The continuing crisis regarding Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department recently reached a new level: in a two-part series, Nat Hentoff, the First Amendment specialist at the Village Voice and an occasional professor himself (at NYU), offers some of the most thoughtful commentary I have seen on the tensions between protecting professors’ academic freedom and the more limited academic freedom rights enjoyed by students.

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger recently appointed a five-person panel to look into allegations of intimidation of students in MEALAC classes. The New York Sun, which has done the best reporting on this story (as they generally do on New York City higher education matters), was sharply critical of Bollinger’s move, contending that the president seemed to have “truckled to his employees in the faculty, permitting them, in effect, to investigate themselves.” Since the committee seems transparently biased (one of its members was a dissertation advisor to Professor Joseph Massad, another signed the petition demanding that Columbia divest from Israel, and a third is in charge of “diversity initiatives” at Morningside Heights), my guess is that it will ratify decisions that Bollinger has already made. If he wanted to whitewash the matter, it’s hard to believe that he would have selected a committee whose objectivity could be so easily challenged.

The Sun also, correctly, chastises Bollinger for limiting the scope of the inquiry’s purview to" classroom experiences,” with a committee not to “review departments or curricula,” raising what Hentoff terms a basic “dilemma": as the department’s “curricula reflect the views and interpretations of the professors, and the evident biases of some of them," how can the basic problem be addressed without looking into the curricular structure of MEALAC?

The answer, according to Hentoff, is intellectual diversity. “It’s not,” he notes, “about bringing in pro-Israel professors, but scholars who teach—not inculcate.” In the academic setting, he reasons,

free speech, free inquiry, and academic freedom are linked together, and all of these First Amendment protections work in two ways. Professors are entitled to their interpretations, however dogmatic. And students have the right to question professors' evidence or proof of their doctrines—and the right to make counter- assertions without being bullied and treated as if their only function as students is to be dutifully indoctrinated. Academic freedom in, of all places, a university based on free inquiry belongs to both professors and students.

Too often, as Hentoff comments, in MEALAC classes, “’academic freedom’ has been transmogrified into naked authoritarianism.”

Bollinger, of course, is not responsible for this problem: MEALAC hiring strategy for years was devoted to bringing in professors ideologically compatible with Edward Said, and so the roots of this controversy were established before Bollinger’s arrival as president. And, obviously, he has limited ability to rein in tenured professors.

Beyond establishing an effective university policy against using the classroom for indoctrination, Bollinger can and should make two other moves. First, he should take steps to closely oversee the personnel process within MEALAC, to ensure that applicants reflecting all legitimate scholarly interpretations are considered for positions. Secondly, he should demand that Joseph Massad provide proof for his wild allegations responding to the inquiry; and, if Massad cannot do so, the president should take appropriate action.