepare their students for government service, as Title VI funds were originally intended to do. That is because the US government, along with the Israeli government, is the oppressor.
I know from personal experience with the funding for my own research, that Columbia lawyers can be very helpful to faculty members who are under pressure from the sources of funding who want to control the publication of findings from research that they fund. Sources of funding often want to have it both ways _ they want the prestige of Columbia, and the impression that independent investigators have done the research, but they want the findings to go their way.
Perfectly understandable. As I said, Columbia in principle does not approve contracts that impose such constraints. But if the recipients do not call attention to problems in some contracts, or if the constraints are not put in writing, then there is no problem, right? That’sa cademic freedom.
So I see the source of the problem on campus as:
1. A systematic and well-financed effort to use educational institutions to undermine public support for Israel and, to the extent possible, the United States
2. A widespread habit among academics in the humanities and social sciences ofemulating Europeans and despising the US government;
3. A widespread tendency to dismiss any dissent from that view as right-wing and therefore anathema; and
4. This one is the most painful to me — even among academics and students who support Israel, have experienced ostracism and intimidation, and are aware of the problem of anti-Semitism on the campuses, a kind of cognitive dissonance, a refusal to see that the left does not have a halo (neither does the right, but it is not useful in this context to classify things as left or right), and a tendency to deny or minimize the problem.
When Scholars for Peace in the Middle East began, we did not have this understanding of the problem. What we did find quickly was that many academics and students had been dealing with problems on their own campuses in isolation.
When I held my first chapter meeting at Columbia, a year ago, I invited all 360 faculty members who had signed the anti-divestment petition. I then got a number of paranoid phone calls and emails. People said, I can’t come to meetings, I’ll work behind the scenes, but please keep me informed.
When I went to the meeting room, schlepping soft drinks and kosher cookies because I am a Jewish mother, I was afraid that maybe only 4 people would attend, and that they would just stare at each other suspiciously and not talk. But 20 people came, from about a dozen different departments. And they did want to talk. In fact, the first few meetings, I could not implement an agenda; they needed group therapy before they could even think about action.
But we seem to be beyond that now.
On Sunday March 6, we held an all-day conference at Columbia, with more than 20 distinguished speakers, including Natan Sharansky, Martin Kramer, Rachel Fish, Nat Hentoff, and Phyllis Chesler. Nearly 800 people tried to register; more than 500 attended, and many more attended via webcast. The press coverage has not been all we hoped, in quantity or accuracy, but the publicity has brought us some new friends as well as critics. In the next few months, we will hold more public events, including events for students who fear reprisals for being outspoken.
And next fall, SPME is holding a closed academic conference focusing on the damage wrought to scholarship by Said and Chomsky and new directions for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We are hoping to restore academic freedom and the pursuit of truth to our universities.