Columbia professor Joseph Massad has made the news yet again. Small wonder: his recent essay in al Jazeera, entitled "The Last of the Semites," linked Zionism to Nazism and claimed that all of the good, anti-Zionist Jews perished in the Holocaust,  Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg congratulated al Jazeera for having "posted one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent memory."

Liam Hoare has penned the most complete deconstruction of Massad's argument, and I can add little to his points. But as Massad has re-emerged to embarrass his university, it's worth remembering that Columbia knew exactly what it was getting when it decided to grant him tenure.

Massad's shameful in-class behavior first came to public attention thanks to the investigative reporting of Jacob Gershman, then of the New York Sun. (The Sun, which folded in 2008, remains very much missed for its consistently first-rate coverage of higher education.) Already under criticism for allegedly threatening to remove a Jewish student from class if she did not acknowledge Israel's supposed atrocities against Palestinians, in 2005 Massad used one of Columbia's "Core" classes to assign one book about Israel which included "a map of 1967 Israel that is labeled 'Palestine.'"

What distinguished Gershman's reporting, however, was his ability to bring readers inside of Massad's classes. (Massad refused to speak to the Sun, and declined to post lecture notes publicly.) One student noted that Massad had described as Zionist myths the facts that "Ancient Hebrews of Palestine lived exclusively in Palestine" and "Mod. Euro. Jews are direct biological descendants of Hebrews." Another student took notes of Massad offering a tasteless joke: "What makes a Zionist a Zionist? A Jew who asks a Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine." Even a hopelessly compromised Columbia "investigation" faulted Massad for his classroom antics.

The professor's scholarship similarly substituted blind adherence to ideology for the honest pursuit of the truth. As Martin Kramer has noted, Massad's heavy ideological bias distorted his findings from the start of his career, and it appeared as if Massad's weaknesses were enough to deny him tenure. But Columbia then granted him a highly unusual second tenure review, and, over the protests of much of the New York media, he squeaked through. Ironically, Columbia did so on the basis of a book that earned the following review from the American Historical Review: "If Massad's evidence is to be trusted, then he is completely wrong in his conclusions."

Massad was then, and still is, a scholar who cared more about advancing his anti-Western, anti-Jewish ideology than true scholarship. And despite all this, Columbia went out of its way to keep him permanently. No wonder the school chose not to comment on his latest screed.

“FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it's intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists, or gay rights advocates, if their speech of a sexual nature is "unwelcome" by religious conservatives. The stated goal of this policy is stemming discrimination, but the inevitable result will be advancing it, in the form of content based prohibitions on speech. When people demand censorship of "unwelcome" speech, they're usually demanding censorship of the speech that they find unwelcome. They usually seek to silence their political or ideological opponents, not their friends—all in the name of some greater good.”
—Wendy Kaminer, The Atlantic

“Conservative student groups must flood the systems with complaints about every Vagina Monologues performance, classroom reference to “testosterone poisoning,” and every single “Sex Week” event until reason returns. It’s an Alinsky principle: Make them live up to their own book of rules. And remember: There’s a lot to make conservative and libertarian students feel uncomfortable on almost any campus.”
—Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

“So, to say the least, this new mandate will have a chilling effect on sexual speech on campus.  There’s no way you could discuss any sexual behavior in class.  Not only couldn’t you discuss Lolita,  Shakespeare and the racier parts of the Old Testament might have to be purged from the curriculum.  I make a big deal of the issue of the relationship between incest and philosophy that Aristophanes brings up in a witty and vulgar way in the Clouds. Students don’t usually welcome the opportunity to have a conversation about incest, and especially about how questionable their revulsion to it is. Book V of the Republic, with the community of women and all that—that always creates a bit of an unwelcoming environment for some students.  Well, it’s supposed to; it’s supposed to get them thinking about the possibility that what we regard as natural sexual differences are merely repressive conventions.  Once I’ve written that, I realize that we just won’t be able to teach most of the content of “women’s studies” classes anymore. A big objection any professor would have to these Puritanical regulations is that they empower student affairs staffs to have a bigger role in schoolmarmishly regulating the campus environment, including assuming a more intrusive role in determining what goes in the classroom and in ordinary conversations between professors and students, and students and students.”
—Peter Augustine Lawler, Big Think

…what defenders of free speech on campus, such as the estimable FIRE, among others, may miss is the contradictory place the university has become. Having embraced the sexual revolution and encouraged an atmosphere of promiscuity, much of higher education has now created a legalistic, centralized crackdown on talk about sex. We have become what Tocqueville implied our condition would be without the influence of mores: a bureaucratic nightmare. If we can’t rule ourselves, we will have rules, myriad of them, made for us.”
—Ken Masugi, Library of Law and Liberty

“Obama promised fundamental transformation. This is part of it. Freedom of speech is sacrificed, and a new army of sexual-harassment “specialists” will descend on America’s campuses to enforce the new dispensation.”
—Mona Charen, NRO

 

As the Supreme Court prepares its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (in which that school’s use of racial and ethnic admissions preferences is challenged), and as our bien pensants continue as always to agonize about the state of race relations in the United States (which are actually quite good, by the way), a few thoughts.

Racial preferences are becoming more and more unwieldy and divisive as the United States becomes more and more multiethnic and multiracial.  But they are thought necessary because without them there would be “underrepresentation” of some groups.  The same logic, by the way, is behind the use of “disparate impact” lawsuits:  They are attractive because this is another way to address the “underrepresentation” that results from merit-based selection. 

But the principal reason for some groups’ failure in the aggregate to achieve will not be solved by using racial preferences and is ignored by them – the principal reason being illegitimacy.  That’s the problem that should be addressed, rather than pretending there is something wrong or unfair with merit selection.

Continue reading "A Simple Prescription for Race Relations" »

Socioeconomic preferences can be a better proxy for race than race preferences, according to an Inside Higher Ed report this morning on a new study to be published this summer in the Harvard Law & Policy Review.

More precisely, the authors, Matthew N. Gaertner, a researcher at Pearson's Center for College and Career Success and Melissa Hart, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado, argue that properly constructed class-based preferences can lead to more racial diversity, i.e., a larger number of underrepresented minorities (URMs) being admitted, than current race-based preferences. A preliminary version of the article is available here.

Analyzing random selection of applicants admitted and rejected at the University of Colorado in 2008 and 2010, the authors describe a complex class-based construct built on a highly complex “disadvantage index” and “overachievement index.” The latter is relatively simple: it measures the degree an applicant’s grades or standardized test scores exceed those typically earned by those in their socioeconomic group.

Continue reading "Looking for Class Preferences to Replace Racial Ones" »

As everyone but members of the National Ostrich Society now knows, Washington, D.C. is beset by three actual or potential scandals: the Benghazi matter; the IRS’s politicization; and the wiretapping of the Associated Press by the DOJ. These matters are important and call for genuine investigation and concern.

But there is another controversy emanating from Washington that should also be of great concern to citizens who care about the education of the nation’s young men and women and the status of free speech and thought in our country. And once instituted, the policy involved could metastasize into other domains as well.

On May 9, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice wrote a letter to the president of the University of Montana, mandating a broad new sexual harassment standard for that institution. But rather than limiting itself to that institution, the letter portrayed itself as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault.” This would be fine if the standard for harassment were properly defined, consistent with the standard proffered by the United States Supreme Court in 1999 Davis case.

Continue reading "A Misguided Feminist Agenda Curbs Free Speech" »

The Obama administration is currently embroiled in two political scandals, and a third, understandably overshadowed by Benghazi and the IRS, is brewing on our campuses. The Civil Rights offices of both the Education Department and the Justice Department have issued a flabbergasting and clearly unconstitutional assault on free speech, ruling that colleges must eliminate and punish "verbal action" (better known as speech) touching on sexual matters. Rumors (true or not), "unwelcome" requests for dates, off-color jokes and virtually all sexual discussion will now be (selectively) punishable as sexual harassment under orders from the Education Department. Here two well-known civil libertarians react to the ED and DOJ's assault on speech and common sense: Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of FIRE (above, writing with Juliana DeVries) and Eugene Volokh of the UCLA law school and the blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, below.

Cross Posted from the Volokh Conspiracy

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is telling universities to institute speech codes. And not just any old speech codes: Under these speech codes, universities would be required to prohibit students from, for instance,

1.    saying "unwelcome" "sexual or dirty jokes"

2.    spreading "unwelcome" "sexual rumors" (without any limitation to false rumors"

3.    engaging in "unwelcome" "circulating or showing e-mails of Web sites of a sexual nature"

4.    engaging in "unwelcome" "display[] or distributi[on of] sexually explicit drawings, pictures or written materials"

5.    making "unwelcome" sexual invitations.

This is not limited to material that a reasonable person would find offensive. Nor is limited to material that, put together, creates a "hostile, abusive, or offensive educational environment." (I think even speech codes that would have these requirements are unconstitutional, but the speech codes that the government is urging would in any event not have these requirements.) Every instance of such material of a "sexual nature," under the government's approach, would be "sexual harassment" and would need to be banned.

Why do I say this? The explanation has quite a few moving parts, because of how the government has articulated its theory. But here's a brief summary.

1. The OCR has long taken the view that, just as Title VII's ban on employment discrimination has been read as prohibiting speech or conduct that is "severe or pervasive" enough to create a "hostile, abusive, or offensive environment" based on sex for plaintiff and for a reasonable person, so Title IX (the educational analog) does the same for speech and conduct in educational institutions. Colleges and universities, according to the government, must therefore institute speech and conduct codes that ban such speech and conduct.

Those courts that have considered the issue have held that such speech codes in public universities violate the First Amendment on their face (to the extent they cover speech), because they are too vague or overbroad (i.e., apply beyond the few unprotected categories of speech, such as threats or "fighting words"). See, for instance, some of the cases cited in this guest post by FIRE's Greg Lukianoff. The government's pressuring the creation of such codes in either public institutions or private institutions would likewise violate the First Amendment. But the government takes a different view. Though it agrees that "harassment" codes shouldn't be read in ways that violate the First Amendment (which is tautologically true), they apparently think that a great deal of speech "of a sexual nature" on campuses is unprotected by the First Amendment, as suggested by the materials discussed below.

2. Now, in an investigation involving the University of Montana (and see also this document, the government has apparently gone further:

a. The government has specifically faulted the University for defining "sexual harassment" as being limited to conduct or speech that is severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile environment, or conduct or speech that would be objectively offensive to a reasonable person. "Whether conduct is objectively offensive is a factor used to determine if a hostile environment has been created, but it is not the standard to determine whether conduct was 'unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature' and therefore constitutes 'sexual harassment.'"

b. Instead, according to the government, "sexual harassment" is simply "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature and can include unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature, such as sexual assault or acts of sexual violence." And what constitutes "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature"? An earlier OCR document, defining, conduct "sexual in nature" as "sexual conduct," says that "Examples of sexual conduct include":

1.    making sexual propositions or pressuring students for sexual favors;

2.    touching of a sexual nature;

3.    writing graffiti of a sexual nature;

4.    displaying or distributing sexually explicit drawings, pictures, or written materials;

5.    performing sexual gestures or touching oneself sexually in front of others;

6.    telling sexual or dirty jokes;

7.    spreading sexual rumors or rating other students as to sexual activity or performance; or

8.    circulating or showing e-mails or Web sites of a sexual nature.

Continue reading "The Administration Says Universities Must Implement Broad Speech Codes" »