In the past year there have been press reports of a problem at Columbia University. The New York Sun has been the leader in exposing the details but the New York Post has also gotten involved. The New York Times has mostly stayed away, its coverage, when there’s been any, marked by superficiality and its famously skewed “balance.”
The basic details are that courses covering the Middle East are obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and are wildly biased against Israel; and that Israeli and other Jewish students have encountered a very hostile reception, even in Arabic language classes, when they have dared challenge the version of events being presented to them.
The university appointed first one then another committee to investigate, but their mandate has been limited to the specific episodes of harassment. The structural problems with the major offending department (Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, or MEALAC) were explicitly excluded from review. Moreover, the composition of the most recent committee appears to have been overtly stacked in favor of those being investigated. No concessions have yet been made, despite the ongoing controversy. The university’s strategy appears to be aimed at waiting out the press’s interest, slapping the offending professors on the wrist (at best), and mollifying the Jewish community by appointing a single professor to head an Israel studies institute.
A very few of the very many Jewish professors at Columbia have been moved to oppose the systematic anti-Israel bias that pervades Columbia’s teaching and to argue for the inadequacy of the “settlement” that appears to be in the offing. We have affiliated ourselves with Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a national organization. (We have, in fact, become its most active chapter.) Our first task has been to try to understand, in a fundamental sense, why our institution and most universities are the way they are.
The truth begins to emerge when one realizes that universities are real organic communities of human beings. Like most communities, universities have common beliefs that help hold them together. I call those beliefs a “secular religion,” and it is about the same at every campus in the Western world. This religion – let’s call it Alienated Leftism – has firm beliefs regarding many social questions. Because of the centrality of these beliefs to the campus “faith” and the difficulty of ever proving anything right or wrong in any social science, the temptation can become irresistible to convert social science (and humanities) departments into “theology” faculties. Everyone in those departments must support the common view or risk being cast out for something very similar to heresy.
Those of us who work in disciplines that are perceived as peripheral to the heart of academic life (law, medicine, business, etc.) get a little more wiggle room. Most of us really have no idea of the pressure to conform that exists in the social sciences and humanities and of the moral – and temporal – power that the insiders, the various “theologians,” “saints” and “martyrs” that populate those departments, can wield.
Most Middle Eastern studies departments are populated by scholars from the minorities and non-Western societies that constitute the special protected classes, the “widows and orphans,” of Alienated Leftism. These scholars function prominently as the human embodiments of the academic secular religion. As such they are uniformly and virulently anti-Zionist – and, of course, anti-American. They may not be challenged for these views or even for their scholarly deficiencies, when present. The public manifestation of those views is the purpose for which they are hired. Their job is to be the saints of “Alienated Leftism,” and any attempt to challenge them only confers upon them the dual status of martyr.