This week saw a pair of ugly incidents at Columbia University. On Tuesday,
somebody hung a noose from the doorknob of a professor's office at
Teachers
College, Columbia's education school. Yesterday an anti-Semitic graffito
was
found in a men's room at Lewisohn Hall, home of Columbia's School of
General
Studies.
In both cases Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, sent a mass email to
members of the "Columbia community." A source from within that community
forwarded those emails to us, and they make for a fascinating contrast.
Here is Bollinger on the noose incident:
As most of you now know, a terrible incident of bias occurred at
Teachers College yesterday, directed at a member of the faculty.
Teachers College is a cherished affiliate of Columbia University
with its own president, Susan Fuhrman, to whom I have offered our
sup****t and assistance. We may be two independent institutions,
but we are one community; and we stand together in our commitment
to oppose the frightening sentiments that lay behind this act.
Tolerance and mutual respect are among the core values of our
diverse community, and all of us must confront acts of hate
whenever they occur within it. As I said last night, an attack
on the dignity of any member of our community is an assault on
all of us.
I will be meeting with student leaders this afternoon, and other
members of the administration will be communicating with faculty
and students in the coming days. Our mission as a university
includes addressing the most im****tant and searing issues of our
time, and we have a particular obligation to respond forcefully
to events that affront our values.
And here is Bollinger on the graffito:
I am saddened to re****t that one of the bathrooms in Lewisohn
Hall was sullied with an anti-Semitic smear. It has been promptly
removed and is now being investigated.
I want to make two points. When words are the offender, as in
this incident, I am reluctant to draw attention to them and will
exercise restraint in doing so going forward. I do not want to
broadcast, in any way, the message they attempt to send or empower
those behind them. Despite the irrational, destructive hatred that
persists in our society and world, we do not accept this anywhere
at this University. No one among us should feel marginalized or
threatened by words of hatred. We are one community; and as one
community, we will overcome these hateful acts and hold each
other to the highest standards of respect for the dignity and
diversity of every individual.
In response to questions students have raised, I also want to
reassure you that we have utmost confidence in our Public Safety
officials and in the NYPD. Not only do they have well established
communications protocols in place when there is an immediate
threat of harm; they distinguish crimes that threaten our physical
safety from incidents like the one that occurred today.
What accounts for the differences in tone and substance between these two
letters--expressing unambiguous outrage in the first incident, while
urging
restraint in the second one?
Although this second email does not mention the noose incident, it seems
clear
that Bollinger is trying to distinguish the rest room incident from it
when he
says that in the latter, "words are the offender," and that the police
"distinguish crimes that threaten our physical safety from incidents like
the
one that occurred today."
The first of these distinctions rests on a factual error. The Village
Voice
quotes a police re****t's description of the graffito: "a caricature of a
male
wearing a yarmulke above a swastika." (We assume this means the caricature
was
above the swastika, not that the male was depicted as wearing the
swastika.)
These cases are alike, then, in that both involve powerful symbols of
hatred,
not mere words.
What about the distinction between "crimes that threaten our physical
safety"
and "incidents like the one that occurred" yesterday? As a legal matter,
the
question of whether the noose constitutes a "true threat" is a very murky
one,
and one that depends in substantial part on the motives of the person who
placed the noose--whose identity apparently remains unknown. One factor
that
militates in favor of its being a true threat, however, is that it appears
to
have been directed against a specific person. (We are assuming for the
purpose
of discussion that neither incident is a hoax.)
But imagine if the situations were reversed. What would Bollinger's
reaction
have been if the swastika were painted on the door of a Jewish professor's
office and the noose turned up in a rest room?
One can only speculate, and we shall do just that. We can imagine that a
swastika on a professor's door would draw a stronger reaction from
Bollinger
than the one in the men's room actually did. But if it were a noose in the
rest room, we find it very difficult to imagine such a tepid response.
This is an educated guess based on years of observing how
multiculturalism,
the regnant ideology in American higher education, works. Multiculturalism
conceives of mankind as being divided into various groups (based on race,
ethnicity, ***, religion, ***ual orientation, etc.) and imposes a complex
hierarchy in which an individual's moral authority depends on the degree
to
which the groups to which he belongs are "oppressed."
The purest form of multiculturalism is what Shelby Steele calls "white
guilt."
White guilt, of course, has a real and powerful basis in history, as
whites
actually did oppress blacks, systematically and brutally, for most of
American
history. White guilt constrains Bollinger against urging blacks to
"exercise
restraint" in the face of the Teachers College noose. As a person of
pallor,
he simply lacks the moral authority to second-guess the reaction of blacks
to
racial offenses.
The relation****p between multiculturalism and anti-Semitism is much less
black- and-white (in more ways than one). Multiculturalism anathematizes
anti-Semitism by white Christians, whether of the Nazi or the country-club
variety. But it embraces other forms of anti-Semitism, most notably under
the
guise of sup****ting "oppressed" Palestinians against their Jewish putative
tormentors.
Bollinger's muted reaction to the Lewisohn Hall episode, we'd venture, is
partly a result of not knowing who the culprit was. If it turns out to be
a
white Christian with National Socialist tendencies, it will be easy to
condemn. But what are the odds of finding such a man on an Ivy League
campus
in 2007? If the vandal is Muslim, or Arab, or black, or a left-wing
anti-Israel activist, by contrast, the multicultural moral calculus is
much
more complicated and must take into account his status as a member of an
"oppressed" group.
A final thought: No institution in America has embraced multiculturalism
with
anything like the ideological fervor of higher education. It's hard to
think
of any institution in America that is more beset by strife over race and
other
distinctions among identity groups. Could there be a causal relation****p
here?
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