Sandstorm In Morningside Heights
Call us anti-Semitic, but the last time we checked a map of the Middle East, it was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim. And last we heard, the countries of the region, including the state of Israel, were still teeming with heated opinions about the Arab-Israeli conflict, many of them unkind to Tel Aviv. So we're always a little confused when Jewish student groups get upset that their Middle Eastern Studies professors aren't IDF-vets with leg shrapnel from '67 and the lectern demeanor of Yanni.
We're a little less confused when it happens at Columbia, a protest-happy Ivy where a large undergraduate Jewish population rubs against the interdepartmental ghost of Edward Said.
Over the decades, Jewish students at Columbia have had reason to protest. Though the university has long housed by far the highest percentage of Jewish students among the Ivies, it wasn't that long ago that caps were placed on Jewish admissions, and that the administration openly debated the "Jewish problem." In an effort to stem the Jewish surge in enrollment, students at Columbia's largely Jewish Seth Low Junior College were barred from transferring to Columbia until the satellite school's closure in the mid 1930s. Three decades later, Jewish students assumed leadership positions in a righteous battle against the university's disregard for the surrounding community and its ties to companies profiting from the Vietnam War.
Next to these struggles, today's squawking over alleged bias on the part of Joseph Massad and other professors looks silly. Not only have the worst of the claims been discredited by an official university inquiry, but it turns out the students who made them were abetted by an outside lobbying group called the David Project. These kids didn't just hurl charges of anti-Semitism because they disagreed with Massad's politics-which would be bad enough-they did so as willing agents of a nutty New England?based pressure group determined to ensure the proper line on Israel at campuses around the country. Talk about Zionist stooges!
Huffing and puffing is part of what being an uppity undergrad is all about, but there are ways to do it. At the University of Chicago in the 1970s, overzealous students of Leo Strauss formed roving "Straussian truth squads" that crashed the classes of other professors and demanded on-site debate over their philosophical differences with Strauss. It was obnoxious, but also honest and serious. The students now causing a scene at Columbia don't seem to want to debate the issues so much as squeal, drag in the media and start hopping up on statues with bullhorns like it's 1969 all over again. And maybe get someone fired.
If there's a lesson here, it's that lobbying groups seeking to control academic debate need to be monitored more closely than Joseph Massad. The kinds of activities coordinated by the David Project-disrupting lectures, spying on professors and encouraging students to report them, videotaping classes-threaten the university more than a peaceful faculty presence at pro-Palestinian rallies.
Another lesson (reminder, really) is that Anthony Weiner needs to be voted out of the 9th district and replaced by a Democrat who can tell the difference between a pickle and a pogrom without his glasses on. Weiner's earnest call for Massad's dismissal (before Columbia even had a chance to complete its investigation) was a wan but chilling local echo of recent p.c. jihads against Ward Churchill and Larry Summers. Weiner appears to be chasing Vito Fosella for the title of Most Embarrassing New Yorker in Congress.
As for the students now howling whitewash at Columbia's self-acquittal, they should relax. Did they bother to acquaint themselves with the faculty at Columbia before accepting admission and enrolling in the Middle Eastern Studies department? Did they really expect to have their opinions gently massaged by lectures lifted from the New York Sun/Post editorial pages? Would that be worth $30,000 a year? If that's what they wanted, they went to the wrong school, and Yeshiva is still accepting transfer applications. Otherwise, keep your attack-dog groups off campus and let debates rage on at the seminar tables and in the lecture halls. That's what they're there for, kids.