“With my admiration and sincere appreciation for the efforts put by the
members of the ad hoc committee, and my deepest gratitude to them for
undertaking this difficult task on behalf of us all here at Columbia, I do
have two reservations regarding this report, both dealing with precision.
1) In regard to the statement attributed to me by my old student Lindsay
Shier, the report implies that I used a “personal reference” about the color
of her eyes, and correctly signaled that the reference may have been part of
a misunderstood argument that I was trying to make. The report goes on to
say: “we conclude that however regrettable a personal reference might have
been, it is a good deal more likely to have been a statement that was
integral to an argument about the uses of history and lineage than an act
approaching intimidation.”
My response to this point is that I never make a “personal reference”, and
the committee’s evidence for it is the statement of the student who is
recollecting my exact words from a four-year-old memory. This is the same
student who in the film “remembered” that I talked to her for 45 minutes on
College Walk and now in the report “remembers” that I talked to her “in
front of Philosophy Hall”. In this instance basing the conclusion of the
“regrettable ...personal reference” in the report on such a faulty memory is
doubly “regrettable” on the part of the committee.
2) The committee also tried to summarize the argument from which I believe
the statement of Ms. Shrier was falsely extracted. I have already published
a correct version of that argument in the Spectator, on Nov. 3. And I
handed a summary of the argument to the committee, in writing, when I
appeared before the committee. Despite all that I am afraid the
re-statement of the argument in the committee’s report came out wrong. The
committee too missed the point. For the moment I cannot re-state it in full
here, and can only send the reader to the Spectator article of Nov. 3 for
the correct statement of the argument, and not to take the version garbled
in the report. I do not subscribe to the report’s version despite the good
intentions in which the argument is cast.”
