Columbia’s Tenured Thugs
- 11.14.2007 - 5:59 PMWe are called upon, ladies and gentlemen, to join the arts and sciences faculty of Columbia University in being aghast at the depredations of Lee Bollinger, who has not sufficiently expressed his intolerance for critics of the arts and sciences faculty, and who forced the entire university into lockstep with the Bush administration by saying mean things to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are truly dark days for the sensitive souls of the sociology department.
More than 100 faculty members issued a declaration yesterday stating that “President Bollinger has failed to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.” They note in particular that 1) the Bollinger administration has not made “unequivocally clear” that attempts by “outside groups…to vilify members of the faculty and determine how controversial issues are taught” will not be tolerated (whatever that entails). 2) That the faculty has not been sufficiently consulted before making “decisions on key issues.” Point three bears reprinting in full:
The president’s address on the occasion of President Ahmadinejad’s visit has sullied the reputation of the University with its strident tone, and has abetted a climate in which incendiary speech prevails over open debate. The president’s introductory remarks were not only uncivil and bad pedagogy, they allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community.”
And finally, Bollinger “has publicly taken partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East in particular, without apparent expertise in this area or consultation with faculty who teach and undertake research in this area. His conflation of his own political position with that of the University is unacceptable.”
In case you didn’t get the message, Professor Eric Foner told the New York Times, regarding Bollinger’s treatment of Ahmadinejad: “This is the language of warfare at a time when the administration of our country is trying to whip up Iran.” Isn’t it clear to you now that Bollinger is just a Bush stooge? This letter, coming after the ouster of Larry Summers at Harvard largely by the humanities faculty, has caused a stir on campus, and the most eloquent response happily has come from a dissenting group of Columbia professors, from the quantitative fields. Responding to point 1, they write that
When nonacademics and outsiders encounter or hear about what they consider inappropriate forms of teaching, allegations of intimidation or harassment, or the distortion of basic historical or scientific facts, they are justified in expressing, and entitled by the First Amendment to express, their objections. No university administration has the power to prevent such expression.
Isn’t it curious that it has fallen to a group of scientists to explain to the university’s humanities professors what the First Amendment means? The rest of the letter is similarly devastating, as it starkly exposes the mendacity and bad faith of the humanities professors:
That President Bollinger’s introductory remarks to Ahmadinejad “allied the university with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq”: As the publicly available transcript confirms, these remarks addressed sequentially: 1) Holocaust denial; 2) Ahmadinejad’s stated intent to destroy Israel; 3) Iran’s funding of terrorism; 4) Iran’s proxy war against US troops in Iraq; and 5) Iran’s nuclear program. Only the fourth item refers to the war in Iraq, and only in the context of Iran’s role in financing and arming terrorist attacks against our troops.
And:
That “the President has publicly taken partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East, without apparent expertise in this area or consultation with faculty who teach and undertake research in this area”: We follow President Bollinger’s public statements closely. The only one that may be characterized as concerning the politics of the Middle East is his denunciation of the British University and College Union’s proposed boycott of Israeli academics, which he described as “antithetical to the fundamental values of the academy.” This statement is actually not about the political problems of the Middle East; it is precisely what President Bollinger is accused of not providing: a vigorous defense of academic freedom, based on his recognition that denying such freedom to any individual or group endangers the entire academic enterprise.
This group of 62 professors should be congratulated for thoroughly humiliating a larger faction of professors who are signatories to a shameful—and actually Orwellian—invocation of free speech and academic freedom for the express purpose of undermining exactly those things. The thugs in Columbia’s humanities departments have made false accusations against the university president; they have demanded exemption from being criticized for their scholarship and campus behavior; they seek political litmus tests for speech; and they have proffered a standard of acceptability to the “university community”—meaning, acceptability to themselves—for speech on the part of the university president. And all of this is put forth explicitly as a requirement of fidelity to open debate, academic freedom, and a salubrious university environment. Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe it.
There is something more to be said about this controversy, because it represents more than just the latest bit of silliness from an American campus. Like Larry Summers’s expulsion from the Harvard presidency before it, the Columbia controversy is exemplary of a new era in campus radicalism in which the radicals who now so thoroughly dominate the academy are engaging in the next act in consolidating their power: the intimidation or expulsion of internal enemies. The lexicon of the previous era continues to be employed, but now its use becomes even more awkward and incongruous than it always was: In demanding control over the content of campus debate, Columbia’s thugs talk about the imperatives of open dialogue and the founding principles of the university.
In 1963, several years after the publication of God and Man at Yale brought him onto the national stage, William F. Buckley wrote another critique of the university entitled “The Aimlessness of American Education,” in which he said that:
Under academic freedom, the modern university is supposed to take a position of “neutrality” as among competing ideas. “A university does not take sides on the questions that are discussed in its halls,” a committee of scholars and alumni of Yale reported in 1952. “In the ideal university all sides of any issue are presented as impartially as possible.” To do otherwise, they are saying, is to violate the neutrality of a teaching institution, to give advantage to one idea over against another, thus prejudicing the race which, if all the contestants were let strictly alone, truth is bound to win…. Academic freedom is conceived as a permanent instrument of doctrinal egalitarianism; it is always there to remind us that we can never know anything for sure: which I view as another way of saying we cannot really know what are the aims of education.
How far down the road have universities such as Columbia traveled since Buckley wrote those words. It is not enough today to allow that Larry Summers deviated from campus orthodoxy, or that Lee Bollinger wasn’t nice enough to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Such acts of dissension strike at the very core of the campus power structure (to appropriate some familiar rhetoric), and to allow them to go unpunished is to deny the incumbency of the radicals and their need to impose intellectual homogeneity. This faction has succeeded in becoming a supermajority in the humanities departments, and now their campaign is hewing to a predictable course: the setting of ideological boundaries by purging and intimidating those who would ignore them. American education is no longer characterized, as in Buckley’s era, by the aimlessness of doctrinal egalitarianism. Today’s campus is characterized by the thuggery of doctrinal totalitarianism.
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November 14th, 2007 at 11:10 PM
That Buckley article was some of the most interesting, quotable prose I’ve read in months.
Just really, really good.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:57 AM
Told ya so, and long ago!
Start with a small dash of Chomskian “let’s all hate Amerika”, mix in a liddle Said sauce, and a coupla spoons of Carter, Walt and Meirsheimer alphabet- soup, together with the culinary contributions of today’s erzatz “academics”, enabled by foreign finance to engage in tenured academic terrorism [is that guy’s name Matory?] and you have, my friends, in an instant, a toxic brew capable of poisoning an entire nation.
Oh, and by the way, its real fast-acting, too!
November 15th, 2007 at 8:37 AM
This is the fourth point of the statement”
“4) In the name of the University, the president has publicly taken partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East in particular, without apparent expertise in this area or consultation with faculty who teach and undertake research in this area. His conflation of his own political position with that of the University is unacceptable.”
The first signatory is Nadia Abu El-Haj who wrote a book, part of the basis for granting her tenure, about Israeli archeology and politics without having a working knowledge of Hebrew. I prefer to believe that her signature is intended for ironic purposes.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:24 AM
Carefully read, this petition, especially point 4 reproduced by Mr. Bensky above, is the classic whine of hackademic impotence. Their complaint is that Bollinger failed to recognize their “expertise.” Indeed, one of the issues plaguing MESA-types is that despite decades of investment in their own careers, they wander the wilderness, unheard by policy makers (although gleefully listened to by Saudi princes.) Their own extreme partisanship is applauded by only their own–the public, politicians, generals, international business types and others who actually create or contribute to real time policy could care less. The louder they scream, the more they’re ignored–and it wounds them to the quick. Must be hell on earth for those who believe they and they alone know “the truth.”
November 15th, 2007 at 2:13 PM
It is telling that the dissenters from this nonsense are overwhelmingly scientists, and as a group are engaged in considerably more important work than parsing the latest patriarchal linguistic construct. It’s a shame, really, that the inferiority complex in the humanities has reached such a reactive pitch, but this is also due to the concerted efforts to deconstruct the canon and considered value judgments to the point where everything is a “narrative” of equal value or valuelessness. North Korean prison camps? Well, they’re really not much different from British surveillance legislation. Allan Bloom had it right in this regard–this kind of nonsense speaks to a fundamental loss of confidence in the humanities among its own professoriate. I’m sure there are many more professors in Columbia and elsewhere who consider this essentially a kind of pointless shadowboxing.
November 16th, 2007 at 8:31 AM
Very good point, Richard F., and I have noticed this argument to expertise is limited. These same people will often make sweeping pronouncements on military strategy, tactics, and other matters while at the same time proudly proclaiming that they in effect don’t know much about military affairs. I hardly need point out to Commentary readers what such people often offer about Christianity without, again, being worried that they don’t know much about it.
Apparently the argument to expertise applies only when it’s your ox that’s being gored. When it’s someone else’s, well, then it’s the general intellectual capacity they have that enables them to offer advice.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:56 AM
One might say, using the example of Eric Foner, one of the dissenting professors whose formal work I am quite familiar with (and whose early work I respect very much), that his expertise–Reconstruction (post American Civil War)–no more entitles him to special respect than is due Bollinger on these matters. But contrary to what this self-appointed posse of academics claim, expertise is not really the issue for them. Rather, it is the great conceit of our age–that large stores of credentialed knowledge equals wisdom and more importantly, that the mere possession of such knowledge contains its own moral entitlement. Such arrogance has always been with us. I suspect that what makes these folks a bit unique to our times is that in the past, arrogance has usually been expressed in the context of social class: inherited wealth and privilege, noble entitlements, and so forth. Remarkably, it still is, although now it is disguised and thus easily denied (for example, Foner’s father, also a professor, was a Communist); those current academics who have not directly inherited these attitudes are usually wannabes, and behave as wannabes always have: admission through assimilation. Thus the remarkably self-reifying world of academia where liberal left voting records exist are in ratios of 10-1. They argue brains produce the imbalance. I think the explanation is more, shall we say, sociological.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:05 PM
Richard F.;
I prefer the virulent meme theory. Their brains are the residence and farmland of a particularly aggressive meme, which purports that all other viewpoints are mere grist for its “equivalence” mill, while it has the only True Vision. All others are mere products of culture and sociology, while its possessed brains are now above all that.