As Columbia University demonstrates, the nice benefit of investigating yourself is that nobody can overrule you when you declare yourself innocent:
The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame.
[...]
Columbia's top administrators released statements applauding the report
[...]
In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.
[...]
The committee's report - four months in the making and the product of dozens of interviews with students and faculty members - represents a significant victory for Columbia's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.
[...]
On the issue of anti-Semitism, the committee concluded: "We found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic. Professor Massad, for one, has been categorical in his classes concerning the unacceptability of anti-semitic views."
The committee made no mention of an article that an Iranian professor at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi wrote for an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, last fall in which he wrote that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."
[...]
The panel also essentially cleared the professors who on April 17, 2002, canceled classes on the day of an anti-Israel rally on campus and encouraged students to attend the demonstration.
In an editorial, The New York Sun asks:
President Bollinger of Columbia University seems pleased as punch with the report from the faculty committee investigating professors in Middle East studies who have been criticized by students. "The Committee's work and report help sustain our trust in the absolutely critical norm of peer review," Mr. Bollinger said. By "peer review," Mr. Bollinger means that the faculty should be left to police itself. The whole point about the controversy at Columbia, however, is that such an approach is not credible. At least two of the five "peers" on the Columbia committee had called on Columbia to divest from companies selling arms to Israel, a position that Mr. Bollinger himself once termed "grotesque" and that the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, has called anti-Semitic in effect if not intent.
In our view, the text of Columbia's report tends to undermine the concept of peer review rather than support it. The faculty members criticize "outside organizations," "outside bodies," and "outside advocacy groups." Inside bodies, however, totally flubbed earlier investigations of the scandal in Middle East studies, and only because of outside bodies has any action been achieved at all. The only such groups the faculty committee carps about, moreover, are the pro-Israel ones, Campus Watch and the David Project. The "peer review" completely ignores the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Aramco, two outside bodies hostile to Israel that have, between them, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into backing a certain Columbia professor and his center.
Nor did the committee deal with questions of bias and inaccurate information, which constituted the majority of complaints made by students. The committee said such questions should be left for "peer review of teaching" and "departments." But the committee lashed out at one unnamed pro-Israel professor, saying, "We find it deeply disturbing that faculty were apparently prepared to encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor's classroom statements." How are the faculty supposed to review each other if they can't ask students about their colleagues' classes?
Good question. It seems obvious that Columbia is more interested in sweeping this under the rug than in fully investigating it. After all, why would the university initially release the report to only one outside news outlet (The New York Times) and then do so only on the condition that the Times didn't speak to any of the students making the complaints? That's shameful behavior, not only on the part of Columbia, but on the part of The New York Times as well.
4 Apr 2005 @ 10:22am