Thursday, March 31, 2005
I've read it, and it's about what you'd expect. It's more critical of the interference of "outsiders" like Campus Watch and the David Project than it is of anyone's classroom behavior, although it is (very) mildly critical of Joseph Massad who ends up coming out quite well overall. To their credit, they seem not to have prepared separate private and public reports, but have instead kept it all public.
The bulk of the report is dedicated to addressing Columbia's failure to have a coherent system of dealing with student complaints which has lead to providing a wedge issue for outside groups to come in and do what Columbia has failed to do. Oddly, in spite of acknowledging a deficiency in their procedures, it's hard to imagine what difference it would make anyway, since the committee heard from scores of witnesses and doesn't seem to have found all that much in the way of what it thought were legitimate grievances. In fact, in my opinion the only people who come out as victims here are the professors themselves who seem to be the victims of outside agitators, overly-sensitive students and (and this is legitimately disturbing) outside unregistered "auditors" who sit in on their classes and disrupt them. It seems to me that all that Columbia is seeking for is a smoother system of dealing with student complaints so they can be brushed aside more expeditiously.
Did anyone expect anything different? The committee specifically does not touch on the specifics of what is being taught in Middle East Studies (to take off on something various speakers at the recent conference remarked on - are they teaching there that 2 + 2 = 5?) - the issue is purely style here, not substance. The committee was interested in whether the professors were behaving badly, not teaching correctly - an admittedly far bigger and more sticky subject.
In the end, the fostering of change within the university is going to have to come from pressure outside the university culture. The academics simply don't have the means or the desire to police each other.
Here is the text of the report.
Update: Via LGF is this New York Sun article with some very interesting tid-bits.
The Sun obtained a copy of the report without the permission of the university administration. Last night, when a reporter from the Sun came to Low Library, the central administration building, for a copy of the report, a security guard threatened to arrest the reporter if she did not leave the building.
According to one student, senior Ariel Beery, one of the campus's most outspoken critics of the professors, a Columbia spokeswoman told him that students were not being shown the report yesterday "for your own good."
Late last night, however, after some of the students who made the charges demanded to see the report, the administration relented and showed it to them.
"The report only focuses on three incidents, and we brought to them a lot more incidents that were not reported and they made no mention of them," Mr. Beery said...
Here's a new one:
Mr. Massad's alleged interpretation of events is sharply contradicted by historians, who say the 11 Olympic athletes were murdered by their Palestinian hostage-takers in a botched rescue operation conducted by German authorities. Historians have debated whether some of the athletes died in the crossfire between German police and the kidnappers, but the notion that the athletes were killed by Israeli gunfire has not been given credence...
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