I think this raises a couple very serious questions about Columbia’s academic review process, and Columbia’s intellectual environment in general. The broader and less answerable question is that of how enough right-thinking, PhD-holding individuals could possibly convince themselves that a purveyor of bigotry that’s as barely-veiled as Massad’s is even entitled to a second round of tenure review. But there’s a more ominous query attached to this one, and it’s one that doesn’t require quite as much speculation. If there really was a bloc of professors who were vocally displeased with Provost Alan Brinkley’s original decision, how did they manage to co-opt him?

Let’s put our conspiracy theory thinking caps on, shall we?

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Disclaimer: I’m a huge “Free Tibet” skeptic.
A commenter on Bwog beat me to the punch on this one, but the mistake in Christina Liu’s op-ed in the Spec yesterday was too big to be overlooked. Liu, a junior in the College, writes:

Yet while the Dalai Lamas have received much praise over the years, the history of the title is far from pristine. One Dalai Lama has admitted to having sex with a hundred men and women, knowing all the while that he had AIDS.

I would be really interested in seeing where Liu got this obviously false piece of information. Which Dalai Lama is she talking about? I’m fairly certain it isn’t Tenzin Gyatso, our esteemed current dalai lama, who has held the position since he was two years old in 1937. Yet the AIDS epidemic did not happen until the early 1980s. With her false (fabricated?) piece of information, Liu handily undermines her own argument: that you should know what you are talking about before you take sides on an issue.

[Pro-Tibet protestors swarmed the Olympic torch in Paris this past week, not far from where Reid Hall correspondant Greg Keilin has been spending his semester. He makes sense of the recent fracas, which made headlines around the world].

I have to admit I barely even noticed when the Olympic Torch came to town this week.  Apart from a few flashing, blaring squad cars that sped past me in the street, I never saw any sign of the commotion that filled the papers the next day.

Kate, on the other hand, was at home when the procession passed by Notre Dame, which we can see from our window.  She never got a good look at the torch—it was obscured by the crowd of protestors and police—but she was an eyewitness to some heavy-handed law enforcement.

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What’s this??!?!? An article in next week’s New Yorker that isn’t online yet, yet is still hosted on the Spec server for some reason? What mischief is this! The Commentariat isn’t saying, although we advise Fair Alma’s Middle East ideologists to start sharpening their respective oyster knives. Because this spring’s Columbia-related New York media expose is even more of a barnburner than last year’s.

Sources just forwarded The Commentariat a PDF of a huge Jane Kramer-penned piece about the Abu al-Haj tenure controversy. While we expect it to be more thorough and even-handed than this rather execrable hack job, the Middle East is Columbia’s third rail, and even the most clueless pieces of off-campus hackery can give an interesting sense of how the outside world interprets our pet ideological conflict. And while I haven’t given this a complete read-through, it’s looking like this latest article is going to be a blockbuster.

Below, a quick n’ dirty CTRL+F, pending a longer dissection from your crack team of Timothy Noah wannabes here at the Commentariat.

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Oy vey! Not to be a shmendrik or anything, but could Columbia’s latest wonder boy be hastening the irrelevence of his own field? That’s what a few rather esteemed Yiddish scholars seem to think. They believe that newly-minted Yiddish professor Jeremy Dauber takes too “scientific” an approach to the Jewish people’s former lingua franca, which has been on life support in the non-academic “real world” ever since Hitler and Stalin’s all too successful extermination of Eastern European Jewery. The “controversy,” in sum:

To put the issue simply, explained Paul Glasser, the associate dean of YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, “there are those academics who make a point of speaking Yiddish at home and those who don’t.” Those in the former camp, often identified as “Yiddishists,” tend to see Yiddish departments not just as academic spaces but as opportunities to keep Yiddish alive outside of ultra-Orthodox enclaves. By their criteria, a Yiddish professor’s role extends beyond research and teaching to encompass involvement in Yiddish cultural life. That often means, for example, passing the language on to his or her children.

“Dauber is more of the scientific school, shall we say,” said Shane Baker, the director of a Yiddish organization called the Congress for Jewish Culture. “He likes the insect pinned to the tray to analyze. He’s not active in the Yiddish world. I’ve never seen him at a Yiddish event.”

This tension isn’t exclusive to Yiddish studies–in fact, it’s common to any field of cultural studies that’s dominated by people who feel like they have some kind of personal, extra-academic stake in that culture. For Yiddish, the fact that the culture is on its last gasps (or was on its last gasps 50 years ago, depending on who you ask) turns this tension into a sublimated fight for survival. By the “Yiddishist” view, someone who is neutral on the issue of cultural continuity shouldn’t be in a field that exists for the sake of cultural continuity. By the opposite view, Yiddish scholarship is at the very least a means of studying stuff that’s that’s worth studying, as well as memorializing something buried in the historical past–or rather, something murdered in the gas chambers and gulags of the 40s and 50s.

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The majority vote was not enough to impeach Cunningham, falling short from a two-thirds vote requirement on Tuesday night. Bearing this in mind, the already-tense GS Council environment will cross into deeper grounds of awkwardness and bad vibes. In a statement made to The Commentariat, Vice President of Policy Nancy Saunders explained that Cunningham “will attempt to damage the reputations of those who voted in favor of his impeachment, or make them otherwise feel uncomfortable on council.” Indeed, Cunningham could do with all the support he can get, knowing that a majority voted against him. What should be more important for Cunningham as it seems now, is to remain collected and finish the year off with a graceful bow out. Unfortunately, Saunders’ predictions may be right–Cunningham was reported saying that he felt that bridges were “burnt” and relationships “torched.”

The Commentariat later caught up with friend of Cunningham and Senior Class President Chikodi Chima who doubted Cunningham would have put in an application for office that was due at noon today. When asked about the failure to impeach Cunningham, Chima believed it “a good thing,” explaining that he was behind a lot of central GS developments such as www.gslounge.com and taking him out now “would be stupid” since it’s so late in the game. Ironically, Chima also pointed out that “many of the people who voted against him last night only have voting power on GSSC because he lobbied for their right to vote as members of council.”

The issue itself simmered as council members found points of contention in Cunningham’s actions, which were sometimes misleading and went against the constitution. This semester, Cunningham reportedly took an extra-light load in order to devote extra hours per week to GSSC. His intentions seem in order, but the heart of the issue seems to be that the way he went about doing things and making decisions lacked the strong foundation of communication needed between members of council. So far, reports have seemed to depict Cunningham as manipulative and self-serving. I think the matter might be a little more complicated than that.

Columbia’s favorite clinical psychologist/hate crime victim/plagiarist/race baiter has caused yet another instituional headache: looks like the TC noose-hanging investigation has dug up something after all.

Or has it? This New York Post “exclusive” says that the state’s hate crimes division was specifically interested in whether a turn in TC’s investigation might have precipitated the noose-hanging; Spec declines to speculate (ha ha!), but it’s nevertheless clear that investigators are exploring any potential links between the allegations of plagiarism and last semester’s hate crime. But it should be emphasized that the links are, for the moment, potential. From the New York Post:

Sources said the records would provide investigators with a timeline on the tightly guarded 18-month plagiarism probe and what Constantine - one of only two tenured black Teachers College professors - stood to possibly lose if she were found guilty and her job were threatened.

I’m not sure what a grand jury plans on doing with this information: after all, investigators could have established motive without asking the school to hand over any records of its investigation. Indeed, the investigation timeline is helpful only if it establishes a break in the case just beforethe noose-hanging, a fact that would focus scrutiny on Constantine rather than a sympathetic friend acting independently.

This leaves a couple of unanswered questions: Does the state want to indict Constantine for criminal conspiracy? And perhaps more importantly, did the plagiarism investigation leave TC faculty divided enough to make the “lone noose-hanger” theory plausible? As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the plagiarism investigation likely sprang from a bitter intra-faculty fued that resulted in one junior faculty member threatening legal action and decamping to the west coast. Now it would be a profound embarrassment for Teachers College if a tenured faculty member faced credible criminal conspiracy charges. But it would a whole lot worse if TC’s professional environment were proven as poisonous as the grand jury seems to suspect it is.