Columbia takes one on the chin

Columbia University suffered profound embarrassment last week when the Israeli government withdrew from a school-sponsored conference on Mideast peace. Ambassador Daniel Ayalon’s refusal to appear was a ringing denunciation of Columbia’s failure to aggressively address anti-Israel bias in its classrooms.

University President Lee Bollinger now leads a premier New York seat of higher learning on whose campus a leader of a major U.S. ally, the only democracy in its region, will not set foot. And he bears deep responsibility for allowing Columbia to fall into such disrepute.

The millstone around the university’s neck is its Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), a bastion of ideologues who approach instruction from roughly the view that Israel is the root of all evil. Long have they been propagandizing. But it was not until last year, when Jewish students charged that professors were intimidating them, that the school was forced to act.

Bollinger created a grievance committee to weigh complaints that professors are hostile to conflicting ideas. He recruited First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to advise the panel as it goes about arbitrating the boundaries that divide instruction from indoctrination from intimidation, all the while protecting academic freedom.

Which is all well and good - and lacking. Bollinger’s solution does not address the fundamental reason students sense hostility. This reason being that too many MEALAC faculty members subscribe to, and propagate, views that are staunchly anti-Israel.

Composer John Corigliano, a Columbia graduate, made the point when accepting an award in March 2003. “There has been,” he said, “an enormous amount of publicity about the various departments of Middle Eastern studies and about the fact that the anti-Israeli policy in these is enormous. And one can say that of the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia.”

Columbia history Prof. Richard Bulliet says MEALAC is “locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well-adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East.” He also said the university should have reformed the department five or 10 years ago.

After Ayalon pulled out of the conference, its organizer, former Sen. George Mitchell, said the forum was being postponed because participants had come down with scheduling conflicts. Indeed? It’s now slated for September. Bollinger has his work cut out if he wants to restore Columbia’s standing between now and then.