Five (More) Questions for Joseph Massad
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College–CUNY

Joseph Massad, the professor in Columbia’s MEALAC Department that even the clearly biased ad hoc investigating committee couldn’t clear, issued a lengthy public defense of his actions on a pro-MEALAC website, censoringthought.org. A few months ago, when he first provided a public justification of his actions, I offered five questions based on his statement. His newest statement raises five additional queries:

1. When you said that “the university is the last bastion of free-thinking that has not yet fallen under the authority of extreme rightwing forces,” were you contending that the Supreme Court (the same Court that, among its other recent decisions, invalidated state laws against sodomy and upheld affirmative action) is “under the authority of extreme rightwing forces”? Do you consider the entertainment industry “under the authority of extreme rightwing forces”? The high-tech industry? K-12 public education? How exactly do you define “extreme rightwing forces” -- and do you apply similar broad brushes to your in-class analysis of recent events?
2. You seem unusually sensitive to criticism from figures such as Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, and even from Columbia students such as Ariel Beery, who you noted “has never taken a class with me and never met me.” Given your disappointment that CU Provost Alan Brinkley and the CU General Counsel’s office refused to represent you “to fight this defamation of character,” why, then, did you not retain private counsel to pursue a legal remedy against Kramer and Pipes? And do you believe that someone like Beery who has never met you has no right to criticize your public statements?
3. The syllabus for your 2002 course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stated that “the purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides, but rather to provide a thorough yet critical historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background to the current situation from a critical perspective.” Would you support, say, a course on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War operating from a premise that a professor need provide only a defense of U.S. policies? Or a course on the history of the British Empire offering not “‘balanced’ coverage” but a celebration of the wonders of imperialism? And why did you describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the “Zionist-Palestinian conflict”?
4. You challenged the ad hoc committee’s “partiality” because of the service of Floyd Abrams as a non-voting advisor, since “Mr. Abrams is publicly identified with pro-Israeli politics and activism.” Why, then, did you not consider the “partiality” of the committee compromised by the fact that two of its five voting members had signed an anti-Israel divestment petition that CU President Lee Bollinger labeled as “obscene,” and a third member had served as your dissertation adviser? Are only “pro-Israeli” voices biased on Middle Eastern affairs?
5. When you said that student Deena Shanker was guilty of “outright lies” when she recalled your responding to one of her questions, “If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom,” were the other two students whose testimony described your conduct in a similar fashion also guilty of “outright lies”?
   Massad’s statement also contains a number of wild allegations against Bollinger, whose proper function, according to Massad, seems to be to defend MEALAC faculty against any allegation, however credible, that is leveled against their teaching.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the same person who produced this statement is capable, once he enters the classroom, of offering nuanced interpretations of the contemporary Middle East, based on a rigorous analysis of a variety of sources and an objective summary of the relevant scholarship. But, to be quite frank, I doubt it.

NAS5:52 PM

We Are All Behaviorists Now . . .
John Staddon, Duke University

A few years ago in The New Behaviorism, which is in large part a critique of B. F. Skinner's fallacious extension of his brilliant experiments with animals to the problems of society, I pointed out that many who do not consider themselves behaviorists nevertheless accept his core beliefs about science and society. Little did I think that more than 30 years after the publication of Skinner's bestseller Beyond Freedom and Dignity, his deceptively simple prose would retain its power to mesmerize. On rereading BF&D, David Barash, an ethologist and anti-Skinnerian, found himself ("B.F. Skinner, Revisited," Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 April 2005 - subscription required) persuaded that our reluctance to accept that human behavior is causally determined underlies many of society's ills. He writes:

[A] scientific conception of behavior abolish[es] the unsupportable conceit that people are responsible for their actions. (B10)

What absolute rubbish! My dictionary defines responsibility thus: liable to be called to account or render satisfaction: answerable: capable of discharging duty: able to pay. In short, responsibility simply means accepting the consequences (a good Skinnerian term!) for one's actions. These consequences are punishment, for bad acts, and reward, for good. Most humans are so constructed that they will behave in predictable, generally deterministic ways if they are rewarded or punished. Moreover, other deterministic humans, seeing the aversive consequences of bad acts, will in turn be deterred from engaging in such acts. None of this works perfectly -- we can't yet predict human behavior with precision. But far from calling determinism into question, the concept of responsibility demands determinism! If human behavior were undetermined and capricious (this is Skinner's straw 'autonomous man') there would indeed be no point to the idea of personal responsibility.

It is depressing to see Skinner's cleverly expressed but deeply erroneous views on responsibility rising again like some psychological Terminator from what should have been a fiery grave.

NAS2:17 PM