Image credit: lev radin/Shutterstock.com

The Columbia University Encampment, Joseph Massad, and the Future of Campus Antisemitism

By Cary Nelson
From: www.telospress.com

Introduction

Every day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass antizionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism require comparison with earlier historical moments. The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples. The students promise to remain until Columbia meets their divestment demands—which presumably means they will be in their tents for a very long time indeed, since for governing boards to cede their investment authority to mob action means giving up their other responsibilities as well.

Students and faculty members rally as Pro-Palestinian supporters set up a protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York as seen on April 22, 2024.
Image credit: lev radin/Shutterstock.com

Meanwhile the chants continue, with new variations introduced to demonstrate the irrepressible creativity of the participants. On the Columbia campus they called out “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!,” “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!,” “Oh Al-Qassam [Brigades], you make us proud, kill another soldier now!,” “Five Six Seven Eight, Israel is a terrorist state,” “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!,” “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!,” “It is right to rebel, Al-Qassam, give them hell!,” and “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab!” Students for Justice in Palestine gathered to lead chants wearing keffiyehs, displaying Hamas symbols, and teaching people to chant “Death to Israel,” “Death to America,” and “Death to the Jews” in Farsi and Arabic. In a New York subway car it was “Free our prisoners, Free them all. Zionism will fall! Free our prisoners, free them all! Israel will fall!” Just outside Columbia’s gates the cries included “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too!,” “Is‑ra‑el go to Hell,” and “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” demanding repeated pogroms in New York City. Two Jewish Columbia students were cursed with the cry of “Nazi Bitches, Nazi Bitches.”

At Yale, where arrests also took place, demonstrators chanted “YPD (Yale Police Department) or KKK, IDF they’re all the same” and “Arab blood is not cheap, for the martyrs we will speak.” Yalies also danced to excerpts from a rap song condemning Israel by SEB!, projected from a boom box. It opens with a simple declaration that encapsulates the message of the whole encampment: “Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch.” As with the chants, condemnation is mixed with celebration of the group’s solidarity: “we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit.” The vehicle of black slang suggests specialized knowledge of Zionism’s supposed racist and colonialist character: “Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it.” The address to “bullshit prophets” doubles as a biblical reference and a critique of contemporary Zionism, with an anti-capitalist economic complaint added in: “y’all just want the profit.“

After arrests were made, an off-campus rally bellowed “The trustees run, the trustees hide, they do take part in genocide!” NYU demonstrators added “Liberation is our mission, no more war with our tuition.”

Moreover, as events at Columbia and Yale have demonstrated, all it takes for this to spill over into violence is one person to become overwrought, taken up in the moment’s hate and lashing out. It does not much matter that many of the protestors declare their violent comrades to be exceptions, outliers who do not represent the majority of the demonstrators. At the Yale version of a tented encampment, Yale Free Press editor-in-chief Sahar Tartak was encircled by scores of demonstrators yelling at her, singled out for wearing Hasidic-style clothing. One masked demonstrator lost control, waved a Palestinian flag in her face and then used the flagpole to stab her in her left eye.

Pro-Palestinian supporters set up a protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York as seen on April 22, 2024.
Image credit: lev radin/Shutterstock.com

I ask myself what it would be like to be trapped there or inside a crowded New York subway car with people chanting in praise of the Hamas pogrom. Perhaps I could be anonymous. Or perhaps not, subject then at least to verbal harassment. If unrecognized, could I calmly remain bemused at passions with no guaranteed purchase on current politics? Or might I be afraid, witnessing a mob that had found its antisemitic moment, the tipping point for generational hatred. What I know for certain is that many Jews, young and old alike, would feel safe neither in the subway car nor on Columbia’s campus. What Israeli students, virtually all of them IDF veterans, would be at ease hearing “Kill another soldier now”? And what Zionist would not feel targeted by “Palestine is Arab!”?

On April 19, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association wrote to the university president to say: “Within the last 24 hours, for example, protestors assaulted an invited speaker and threatened Jewish students by shouting, ‘we know where you live.’ Immediately outside Columbia’s gates, protestors shouted that ‘October 7th would be every day’ for Jewish students while, on its lawn, protestors called for the destruction of Israel and equated the NYPD and IDF to the KKK.”

I often think about political chanting, since I spent a decade among those chanting at Vietnam demonstrations. My first was in 1964 as an Antioch College student. College president James Dixon called a community meeting in the auditorium at Kelley Hall, where he told us he was disappointed we were not actively protesting the war. When president Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to speak at Ohio State University in Columbus, we decided to take up the college challenge. The event was at the OSU football stadium, and it was full of a crowd of 50,000 cheering fans, many of them farmers from the conservative Ohio countryside. With vetting of crowds at the time still less obsessive than later, a dozen of us were able to enter the stadium and work our way to just in front of the podium. We had antiwar posters under our coats. Shortly after Johnson began to speak, we pulled them out and began to chant “LBJ, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” The crowd roared in guttural anger, an animal cry of rage that filled the stadium. Johnson looked down at us and called out “You fools! You fools!” Then secret service agents wrestled us to the ground. The agent holding me whispered in my ear (I had long hair and a full beard): “I’d like to get you lady-looking son of a bitch behind bars and beat the shit out of you!” We were lifted up and escorted out.

I still feel nostalgia for that day and the next decade of chanting at Vietnam demonstrations. The sense of group solidarity offered a certain counterpoint to the intellectual life. But political chants at least for me always came with double consciousness. I could never altogether give myself over to them. Part of me watched myself as if from above. The chanting always felt somewhat foreign, contrived, as though my ordinary self remained embarrassed at the performance. Not that my antiwar politics were in the least ambivalent. But chanting always felt somewhat unnatural. And we would not have chanted “Kill another soldier now.” We were very much aware that the United States drafted the American poor, often people of color, to fight its wars.

I have lurked to the side at antizionist rallies in DC and New York, wondering whether there were any second thoughts among those joining in the chants. I could detect none. Did people flinch? Did they abstain from chanting? Did they look away? Not that I could see. And I would not expect such reservations to have been in evidence at Columbia. Ecstasy and anger, yes, both buoyed up by antisemitism. A hate encampment’s chants call on the community to cast out the hated other, not just the IDF an ocean away but the Zionists next door. At the Columbia encampment, protestors were led in a group chant: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.” Despite some civil interchanges, they formed a human chain to push them out. Nearby a demonstrator held up a hand-lettered sign reading “AL-QASAM’S NEXT TARGETS,” with an arrow pointing at a group of Jewish students holding U.S. and Israeli flags.

Giving yourself over to group anger means making yourself susceptible to mob action if chanting and exhortation inspires violence targeted at people. Does anyone really doubt that line has not been crossed and will not be crossed again? Students for Justice in Palestine threatens Columbia-style encampments nationwide. It appears to be delivering on the promise. By April 25, tented encampments were in place at NYU, MIT, Tufts, Vanderbilt, USC, Emory, UNC Chapel Hill, Emerson College, Washington University, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland, and elsewhere. Some of the tent encampments were taken down rapidly by campus authorities; others persisted or were rebuilt. That week mass demonstrations without encampments spread to many other campuses, among them Indiana University and the University of Illinois.

Meanwhile, career antizionist faculty do their best to normalize the events of October 7. Columbia’s Joseph Massad has acquired symbolic status among that cohort. He was called out repeatedly by congressional representatives questioning Columbia’s president Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, co-chair of its antisemitism task force and long-time faculty member David M. Schizer, and Board of Trustees members Claire Shipman and David Greenwald. While there were more than a few examples of opportunistic posturing among the questioners, the challenges were nonetheless often to the point. Shafik was often evasive or misleading in her answers, once again revealing more of higher education’s problems than she likely realized. Schizer was far more honest, but he was not equivalently challenged.

Joseph Massad

At the House of Representative hearings on April 17, members were blunt. North Carolina Democrat and lawyer Kathy Manning demanded an account of Massad’s status: “Why is that Professor still teaching at Columbia?” She followed a series of questions from New York Republican Elise Stefanik about Massad and others. Hostility toward Massad was thus notably bipartisan.

Given Massad’s history, it is a question that might well have been asked repeatedly over the years. Indeed, I devote a ten-page section to Massad’s teaching and research in my 2019 book Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & The Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State.^[2] I include a week-by-week commentary on the 2016 version of his course “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” based on the detailed syllabus provided to me by a Columbia student. Since Massad’s academic publications include comments on the issues he raises and texts he assigns, his written and teaching commitments and public remarks clearly triangulate. My conclusions after the analysis of the course are these: “The fundamental problem is that Massad uses a course claiming comprehensiveness as part of a biased anti-Israel political campaign” (274). “Massad’s course is about convincing students that his political opinions are correct and should be adopted” (272).

The views expressed in Massad’s 2023 piece did not coalesce recently. In his 2006 “Pinochet in Palestine,” he embraces Hamas as the true voice of the Palestinian people and describes it as the one group equipped to “defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation.” In The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006), he writes that “The Nazi precedent acts, not as deterrent, but rather as a pedagogical model for the Israeli army” (176).^[3] He continues to insist that Jewish supremacism is at Zionism’s core.

An official Columbia University “Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report” from 2005, a report cited by Michigan Republican Tim Walberg in his remarks to the committee, reviewed two complaints about Massad’s antisemitic teaching and public conduct. Massad contested the report, but the committee found it credible that both of the incidents at issue had in fact taken place. One may consult Israel Denial for details.

The administrative answer to Manning and others offered at the hearing by Columbia created more problems than it solved, as Shafik declared him “under investigation,” soon prompting faculty complaints that campus investigations are designed to be confidential and thus it was a violation of personnel standards to announce one in public. Two days later AAUP president Irene Mulvey issued a statement declaring that “President Shafik threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus instead of providing what higher education and democracy require: a robust defense of academic freedom and its essential protection of extramural speech.” She went on to condemn the arrests at the encampment: “Shafik trampled on students’ associational and free speech rights by declaring a peaceful, outdoor protest a ‘clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.’” Calls for assaults on Jews apparently count as peaceful speech.

The “extramural speech” at issue is primarily Massad’s October 8 Electronic Intifada essay “Just Another Battle or the Palestinian War of Liberation?” Given that Massad’s essay was published the day after Hamas’s attack, there were some things he would not have known, but Israel is seven hours ahead of New York and events were well under way in Israel before Americans began their day. The Atlantic Council’s first report, itself published on October 7, read in part: “It is not the five-thousand-plus rockets that have already been fired from Gaza into Israel over the last twelve hours that’s shocking Israelis and the world. It’s the complexity of what was an extremely well-planned and well-prepared attack in which Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel by land, by sea, and even by air (via paragliders); embarking on an unprovoked and indiscriminate killing spree of men, women, and children in their homes, on the streets, and even at a nature party in the desert.”

The AAUP’s response to the essay following the testimony by Columbia authorities reflects the policy about nonacademic publishing venues and social media the AAUP has maintained since 2015. I critique that policy in detail in my 2024 book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles.^[4] Mulvey devoutly follows that recent policy by insisting absurdly that an essay in a public venue about an assault on Israelis, an essay by a faculty member in Middle East studies who writes and teaches about Israel, should not be subject to any professional academic evaluation. It is not part of his professional profile. It has nothing to do with his faculty position and duties. Perhaps the author merely resembles Professor Joseph Massad. The two people must not be confused. It’s too bad Mulvey was not on Capitol Hill that day to spout these AAUP pieties, since the AAUP deserves the contempt that would have been visited upon it.

Memories being short and knowledge often self-selective, I have not been surprised to see people on social media defending Massad by falsely claiming Columbia has never received complaints about his teaching. It is hardly surprising that Massad does not leave his politics at the door when he enters the classroom.

But the evidence in question that day in April was only not about Massad’s pedagogy; it was Massad’s Hamas 10/7 pogrom celebration. He opens the piece with a question no one save Hamas leaders themselves could have answered on October 6: “What can motorized paragliders do in the face of one of the most formidable militaries in the world?” His answer encapsulates the cheerful tone of the whole essay: “Apparently much in the hands of an innovative Palestinian resistance, which early on Saturday morning launched a surprise attack on Israel by air, land and sea. Indeed as stunning videos show, these paragliders have become the air force of the Palestinian resistance.” By that time, SJP had adopted a cartoon paraglider logo on the posters advertising its pro-Hamas rallies on American campuses.

As Congressman Walberg noted, Massad quickly rings changes on his terms of excited praise, echoing what he says Arab media announced: “the resistance has effectively obliterated the myth of Israeli military might and the undeserved reputation of its intelligence apparatus, whose failures—judging from the shocking success of the Palestinian offensive—are staggering.” He adds that “No less astonishing was the Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22 kms, as in the case of Ofakim.” Takeover? Yes, they stormed kibbutzim to rape, burn, behead, butcher, and kidnap men, women, and children. Not that you would know any of this from Massad’s essay. The essay pays no attention to the details of the massacre. Hamas violence is never mentioned. Not discounted, not disputed. Simply ignored.

Massad has shamelessly sanitized all this barbarism to make it more palatable to his fans. The scenes of Hamas crimes against humanity are actually no “more than two dozen battle sites, with Hamas declaring 50 Israeli military targets for its operation.” He trifles in another way with Israeli family terror that day: “In the interest of safeguarding their lives and their children’s future, the colonists’ flight from these settlements may prove to be a permanent exodus. They may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.” Little matter that those murdered on the spot could not flee anywhere, or that many others were slaughtered as they fled. They were all settler colonial captives, partners in a conspiracy to occupy Arab land.

Massad is careful to keep inserting new terms into his recitation of Hamas achievements; I’ll add my own italics:

—”The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding.”

—”No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.”

—”No less striking was the capture of some of Israel’s colonial soldiers and officers in their underwear.”

—”The stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance over the Israeli military on the first day of fighting is a historic event both for Israel, as Netanyahu admitted, and for the Palestinians.”

—”The resistance’s remarkable takeover of Israeli military bases and checkpoints, where even the resistance fighters marveled at the rows of abandoned Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, upon which they placed their banners, has both shaken Israeli society and struck Palestinians and Arabs as incredible.”

As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Walberg said that Dr. Massad had said Hamas’s murder of Jews was ‘awesome, astonishing, astounding and incredible.’ ‘I certainly said nothing of the sort,’ Dr. Massad said.” Massad cites everything he can without mentioning Hamas’s violence, but he nonetheless uses all those words to characterize an assault devoted to murdering Jews. We are in the presence of a distinction that isn’t one at all.

Most of these expressions of what Massad himself characterizes in a subheading as “Jubilation and Awe” set us up to be persuaded by what will count as political analysis. It is a perfect structure for a politically debased pedagogy, something the congressional commentators seemed to understand. You preface your purportedly academic analysis with crystal clear statements of the correct emotional reactions and political conclusions. Of course we were reminded that some House members barely meet the low entrance bar. One repeatedly referred to the “Infitada,” an error the Columbia panel knew better than to correct. Georgia Republican Rick Allen gave a fundamentalist sermon, finally asking Shafik “Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” But there were also many telling moments. Asked whether, knowing what they know now, they would still grant Massad tenure, the two board members both firmly answered “No.”

Despite being pummeled with jubilation and awe, we are hardly prepared for Massad’s embrace of a key Vladimir Putin talking point: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose alliance with the West against Russia is pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, joined his Western sponsors in condemning the Palestinian resistance as ‘terrorist’ and asserting that ‘Israel’s right to self-defense is unquestionable.’” UN Secretary-General António Guterres is faulted for finding “it in his heart to call for the return of ‘abducted’ Israeli civilians from the Gaza Strip.” He doesn’t tell us whether the civilians, infants and children among them,” are really prisoners of war or guests of the innocent Hamas “resistance fighters.” They are all guilty of the crime of stealing land that really belongs to the Palestinian people.

For that entire case presumably one could enroll in his course. There we would clearly learn in detail that “Iran has neither been responsible for the murder of millions around the world nor for colonizing or occupying the lands of others.” Given the many civilians who have been killed by Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, along with the other militias supplied with Iranian arms, that seems a less than categorical truth. Not that Massad’s students are likely to learn anything of the sort.

Massad is not fit to teach a course on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Shafik assured Congress that his courses are not required, that they are only elective. Are we to suppose there is no pressure on students in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Massad’s disciplinary home, to take courses from the distinguished, internationally known professor? No conversations like this with a colleague’s advisee: “John, I see you haven’t taken anything from Professor Massad. But you are specializing in the Middle East”? Are the students who do take his courses better prepared to understand Israel, let alone Hamas? Are they better prepared for careers in teaching, politics, or diplomacy? How often do faculty in the program urge their students to take courses on Israel from other departments to gain a more varied political perspective?

Given the opportunity for a tenure decision do-over, the trustees would make a different decision about Massad. But no one was prepared to answer the “Why is he still teaching at Columbia?” question. The answer is not complicated: because he has tenure, and because the American academy is largely incapable of supervising or policing its tenured faculty. We cannot even do so at an elite university.

Representative Manning asked the more general question: “Does any professor in Massad’s program believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state?” Shafik dissembled, pointing out that the program is headed by an Israeli. Manning shot back, “That doesn’t answer the question.” Shafik deflected again, replying that Columbia’s faculty overall has a variety of political views. On the table but altogether unanswered: what is to be done when an entire department is consumed by political antisemitism? What do we do with a department that is an organized indoctrination machine?

On the question of Massad’s status, Shafik instead tried a bit of sleight of hand to distract her audience, telling the committee that Massad is under investigation. I would have used less specific rhetoric: “We are in the process of reviewing the essay in question and determining what implications it may have for his role at Columbia.” The not-so-useful idiots at the AAUP would evidently have opted for confirmation that the university has no right to an opinion about Massad’s essay and no right to ask whether it bears on his teaching. How would that have gone over? Or perhaps the AAUP would have recommended, “We cannot venture any opinion about Massad’s essay.” The AAUP president can bluster vapidly on the topic because no one will call her to account. Academic freedom should not protect pure indoctrination as a pedagogical standard. Academic freedom does not deprive anyone of the responsibility to object when faculty members mislead us in speech or in print. As I argue in my Hate Speech and Academic Freedom, academic freedom exists to protect the search for the truth. Joseph Massad’s career is centrally devoted to telling lies about Israel and Hamas. His job may be secure, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility to call him out as lacking integrity when he deserves it. His immoral, despicable essay about October 7 must be analyzed thoroughly, not simply condemned.

Going Forward

The absence of any real concern with Hamas’s 10/7 actions that seemed both shocking and outrageous in Massad’s essay in some ways defines the campus occupations described in the opening section of this essay. Other antizionist faculty members have felt the need to justify Hamas’s invasion in some detail. Massad finds it sufficient to invoke generalizations, as when he tells us 10/7 is part of “the ongoing war between the Israeli colonial army and the indigenous Palestinian resistance.” That is one version of the stark dichotomy the demonstrators offer as their view of the world. Massad is thus the appropriate faculty agitator to have prepared the Columbia protestors for the chants they perform.

Massad was, predictably among 170 Columbia faculty members who signed an October 30 open letter turning his view of 10/7 into a group manifesto:

military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years. One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation, something anticipated by international humanitarian law in the Second Geneva Protocol.

To turn a murder and kidnapping spree into a “military operation,” as “just one salvo in an ongoing war,” indeed one in which the murderers were operating in harmony with “international humanitarian law,” is to elevate Massad’s moral bankruptcy into group blindness and to institutionalize it as a legal principle. The 170 Columbia faculty have articulated a permanent Jewish exception to all standards for human conduct. Whatever violence is done to Israeli Jews now and in the future is always already acceptable, preordained as virtuous. In this light, what would criminalize Hamas assassinations of Israelis studying in the United States?

Then, in the sentences immediately following the passage above, Columbia’s faculty introduce an Orwellian turn into the argument: “In either case armed resistance by an occupied people must conform to the laws of war, which include a prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians. The statement [issued by students] reflects and endorses this legal framework, including a condemnation of the killing of civilians.” Except that Hamas’s use of rape and murder was at the center of the entire “operation.” The main purpose of the attack was to kill or kidnap civilians. We are in favor of the righteous hands-on butchering of civilians in their homes but not the righteous hands-on butchering of civilians in their homes. We entirely endorse and entirely condemn the Hamas pogrom. This “reasoning” now apparently encapsulates the new post-10/7 standard for antizionist student/faculty ethics and politics going forward. It represents a substantial threat to the mission of higher education, a more fundamental one than the physical disruption of educational activities being mounted by today’s demonstrators.

It also reflects the purported “idealism” of some of the Hamas supporters who have occupied American campuses. They simultaneously champion and oppose mass murder. It can be assumed that few if any understand this contradiction, or understand that a Jewish exception cannot be easily limited to the Jewish homeland. The only available theory to rationalize this contradiction is the conspiratorial theory of Jewish malice that animated National Socialism in Germany. It evokes the Judenrein utopia the Nazis promoted.

The problem is not whether there are idealistic and utopian participants in the occupations, along with ill-informed and naïve ones and vampires who wish they could have joined Hamas on 10/7. The problem is that the idealistic participants have ceded their political efficacy to those consumed with blood lust. I do not mean that they do so willingly. That’s the risk in group action. The provocative chants and posters win the day. Of course, if you are Robert Lowell you can write two superb poems about your participation in a demonstration, as he did during the Vietnam War, and establish your distinctive individual view. But most ordinary mortals do not win that privilege. Lowell walked by me during a D.C. Vietnam demonstration when I was an undergraduate. I believe history remembers only one of us being there.

The need for a counter-educational agenda to address this irrational conflation of mass violence and enlightenment values could hardly be greater. It is not the only challenge higher education faces, but it is a central one. It will require a large collective commitment to a long-term educational project.

Meanwhile there are urgent practical needs to address. Universities need clear policies governing mass assembly. Designating specific spaces for them, a long but often ignored practice, should be revived and enforced. The SJP preference for full-face keffiyehs disguising protestors’ identities should be officially prohibited everywhere and all full-face coverings sufficient to disguise personal identity made the basis for arrest if people refuse to lower them. Keffiyehs of course can be worn wrapped around the head so identity is not obscured. That way they can signal solidarity with Palestinian militants, lending protestors an illusory paramilitary appearance, but not provide anonymity that protects people from disciplinary action and can make actual violence consequence free.

People who participate in mass actions have to realize that their internal personal reservations and qualifications are politically irrelevant. The people acting at the forefront of the action represent the group as a whole, whether everyone likes that or not. Of course there are wide differences of knowledge, understanding, and intent among the students and faculty participating in the occupations. But if those differences remain unexpressed or subject to marginalization or erasure, they have no purchase on events. Everyone needs to make a decision about whether they are comfortable with being absorbed into and represented by the group actions. Characterizations of individuals’ identities by nonparticipants are inevitably based on the group’s actions. Similarly, if you have a local SJP chapter, its members will be identified with the national organization’s policies.

So too will Joseph Massad be justifiably taken to represent not just Columbia’s but higher education’s inability to confront its defective, dysfunctional faculty personnel policies. Shafik was pressed to commit herself to removing Massad as chair of the Arts & Sciences Academic Review Committee. She waffled about his status, but the truth is a Hamas supporter and clear antisemite should never have been given that responsibility. He was not disciplined; he was honored. Even now, I would not fire him. But I would have limited his responsibilities years ago.

The indicative April hearings in the House of Representatives, hearings that are well worth listening to in their entirety, had moments that demonstrated our problems begin much earlier than tenure itself. They start with faculty hiring that is inherently unsupervised. Stefanik interrogated Shafik about Mohamed Abdou, 2024 Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia. His antisemitism presented no impediment to his employment. Publicly exposed, he will not be reappointed. Asked why his appointment passed muster in the first place, Shafik disingenuously replied that he had been subjected to a criminal record check and had to attest that he had never been part of a criminal investigation. Those procedures will not guard against hiring a racist or an antisemite.

If both Columbia and higher education as a whole adopted responsible faculty personnel practices overall, we might not have so many students ready to set up tents in support of a terrorist group.

Notes

1. For a recording of the performance at Yale, see Sahar Tartak, “I Was Stabbed in the Eye at Yale,” The Free Press, April 21, 2024. The excepts used there included a number of repetitions. But the full song is much longer.

2. Cary Nelson, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & The Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press/Academic Engagement Network, 2019).

3. Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (New York: Routledge, 2006).

4. Cary Nelson, Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Boston: ISGAP/ Academic Studies Press, 2024).

Cary Nelson was President of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012, and he is emeritus professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of modern American poetry and critical theory, he is the author of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), among many other works. His edited and co-edited books include Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) and Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1994). His contributions to American academic life are the subject of Michael Rothberg and Peter Garrett, eds., Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009).