An independent investigation has confirmed that Columbia College violated the academic freedom of Prof. Iymen Chehade, reports Eric Ruder.
Iymen Chehade (Erin Turney)
AN INVESTIGATION by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has found multiple violations of Prof. Iymen Chehade's academic freedom by Columbia College administrators. The finding is a major victory for the "Respect Academic Freedom: Palestine is No Exception" campaign, which is demanding the reinstatement of the second section of Chehade's course on the Israel/Palestine conflict, among other things.
The report, which was undertaken by the AAUP's Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and released March 25, confirmed Chehade's account of how his academic freedom had been violated by Columbia College administrators in response to a student complaint of "bias" after he screened the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras in his class.
Steven Corey, the chair of the department of Humanities, History and Social Sciences (HHSS), summoned Chehade to discuss the anonymous student complaint last fall and instructed him to teach in a more "balanced" manner. Days later, two sections of Chehade's were made available to students for online registration for the spring semester, but within hours, one of the two was removed.
What you can do
1. Sign the petition and circulate it via social media.
2. Call the Columbia College administration and tell them to respect academic freedom.
3. Tweet Columbia College. Use this sample tweet or make your own. Stand up for #academicfreedom: Why is #Palestine taboo at @ColumbiaChi? http://chn.ge/MXMtpY
4. Follow Chehade's by liking the campaign Respect Academic Freedom: Palestine is No Exception on Facebook.
The AAUP report (HTML | PDF) found that this amounted to "an inappropriate cancelation of a second section some six days after his adversarial meeting with Chairperson Corey in which the issue of balance, bias and a student complaint dominate[d] the agenda."
But the AAUP went even further, finding that Louise Love, the interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, and Corey not only did not instruct the student to take the complaint directly to Chehade, which is "a violation of widely accepted norms of academic due process," but further instructed the student to "report back" at the end of the semester on whether more "balanced delivery" of the class had occurred.
According to the report:
Illinois AAUP finds such a request as an unacceptable violation of Professor Chehade's academic freedom. Department chairs should not use students as scouts or monitors of a professor's performance. The student's mission is to learn, not to serve as an agent of a department chair who is delegated the power to assess and report on the pedagogy of an instructor. Students do not possess the training and the expertise to serve in this capacity that challenges the authority of an instructor. Chairs may visit a class and observe an instructor if there are concerns.
In sum, the report substantiated that Columbia College administrators violated Chehade's academic freedom:
Because a student objected to a film, Columbia College acted in a manner that strongly suggests a desire to suppress a narrative that deviates from the predominant accepted discourse on matters pertaining to the long-standing conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza.
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REQUIRING PROFESSORS to teach in a "balanced" manner makes a mockery of academic inquiry. Peter Kirstein, the chair of the AAUP committee that authored report, explained this further in an interview:
When you're asking a professor if he or she is balanced, you're really asking them if you're teaching in a way that advocates for a position, which you are entitled. So the issue of "balance" is usually to constrain critical thinking. I have nothing against balance, and it can certainly be a useful pedagogical tool, but these questions indicate an unwarranted concern regarding an anonymous student complaint.
In the case of Middle Eastern studies, the issue of balance is rarely used against professors that adopt a position that supports the state of Israel's post-Six Day War occupation, it's usually asked of those professors who uphold the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to have greater national sovereignty.
Thus, calls for "balance" in the Israel-Palestine context are generally used to muzzle pro-Palestinian voices in favor of the dominant view of support for Israel. But in any case, "balance" is simply one among many tools for reaching students in a classroom setting; requiring it at all times, however, is impossible. In the words of the AAUP report:
Professors are not bean counters and need not pursue an ephemeral, sterile "balance" at the expense of "professing" and pursuing the art of teaching as a moral act...A course on slavery need not proffer arguments for and against the racist, dreaded institution. A course on gay rights or the history of genocide need not "balance" the number of arguments in favor of gay rights and in opposition to genocide with those that support discrimination against homosexuals and mass murder.
If scholarly opinions that stray from mainstream discourse can't be explored in academic settings, then it constitutes not only a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of speech, but also presents obstacles for general societal advance. According to the report:
Academic freedom is essential for the advancement of the common good through the pursuit of knowledge and the truth...Truth is frequently elusive but unless academicians are free to teach and challenge the perceived orthodoxy, then a society cannot progress and liberate itself from the past. The pursuit of knowledge and the determination to resist the canon can be fraught with peril and controversy but it frequently advances the common good.
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THE LARGER context for the violation of Chehade's academic freedom is the growing backlash on campuses orchestrated by pro-Israel organizations who try to define criticism of Israel as beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. Such attempts to stifle debate aren't new, but they are becoming more intense as the movement for justice in Palestine gains followers and an increasing moral legitimacy.
In the words of Kirstein:
There is a history of silencing professors during wartime who either are critical of war or are ethnically associated with the latest "designer" enemy that we are murdering and killing on the battlefield. There's a long history of this, throughout the world and in the U.S.
Part of the revolution in the 1960s in the U.S. was to not only liberate students on their campuses, but to liberate professors in the antiwar movement as well. We had a New Left, such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who later served as my advisor at Boston University. Since then, there has been somewhat of a counterrevolution, and Zinn himself was fired from Spellman College even though he had tenure.
After 9/11, we've seen this counterrevolution grow, in particular in Chicago. Chicago is the worst place in the country in terms of academic freedom. National Louis University has been censured, Northeastern Illinois University may be censured over the John Boyle issue, and then there was the treatment of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University. Chicago is ground zero in the academic freedom battle.
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing frustration among the Israel lobby that the "new, new left" does not include Israel in its agenda. Of course, the old New Left of the 1960s and the old Old Left before that were very much pro-Israel. But the "new, new left" is more critical of Israel because they see it as an American ally and a part of the Western imperial world order.
So you have professors, both white and nonwhite, and many of them, though not all, get in trouble with Zionists or Israel supporters, who may or may not be Jewish. We have seen this at Columbia University's Middle Eastern studies program and at Barnard College, and we saw it with Finkelstein. Finkelstein represented the Haymarket Massacre of academic freedom, because after the Haymarket affair in the 1880s, unions didn't have the right to organize until the Roosevelt years and New Deal. And I think we still haven't recovered from what happened to Finkelstein in 2007-08.