Notes of a Rebel Professor

Harvard Salient

FrontPage Magazine
March 22, 2006

By Prof. James R. Russell

In March 2003, I gave a lecture in the Department of Middle Eastern and
Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University. It was a
job talk: my partner of a quarter century lives in New York, my
hometown, and I figured I might as well apply for the long-vacant chair
in Armenian Studies that was once more being advertised. My lecture
presented a small philological discovery – that a pig-herder and rapist
named Argawan who debuted in an Armenian epic poem dating to the time of
Christ reappeared in a much later Ossetic epic, Nartae. An interesting,
if not earth-shattering, study – but I was not prepared for the passions
of a few members of the audience. One professor declared that such
scholarship, with its implication that one culture might influence
another, was a deplorable relic of imperialism, hegemonistic in essence.
I replied that the comparative method, though susceptible to misuse, is
indispensable to philology and is not intrinsically conspiratorial. As
we were leaving, another professor came up to ask me whether I was a
Dumezilian – that is, a follower of Georges Dumezil, who thought there
was broad continuity in social structures between Indo-European cultures
– and expressed her relief at my assurance that I was not. (“Senator, I
am not, nor have I ever been, a Dumezilian.”) For that would be, she
said, hegemonistic. Now, how many times, gentle reader, do you hear the
word “hegemonistic” in a day? I’d just heard it twice in an hour.

The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough, as one strolled down
corridors festooned with posters depicting a map of Israel dripping
blood or inviting one to celebrate the legacy of Edward Said; I
conversed with postgraduates in a student lounge decorated with a poster
of a kaffiyeh-swathed Hamas terrorist (sorry, I mean, “militant”). Only
two members of the search committee came to lunch; and on the way back
to Kent Hall from the Faculty Club one wondered aloud to me why I’d
bothered to apply for a job in a place where anti-Semitism had become
“mediaeval.” In the end, MEALAC nominated for the job a junior faculty
member who had been refused tenure by an ad hoc committee several years
earlier. The search had been a charade. The nomination was rejected
again, no appointment was made, and to this date no applicant has heard
from Columbia. In the year that followed one’s lecture in the
through-the-looking-glass world of Columbia’s Stalinism without Stalin,
MEALAC made the headlines. One professor told a girl she couldn’t be a
Semite because she had green eyes. He later denied saying anything, but
it sounds true to form: years before, he’d told me after the
assassination of Anwar Sadat that the Egyptian president had met the
fate of a traitor; and through the Gulf War, he had harangued his
colleagues on how Israel should not exist. Another professor made an
Israeli student stand up in class to be verbally abused. The press
reported one such incident – a student whose boyfriend was in the class
has told me that there were in fact several. Yet another professor in
the department made violently inflammatory remarks about Jews in Al
Ahram. Columbia’s administration eventually was forced to take note of
the scandal. It placed the MEALAC department in receivership, but under
the tutelage of professors in other departments who were close to the
faculty members accused of these offenses and shared their views. An
investigatory committee, likewise weighted with left-wing and
anti-Israel extremists, exonerated the accused: A New York Times
editorial condemned the committee’s work as a whitewash.

My association with Columbia goes far back. My father is a graduate of
the College and Law School; my mother, a Columbia Ph.D. in Chemistry. I
was Salutatorian of the Class of ’74 and a Kellett Fellow; and I taught
for twelve years in MEALAC as Lecturer, then Assistant Professor, then
Associate Professor. Two of my courses were listed among the top ten for
1991 in the Columbia-Barnard Course Guide. In 1992 I was denied tenure:
since I was offered the Harvard chair in Armenian Studies a year later,
I do not think my scholarship or teaching were at fault. Two senior
colleagues told me that I simply belonged to the wrong race.

David Horowitz’s The Professors

I also thought my experience was unusual; but as we learn from David
Horowitz’s superb book, the inmates have taken control of the lunatic
asylum that is academia today. Misery loves company: if you’re a sane
scholar in this business, the book will at least cheer you up, at least
at first, until you remember this is a book, not about Heidelberg in
1934 or Moscow State University in 1937, but about America in 2006. The
book begins with an account of Hamilton College’s invitation to Ward
Churchill to deliver a lecture (for $3,500 plus expenses). Churchill is
a tenured professor at the University of Colorado and was chairman of
his department. He does not hold a doctorate. He claimed to be an
American Indian – that was a lie. The Rocky Mountain News maintains he
has plagiarized the work of others. In the 1970’s he trained the Weather
Underground in the use of weapons and explosives. He regards the 9/11
terrorist attack as a just penalty visited upon “the little Eichmanns
inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers”. Hamilton, after
immense pressure, including the protests of one student whose father
died in the World Trade Center, withdrew its invitation. The AAUP has
declared its official support for Churchill, and he has since toured
many campuses, receiving everywhere a hero’s welcome from large crowds.

This is not an extreme example. Horowitz demonstrates that it is routine
for American universities to grant tenure to people who are
under-qualified or unqualified, provided they meet an ideological
standard imposed upon various disciplines in the humanities. It is de
rigueur to decry America as the fons et origo of every evil, from the
oppression of Blacks, women, gays, and Native Americans to the fouling
of the planet and the fomenting of war and misery around the globe.
Israel, too, must be derided as the sole villain in the Middle East
conflict: as the Israel-bashers have gained confidence, their imagery
and rhetoric have assumed the features of old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
Correspondingly, one may not criticize Islam or the Arabs for offenses
inexcusable in others: I recall a poster of the Arab students’ society
at Columbia around 1990 depicting a hook-nosed Israeli soldier
bayoneting a crucified Palestinian. It hung in the MEALAC office for
some days before I removed it, to the consternation of the staff – and,
doubtless, to the detriment of my future career on Morningside Heights.
(It did not matter that some years before I had asked my Literature
Humanities students not to use an assigned edition of the Inferno that
contained a crude modern drawing of Muhammad dismembering himself. I did
not want to hurt the feelings of a Muslim pupil and friend. But Islam
was not the cause of the day then. You can’t win.) It also harms one’s
chances of employment if one is an overtly devout Christian, or a
political conservative. How things have changed! A teacher of mine
recalls that in the early 1960s, candidates for positions at Smith were
interviewed on Friday and served pork at lunch, to weed out Jews and
Catholics. I wonder which foods are verboten to Hegemonists. And
academic writing itself has come to reify these political positions: the
impenetrable jargon of “gendered” studies decrying “patriarchal”
phenomena and so on. The purpose of such “cultural studies” is to make
what is disputable opinion look like the hard technical data of exact
and indisputable scientific research. It is a way of imposing orthodoxy
and stifling dissent. That is not really new, in a roundabout sort of
way: in the early 1950’s, the Soviets decided “Western” genetics (scil.
science) wasn’t Marxist, so Trofim Lysenko obligingly cooked up a set of
irreproducible experimental results showing that genetic traits could be
acquired during one’s life and passed on. The Russian mistake was to
dress up bad science in political jargon. Nowadays it is fake
scholarship in the service of a vicious political agenda that is gussied
up with the borrowed terminology of science.

The body of Horowitz’s book is a kind of rogues’ gallery. As a professor
of Armenian studies, I’ve met over my lifetime hundreds of survivors of
the Armenian Genocide and have read scores of testimonies in Armenian
and other languages. I’ve also traveled to Eastern Anatolia and spoken
with Turkish and Kurdish farmers who spoke freely of the massacres.
Often the ruins of Armenian villages and even quarters of whole cities
are untouched. So I note with appreciation the inclusion of Hamid Algar,
a professor of Persian and Islamic studies (and, for the record, a
superb scholar) who in 1998 spat on members of the Armenian Student
Association at UC Berkeley. He is quoted as having said to them: “It was
not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs…You stupid
Armenians, you deserve to be massacred!”

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan is criticized for his
anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, but that scarcely exhausts Ann Arbor’s
charms: a colleague who applied for a job in Armenian studies there
recalled to me being told they would not hire anyone planning to talk
about the Armenian Genocide. Rejecting a number of fine young scholars
with training in Armenian language, literature, and history, they hired
a scholar of anthropology whose Ph.D. dealt with UFO sightings in the
Soviet Armenian republic. If the little green men land in Michigan,
though, they’ll either have a lot of fun or, more likely, run for their
flying saucers and leave this galaxy at warp speed: Professor Gayle
Rubin (p. 307), 1988 Woman of the Year of the National Leather
Association, has written thoughtfully about “boy-love” and
“fistf**king”, and has deplored women’s lack of phallic power (a problem
easily remedied, I should imagine, by a visit to Hubba Hubba on Mass Ave.).

And then, there is Prof. Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey (the
bard of Camden must be spinning in his grave like a top), Professor at
Rutgers and Stony Brook and author of such immortal musings as these:
“Most American white men are trained to be fags.” “Rape the white girls.
Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” Columbia’s Middle East
Studies program held a gala for Baraka’s 70th birthday – presumably in
recognition of such strophes as “I got the extermination blues, jewboys.
I got the Hitler syndrome figured.” The relatively long section on Hamid
Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia’s MEALAC, with its
catena of violently racist rants against the Jews, Israel, and America,
is horrifying enough. What makes it worse is the background Horowitz
does not provide: Columbia was once a great center of Iranian studies.
Professors A.V. Williams Jackson and Louis Gray taught the Zoroastrian
high-priests, Ervadji Pavry and Dhalla. Dale Bishop, Chris Brunner,
Ehsan Yarshater, Prods Oktor Skjaervo, your obsedient servant – we were
Columbia’s Iranists. Dabashi was a respectable scholar once, too, and I
thought him a friend. But It would be unfair to single out MEALAC:
Horowitz devotes an entry to Columbia’s feisty anthropologist Nicholas
De Genova, who has called for “a million Mogadishus” and explained that
“the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S.
military” (p. 123).

At Syracuse, where once Delmore Schwartz held court to Lou Reed, you can
now take an accredited course on Lil’ Kim and parse such texts as
“Niggas… betta grab a seatgrab on ya dick as this bitch gets deep,/
Deeper than a pussy of a bitch 6 feet stiff dicks feel sweet in this
little petite.” Nathaniel Nelson reports that the instructor announced
on the first day of the course “Political Philosophy: Plato to
Machiavelli”, “My name is Michael Vocino and I like dick” (p. 346). The
candid Mr. Vocino, a tenured full professor in his fifties, is writing a
Ph.D. dissertation on the TV series South Park. Ann Arbor, we’ve got a
phallic power problem.

On page 365, Horowitz reaches Chapter 2, which deals with background to
the no-confidence vote against President Larry Summers of Harvard in
March 2005. He reviews the case of Cornel West and African-American
Studies and the controversy over women in science and concludes: “the
entire purpose of the censure was to suppress a politically
objectionable (but scientifically grounded) idea.” The affair
“demonstrated the chilling power of a radical minority on the
university’s faculty.” The chapter does not consider Summers’
condemnation as anti-Semitic in result if not intent of a petition for
Harvard to divest from Israel; but I think this statement galvanized
radical faculty opinion against him. The book was published before
Summers’ resignation: it records only his attempts after censure to
rectify the errors of which he had been accused. But it is now plain
that nothing he could have done would have saved his presidency.

As I understand it, liberalism has to do with freedom. As a boy I
marched for civil rights: that meant equal opportunity and integration,
not affirmative action, Black separatism, and the licentious advocacy of
violence. When as a college student I fought for gay rights, I wanted
homosexuals to be able to express the love we naturally feel without
fear of violence, ridicule, or condemnation; I did not have in mind the
imposition of “queer theory” on the study of literature, or the
accreditation of college courses on, well, on the stuff you have just
read. It has been distressing to witness the Left’s misguided take on
foreign affairs morph into full-blown, murderous anti-Semitism, coupled
with an utterly illogical worship of political Islam, which is
anti-homosexual and misogynist just for starters. But the Left has
always flirted with totalitarian violence and has indulged in an easy
demonization of America that relieves one of the need to think with
greater complexity and depth about the problems of our world. Most of
the 101 academic rogues of Horowitz’s list would probably describe
themselves as liberals, but nothing could be more illiberal that their
censorious intolerance. They abuse their position of authority and the
captive audience of the classroom to impose their views on students,
often neglecting at the same time to teach the subjects for which they
are paid. They abuse academic standards to hire and promote those who
think as they do: as Horowitz shows, professors with little or no
scholarly merit are often at the top of their departments, even of
professional associations. And God help those of us who do not think as
they do – or who do not meet other criteria. I once applied for a job at
CCNY. My application was never acknowledged. When my mother, who worked
there, inquired, a colleague replied “Why did he even bother? He’s the
wrong color.” Of course one of CCNY’s stars at the time was the
estimable Prof. Leonard Jeffries: “Jews are a race of skunks and animals
that stole Africa from the Black Man” (Horowitz, p. 234).

A problem we face is that of terminology. Words like “liberal” and
“Left” actually mean today the opposite of what they once did; while
“conservatives” on American campuses are a dissenting, often
disenfranchised minority who believe in freedom of speech, freedom of
conscience, fair hiring practices, and so on. They tend to oppose the
murder of Jews, the practice of slavery, female circumcision, and, of
course, destroying office buildings full of working people with
airplanes full of more working people. (Among the “little Eichmanns”
working at the WTC when “the chickens came home to roost” were men and
women from my old neighborhood, Washington Heights: Dominican immigrants
who worked as janitors, as cooks at Windows on the World.) Let’s start
by calling things by their right names: Horowitz’s 101 professors are
bigots, racists, apologists for murder, fascists, traitors to this country.

And what is to be done about them, once the public is informed about
them? Do America’s lawmakers want public money (that is, our income
taxes) to go to pay the likes of Ward Churchill or Amiri Baraka? Do
parents and alumni want to fund private universities that hire people
like Hamid Dabashi and Joseph Massad? There are students who are sick
and tired of relentless indoctrination, of bogus scholarship and silly
courses that take the place of real learning. Their voices should be heard.

After my lecture at Columbia in 2003, I returned to Cambridge. I am
fortunate to have an academic job: I know a number of people who,
because they were Jews, or white men, or conservatives, failed to secure
professorships and their careers were truncated or destroyed. Horowitz
in his final chapter describes how he collected his data, and avers he
could have written a book about a myriad, rather than a hundred. But
what disturbed me most, and what convinced me New York was no longer my
home, was not the derision within the gates of Columbia University, but
the banality of indifference outside.

Prof. James R. Russell has been the Mashtots Professor of Armenian
Studies at Harvard University since 1993. Previously, he taught at
Columbia University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

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