Israel Denial by Nelson Cary;

Author:Nelson, Cary; [Nelson, Cary;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253045058
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

INTIMIDATING OR RIDICULING STUDENTS

As I have emphasized several times, an AAUP principle incorporated into many faculty handbooks and campus policies throughout the US stipulates that, while faculty have the right to express controversial views in class and to advocate for them, they have a concomitant responsibility to “create a civil and tolerant teaching environment in which opposing views can be expressed.” I am quoting in this case from an official Columbia University “Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report” issued March 28, 2005 (Katznelson et al). The ad hoc committee was charged by then Vice President Nicholas Dirks and announced by President Lee Bollinger that January. The charge was to investigate claims “of inappropriate faculty behavior in their role as teachers” with the aim of establishing principles and guidelines to be followed by a permanent committee to be established to conduct such pedagogical inquiries.

The ad hoc committee decided to concentrate on three incidents from the 2001-2002 academic year, the first two of which concern Joseph Massad. An incident from his Spring 2002 class on “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies” was the first one investigated. The second incident took place at a public lecture Massad presented at a location adjacent to the Columbia campus. My concern here is not to interrogate Massad’s teaching practices. Both incidents took place over fifteen years ago, and, while both received corroboration from some students, other students could not remember them. Massad, moreover, in the first case “denied emphatically that this incident took place” and in the second claimed “no recollection of the event.” The committee, however, in the first example found “it credible that Professor Massad became angered at a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved, and that he responded heatedly.” In the second case the Committee found “it credible that an exchange of this nature did occur.” The principle the committee followed was that “instances in which a student is ridiculed, threatened or silenced for holding certain views contrary or inimical to those of the instructor constitute serious breaches of academic norms.”

There is, I believe, good reason to review these Massad cases here—because they illuminate what it can mean to ridicule or silence a student; that is true whether or not we believe the incidents took place. Moreover, in thinking through the implications we face a different political context than the committee did in 2005. Over the years encompassed by the incidents themselves and the committee deliberations there was not only the Second Intifada but also the well-publicized public interventions into pedagogical practices. That was followed a few years later by ill-advised public interventions in tenure cases. Any inclination to hold faculty harmless for bad classroom behavior during the Second Intifada, however, can now be countered by the recognition that there is basically no period free of potentially compromising events on the ground in Palestine, so we either hold to professional norms comprehensively or decide they cannot apply. Steven Salaita’s 2014 tweets provide an obvious point of comparison.

The most

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