The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Columbia University Faculty Behaving Badly
A new report out of Columbia University documents abuses of faculty prerogatives and general outrageous misbehavior on the part of full-time faculty, instructors, and graduate assistants. Academic freedom does not include being abusive to students, using your classes for political organizing, teaching material unrelated to your classes ideological reasons, and otherwise treating your classroom position as if its your personal platform to pursue an ideological agenda. All of these teachers should face sanctions ranging from suspensions to being fired, but I'm not holding my breath. While these incidents all involve misbehavior on behalf of "Palestine," it's reasonable to assume that it reflects a broader culture of politicization of the classroom and perceived impunity more generally, and not just at Columbia. Luke Tress of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency provides a summary of some of the misbehavior:
The task force also reported that university instructors singled out Jews and Israelis for "personal scapegoating" during classes, noting that the practice violated federal Department of Education guidelines.
An instructor told an Israeli student, "You must know a lot about settler colonialism. How do you feel about that?" Another Israeli was called an occupier. An Israeli IDF veteran attended a class about the conflict, saying that the IDF was presented as an "army of murderers." The instructor pointed at the student in front of the rest of the class and said she should be considered one of the murderers, the report said.
A Jewish, non-Israeli student was told, "It's such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide." Other students avoided identifying as Jewish or Israeli in class.
During a required introductory course for more than 400 students at the Mailman School of Public Health, a teacher told students that three Jewish donors to the school were "laundering blood money" and called Israel "so-called Israel." The teacher later dismissed complaints as coming from "privileged white students."
Some instructors encouraged students during class to attend anti-Israel protests, canceled classes for the protests, moved classes off campus to use the classes as "political organizing sessions," and held classes in the protest encampment, where "Zionists" were not welcome.
Many students told the task force that teachers issued moral condemnations of Israel in unrelated classes. An introductory astronomy class started with a discussion of the "genocide" in Gaza, and in an introductory Arabic class, a teacher taught students the sentence, "The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden." Another instructor told her students in a class on advocacy that reports of sexual violence by Hamas were exaggerated or fabricated.
One student objected to a teacher about a course's framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an email that the student had considered private. The instructor then read the email aloud to the class, without the student's permission, arguing against the email's positions.
Graduate students told each other to "teach for Palestine," regardless of subject, and anti-Zionist content was a "central element" in classes on feminism, photography, architecture, music and nonprofit management.
