Columbia University: Dealing with the Joseph Massad(s) problem
What can a university do about antisemitic terrorist-loving professors like Columbia's Joseph Massad – especially when his whole department agrees with him?
During the congressional antisemitism-on-campus hearings this past Wednesday (focusing on Columbia University), several members of congress asked the Columbia president, Dr. Minouche Shafik, about Dr. Jos[eh Massad, a long-time faculty member within Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS for “short”). As congressman Tim Walberg (and others) noted, following the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, Dr. Massad described the massacre of more than 1000 Jewish civilians as “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” When asked about the university’s response to Massad’s support for terrorism, Columbia president Shafik said “He has been spoken to.” She later indicated he is “under investigation” for his comments. Massad himself denies knowing anything about such an investigation.
Who is Massad?
Massad has taught at the school for 25 years, and is a tenured professor. He has a LONG history of anti-Israel rhetoric and his classes have a reputation for promoting ant-Israel hatred. Jewish students have long reported that they avoid taking his classes if at all possible. Bari Weiss wrote about his antisemitism when she was an undergrad at Columbia twenty years ago, and the decision to grant him tenure in 2009 was highly controversial, in part because it involved a extremely unusual set of circumstances; he was initially denied tenure in 2007 (because of questions about the quality of his scholarship rather than for any reason related to his politics), but he was then permitted to come up for tenure a second time and was successful that second time. Although the reasons for permitting him to come up for tenure a second time have never been made public, it is reasonable to assume that political considerations were involved — that some influential people at Columbia at the time did not want tenure denied to a Muslim assistant professor.
Bari Weiss’s writings about Massad from her time as an undergrad highlight the fact that what Massad has said recently is nothing more than a continuation of the Israel hatred and antisemitism he has been spewing throughout his years at Columbia. Shockingly, one of the classes he teaches regularly at Columbia is the History of Zionism course. Having an Israel-hater like Massad teaching that class is like an avowed openly and unapologetically racist KKK member teaching a class on the history of the civil rights movement.
And yet — he is still teaching at Columbia
Both representative Tim Walberg and representative Kathy Manning asked president Shafik why Massad is still teaching at Columbia. She never really gave a direct answer, but in fact, the answer is fairly simple. He has tenure. Professors do not serve at the pleasure of a school’s president. Instead, tenured professors have a LOT of protections against summary dismissal. If professors are grossly neglectful of their responsibilities (by, for example, not actually teaching the classes assigned to them) they may be dismissed, but even under those rather extreme conditions, it can take quite a while to terminate a tenured professor. A professor who has egregiously violated codes of conduct may be subjected to increasingly severe forms of discipline, culminating in termination, but at most universities, exercising one’s first amendment rights to voice political opinions outside of the classroom would not be considered to be a code of conduct violation. Even expressing a very biased perspective on a political issue within the classroom would not, at most schools, violate any policies, as long as what was being said is relevant to the topic of the course. As Shafik said, in response to Manning’s questions about Massad presenting a one-sided perspective on the conflict in the Middle East, professors at Columbia are not actually obliged to present information in a fair and balanced manner. Instead, Shafik explained, the balance comes (if indeed it ever does come) from offering other classes that discuss the same situation from a different perspective.
Professors cannot, of course, exhibit bias in the way they treat and grade individual students based upon the students’ sex, race, religion, or ethnicity. I don’t know what the experience of being in one of Massad’s classes is like for Jewish students, but it is noteworthy that there have not been reports of him abusing or mistreating Jewish students (while still permitting only one view about Israel to be discussed in his classes), and even Bari Weiss reports that she got an A in his class.
Can ANYTHING be done about Massad et. al.?
So – the bottom line is that it seems highly unlikely that Massad has done anything that would rise to the level of providing the administration with permissible cause to terminate him. Moreover, it is likely that most professors at Columbia would not want him to be terminated, because they value the very protections against arbitrary dismissal that make it almost impossible for the administration to get rid of him. And on top of that – Massad is just one of many Israel-hating professors at Columbia. Indeed, the Columbia MESAAS department is probably full of them, and that number includes the head of the MESAAS department (and quite possible every other member of that department as well). So efforts to terminate Massad would be met with strong resistance from his home department.
Given that, what can the Columbia upper administration do about him (assuming they actually want to do something – which may or may not be the case)? NOT MUCH. They can “talk with him” (which Shafik said has already happened), but there is no reason to think that will accomplish (or has accomplished) anything. They can’t even stop him from being assigned to teach the History of Zionism course, because course teaching assignments are made at the department level.
The person with the greatest potential influence is not actually the president – it’s the dean of Columbia College (within which the MESAAS department is housed). The current dean is Dr. Josef Sorett, and he, much more than the president, is the one who ultimately allocates resources of various and sundry kinds to the department, and through that process can exert pressure on a department. I am not aware of any statements that dean Sorett has made that reflect on his views about the legitimacy of Israel, but it is noteworthy in this regard that, in his role as dean, Sorett had to approve the hiring by the MESAAS department of Mohamed Abdou as a visiting scholar for the spring 2024 semester. Abdou, who was hired after Oct. 7, is described on Columbia’s website as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.” and had a social media post on Oct. 11 that read, “I’m with Hamas & Hezbollah & Islamic Jihad.” And still – the MESAAS department hired him to teach a course titled “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition in SWAN”. Dean Sorett would have had to sign off on that hire and that teaching assignment, but apparently, for him, there was nothing about Abdou that raised a significant enough red flag for Sorett not to endorse him.
By the way – mainly just for your reading amusement, here is Abdou’s description of his course. I cannot imagine what kind of student would sign up for a class described this way, but I’m confident that any student who did sign up for this class would not be a big fan of Israel. And as you read this course description — written by a real professor at an Ivy League school — you may want to keep reminding yourself that THIS is what students are being taught in the MESAAS department at Columbia, and that THIS is what some parents are spending almost $100K per year for their child to learn.
This reading-intensive seminar course will examine the continuing impact, since 1492, of a (neo)colonial/(neo)imperial Euro-American informed modernity animated by (neo)liberal-Enlightenment values (free will/humanity, secularism, racial capitalism) and individualist identity politics on past and contemporary conceptualizations of family, kinship, and friendship in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities within the context of settler-colonial societies (as the U.S./Canada) as well as in postcolonial nations and regions (as Southwest Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) that arguably never underwent adequate decolonization. The course will explore kinship, intimacy, and friendship ties in a dynamic age where sexual and gender diversity is a hallmark of neoliberal ‘secular’ modernity, whose advent historically exposed all non-Europeans, to a plethora of false competing dualisms, such as secular/religious and heterogeneity/homogeneity, as well as discourses such as homonationalism (al-qawmiyyat al-mīthlīyat) and pinkwashing (al-ghaseel al-banafsajiy). We will examine selected themes such as racialized gender (including masculinities), sexuality, intimacy, class, age, power relationships, and their intersections. By drawing on transnational feminist discourses, queer Black, and Indigenous studies as well as queer of color critiques we will explore different manifestations of intimacy, familial, marriage, and friendship ties. What can friendship patterns - intimate, trustful, as well as voluntarily chosen ties that people maintain - tell us about societies and communal solidarities at present amidst polarizing ‘woke cultural wars?’ What role do geopolitical and social institutions and agency beyond them play when thinking about the violence of global nation-statist and racial capitalist gendered/sexualized systematic and systemic structures and what they provoke of reactionary Orientalist/Conservative impulses? Using intersectional/assemblage-based theories, what decolonial, gender- based, readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories that characterizes most (non)Euro-American political queer- feminist scholarship beyond the depiction of queer BIPOC as co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of ‘Gay Empire’ towards elucidating critical discussions on identity, agency, subjectivity, and dissidence?
There IS one option that is open to the administration if they are serious about making changes to the MESAAS department; they could put the department into “receivership” – basically taking it over, stripping the members of the department of the control they currently have over course creation, course assignments, and hiring decisions. Safik should direct her provost to do this. It is hard to imagine that she will. My guess is that right now she is just praying that graduation does not require police to be called in.
The bottom line, then, is not an optimistic one. The current climate at Columbia is a consequence of some long-term trends, especially involving hiring decisions made by humanities departments years ago. Massad isn’t going anywhere. He will continue to try to indoctrinate students in his Israel-hating beliefs, and so will others in his department and in other departments, and there is not much that the Columbia president can do about it.