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To:
Office of the President, Columbia University
Dear President Bollinger,
We, professors, scholars, teachers and students at universities
world-wide are shocked by the slanderous campaign long launched in
the New York media against our colleague Assistant Professor Joseph
Massad. Conducted at a time when, following September 11, basic
academic and political freedoms have been increasingly weakened,
when individuals speaking up and voicing their dissent have been
personally threatened and when Middle East Studies have come under
attack, this campaign is fed by false and baseless accusations on
the part of self-appointed individuals and organizations who claim
for themselves a legitimacy or a representativity they never gained.
More importantly, it participates in a massive accumulation of means
of intimidation and harassment aimed at teachers and intellectuals,
and at young scholars whose professional future is even more fragile
due to their unprotected status as non-tenured faculty. These means
include the use of threats by donors of financial retributions
against the university, calls for the dismissal of an academic
colleague based solely on political rumors and, most alarmingly, the
intervention of a member of Congress with ambitions for higher
office. The attacks come from sources who have no role to play in
making assessments about academic matters such as professional
standing or tenure decisions.
These attacks, moreover, grossly misrepresent Professor Massad's
teaching and scholarship. Hence, it is essential that a sharp
distinction be made between the caricature that is being drawn of
Professor Massad as anti-Semitic, and Professor Massad, the public
intellectual, who has courageously written in Arabic and in English
against anti-Semitism and anti-Semites. The attacks on Professor
Massad's teaching rely, at best, on a few unsubstantiated students'
complaints, unscrupulously solicited and deployed by politically
motivated actors. They ignore his distinguished teaching record and
the significant support he enjoys from the vast majority of students
who have, in fact, taken his classes.
The means used by these attacks endanger nothing less than the very
basics of academic freedom, the protection of intellectual
integrity, and the protection of the classroom as a site of engaged
reflection and unsettling debate. What such campaigns aim at is to
frighten, and ultimately silence, the courageous voices of public
intellectuals, and those of committed teachers and professors, who
seek to publish and speak freely. They threaten the very ideal of a
university as a place of open and vigorous intellectual exchanges.
They threaten the very ideals upheld by Professor Massad and by the
faculty of Columbia University. It is these ideals and these
commitments, this intellectual work that needs to be protected. We
call on President Bollinger to rise to the occasion and issue a
categorical statement in defense of Professor Massad and against
this! campaign of defamation, to ensure that teachers and professors
be allowed to teach without intimidation from within or without the
university.
To sign the petition
http://www.petitiononline.com/jmassad/petition-sign.html?
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