Columbia’s Most Unwanted
Columbia’s Most Unwanted
Why the campaign to get Joseph Massad fired failed, and why that’s a good thing
Last fall, nearly 80,000 people signed a petition demanding Columbia fire professor Joseph Massad. It failed, and here’s why that’s a good thing.
One day after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks, the professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history published a piece in The Electronic Intifada in which he described the attack as a justified “resistance offensive” and a “stunning victory.” He rightly decried the plight of the Palestinian people while all but disregarding the murder of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians, many of whom were children and the elderly. Given that Massad’s first reaction to the deadliest terrorist massacre in Israeli history was broadly celebratory, it’s no surprise that calls for Columbia to fire him quickly followed.
On October 13, Columbia student Maya Platek, who is Israeli, launched her Change.org petition. “Massad’s decision to praise the abhorrent attack encourages violence and misinformation in and outside of campus, particularly putting many Jewish and Israeli students on campus at risk,” Platek wrote in the petition.
These were sentiments many other Jewish students seemed to share. At one of the first protests, I met freshman Noah Lederman, who is Jewish. When I interviewed him at the end of October, he recalled how the language the pro-Palestinian protestors were using made him feel unsafe.
“These people across from us were shouting and chanting terrible, terrible things, referencing mass displacement, perhaps mass genocide of the Jewish people…even the most activist of activists in the Jewish community felt that it was unsafe for us to remain there,” he said.
For Lederman, Massad’s writing only exacerbated Jewish students’ fears. He said that while he couldn’t speak to Massad’s intentions with certainty, he believed his writing “went past just free speech…it was a blatant attack on the Jewish students, and it was an attempt to make us feel unsafe.” Lederman said Massad was “a well-educated man” who, in his view, should have known better than to write what he did. That’s why he supports Massad’s termination.
When I spoke to Platek a week later, she raised similar concerns. “His comments encourage misinformation and potentially encourage violence, and I had quite a few students come up to me and say that they felt unsafe, or they felt uncomfortable upon reading that article,” she said, “I just thought that I had to do something about it,”
Although Platek wouldn’t hold Massad directly responsible for the increase in antisemitism at Columbia since October 7, she maintained that rhetoric of the kind Massad used contributed to an atmosphere in which instances of antisemitism are more likely to occur.
It’s hard to blame Platek, Lederman, and the petition’s other signatories for wanting Massad to get the boot. The callousness of his writing only worsened legitimate fears of antisemitism on campus, so it’s understandable why so many people believed what he wrote exceeded the bounds of free speech.
But even after a massive petition and a fair bit of condemnation in the media, Joseph Massad remains employed at Columbia. Keeping Massad was the right decision, not because we should agree with what he wrote, but because firing him would have been a violation of the principles of free speech and academic freedom.
While many agreed with Platek and Lederman’s characterization of Massad’s piece, there are also quite a few who disagreed. Over 2,000 Columbia affiliates and members of the public signed a letter, dated October 15, expressing support for Massad and condemning Platek’s petition as “incendiary and defamatory.”
“Mainstream media outlets such as Fox News and the Jerusalem Post have published articles misrepresenting Professor Massad’s views as ‘condoning and supporting terrorism,’” they wrote. “Current attacks against Professor Massad are a continuation of this decades-long attempt to censor and intimidate him for his rigorous scholarship on Palestine.”
These wildly different characterizations of Massad’s writing demonstrate that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a campus to agree on what kind of speech encourages violence, supports terrorism, or puts students in danger. If campus speech codes are based solely on subjective feelings of offense or danger, they’re bound to be inconsistent and unfair. Any ideology held by the dominant faction would define what kind of speech is acceptable. The result is censorship through double standards for anyone who dissents from the dominant orthodoxy. If universities have the power to chill or silence dissenting voices, campuses risk becoming echo chambers for the dogma du jour.
Universities should instead stick to speech rules that reflect the First Amendment principle that debate on public issues should be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Thankfully, Columbia’s current policy already protects controversial speech like Massad’s. Section 440 of the Rules for University Conduct states, “The University cannot and will not rule any subject or form of expression out of order on the ground that it is objectionable, offensive, immoral, or untrue.” The university will only restrict speech if it “constitutes a genuine threat of harassment, that unjustifiably invades an individual’s privacy, or that falsely defames a specific individual.”
Massad’s speech constitutes none of these. While he trivialized the violence and horror of October 7 in his article, at no point did he call for or threaten violence against Jewish students at Columbia or anyone else. Claims that Massad’s writing constitutes harassment or discrimination would be similarly weak. His words caused discomfort for many Jewish students at Columbia, but causing discomfort is a far cry from harassment. An argument could be made that Massad spread misinformation with his writing, but spreading falsities without an attempt to damage someone’s reputation is not libelous.
Even if Columbia’s policies didn’t prohibit them from firing Massad, doing so would be counterproductive. Removing Massad would be at best a symbolic victory for those who disagreed with him, and at worst a flashpoint for further controversy and potential violence on campus.
Building a robust culture of free speech at Columbia requires us to tolerate offensive, even repugnant, viewpoints. Without tolerance of the intolerant, we risk creating a culture of censorship that stifles open discourse. The anti-Massad crowd is on solid ground when they attack his views, just not his academic freedom.
Mr. Smith is a staff writer. He is a senior at the School of General Studies majoring in political science.