Nat Hentoff on Columbia

Here's Nat Hentoff, a champion of free speech and civil liberties, on the whitewash at Columbia University.

The official Columbia report cited only three instances of intimidation by professors in the department (all of them previously publicized) but omitted many more, according to students who were interviewed by the committee.

Most remarkably left out was testimony to the alleged investigating committee by Yael Bitton that in a class taught by Joseph Massad, he told the students that the killers of the Israeli Olympic athletes in the 1972 massacre in Munich were not Palestinians or Germans - but Israelis!

As for the three instances of questionable, intimidating behavior by enthusiastic anti-Israel professors, only one was substantiated, but the reprimand was mildly bureaucratic in tone: "His rhetorical response . . . exceeded commonly accepted bounds."

What particularly struck me in the 24-page exercise in whitewashing was this attack by the committee on whistle-blowers among the students and their faculty supporters. Dig this:

"We find it deeply disturbing that faculty were apparently prepared to encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor's classroom statements. Such behavior undermines the standing of the professoriate as a whole, erodes the relationship of trust that ought to exist between a teacher and his students, and threatens to turn the latter into informers."

So this official Columbia committee is now advocating a gag rule on all students at the university. They can't report to a fellow professor, even if they hear the professor engage in outright agitprop racist or gender fabrications.