Professor Joseph Massad is under attack. Please sign and circulate. Naseer
From: Neville Hoad <nhoad at mail.utexas.edu> Date: October 23, 2004 6:22:44 PM CDT To: Joseph A Massad <jam25 at columbia.edu> Cc: ga152 at columbia.edu, abukhali at uclink.berkeley.edu Subject: Fwd: Final Final Version
Please circulate as widely as possible
Dear Colleague,
Recent articles in New York newspapers have attacked Assistant Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University in a most insidious manner. In addition, a call was issued by U.S. Congressman Wiener to dismiss Massad from the University (see links below). This campaign of defamation and of intimidation is based on allegations contained in a secret and unreleased film produced on the Columbia campus. The following letter was drafted in solidarity with Professor Massad. We need signatories to sign the letter and send it to me (Neville Hoad) by Five o'clock New York time on Monday October 25 so that it can then be forwarded to President Bollinger and copied to Vice President Dirks and Provost Brinkley. Please email your name, title and institutional affiliation to nhoad at mail.utexas.edu, if you wish to be a signatory to the letter below
In solidarity.
Neville Hoad Assistant Professor of English University of Texas at Austin nhoad at mail.utexas.edu
http://www.nysun.com/article/3452 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/244430p-209482c.html http://www.nysun.com/article/3602 http://www.nysun.com/article/3639
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.