Bwog has noticed that over the next week or so there will be a smorgasbord of learning opportunities for those who are not going home to spend their magnificent four days of fall break. Whether you are interested in theater, bioethics or academic freedom, there's something going on that's right up your alley.

Human Genetic Complexity: What We Know--Legal, Historical, and Evolutionary Perspectives
October 29th at 8 pm
417 IAB

This talk features philosophy professor Phillip Kitcher, biology professor Robert Pollack and NYU law professor and Nation columnist Patricia Williams (who is no stranger to this campus). While the discussion supposedly will center around themes from the Core, expect philosophy more contemporary than CC and science more general than Frontiers.

Princess Ghida Talal of Jordan, PrezBo and scholars from around the world are in Lerner 555 today discussing academic freedom in places where scholars are imprisoned, executed and oppressed in other ways. Bollinger began the event talking about the precarious nature of scholarship in the world and on the other side, Columbia's commitment to the study of human rights (with the creation of the CSHR in 1978).

Some governments, even democracies, he said, are geared towards allowing only a few viewpoints and that limits the scholarly project to seek truth. Novel ideas from the academy, by their very nature, commonly conflict with the traditional views that these governments hold and in a fight between the government and the scholar, the government always wins.

Of 70 Columbia professors, expressed to the New York Sun! Some of them rather prominent! A faculty action committee statement of concern accuses PrezBo of failing "to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom." Particularly rankling to signatories--which include such luminaries as Akeel Bilgrami, Bruce Robbins, Mahmood Mamdani, Gayatri Spivak, Eric Foner, and former Provost Jonathan Cole, as well as predictable lightning rods like Nadia Abu al-Haj and Nick DeGenova--is the impact of outside groups on tenure and other "academic freedom" issues. The New York Sun suggests (albeit very implicitly) that this could be the early stages of the kind of faculty ouster that cost Lawrence Summers his job; meanwhile, the professors plan on presenting their grievances tomorrow at a meeting of the Arts and Sciences faculty.

Conspiracy theorists will note a number of carefully worded references to recent events in the professors' statement: "Tenure, "the hosting of controversial speakers," "villifying members of faculty," "partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East"...this thing could be read as the culmination of faculty discontent with Low Library's handling of the MEALAC controversy, the al-Haj tenure debate, the Ahmadinejad introduction, and Islamofascism awareness week.

But one conspiracy theorist has gone a step further: according to the mysterious "Emmett Trueman," who has been flooding publicaton inboxes with "inside information" about this year's tenure battles, an ad hoc committee has recommended that Professor Joseph Massad be denied tenure (which New Republic resident codger Marty Peretz called a few weeks ago), and the letter is an attempt by the MEALAC faculty to persuade the administration to overturn the recommendation. Also worth noting: at a panel tonight lauding Massad's Desiring Arabs, hosted by the Heyman Institute, the professor noted that he was "personally grateful for this intervention."

Bwog lecture hopper Pierce Stanley reports back on the Heyman Center's discussion on the limits and applications of academic freedom.

So it appears that with the exception of Methods and Problems of Philosophical Thought, Akeel Bilgrami, the suave and erudite former Rhodes scholar is bringing his A game to Columbia these days. The Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Heyman Center for Humanities director should be given full credit for the assembly of all-stars he brought to Columbia last night to appear on a panel to discuss the topic "Freedom and the University." An impassioned discussion between five preeminent leaders in their respective academic fields who are also key players in the contemporary debate over academic freedom at the university, it was easily the best event of the day that no one knew about.

Introduced by Columbia's own Provost Emeritus and academic freedom expert, Jonathan Cole, the event brought together Yale Law professor Robert Post, Joan Scott of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, UChicago International Relations theorist John Mearsheimer of Israel Lobby fame, and his quirky colleague, historian Peter Novick to debate, discuss, and joke about the state of the academic enterprise today. While the professors all seemed to generally be in agreement about the freedoms of research and speech by professors at the university, one was left wondering why a more dissenting voice was not included in the discussion, a la Columbia's own favorite David Horowitz.

Nevertheless, the panel embarked upon the tough task of determining the current state of academic freedom in American universities, at a time when it is widely perceived to be under the biggest threat since 1950's McCarthyism's crackdown on university professors. Mostly an attempt to determine the role that a professor's outside views should play inside the classroom, the three of hours of discussion flew by, they spared no breath in discussing everything from the intricate rules that a professor must follow according to the 1940's Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure constructed by the American Association of University Professors, to the influence of the Israel Lobby on determining what professors say and do. They touched upon the commonplace understanding that most professors in the university system today are of a liberal persuasion, followed by a debate over the appropriateness of several high profile professor firings and tenure decisions, and even a discussion about the six different definitions of the word "motherfucker" that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

And by The Boss we mean Bwog-fave Bruce Robbins, whose ruminations on Columbia's dearth of academic freedom made it into this week's edition of The Nation. Esther Kaplan's penetrating investigation of Fair Alma revealed a brewing crisis in contemporary academia: fringe right-wing groups holding controversial events on campuses. And dear God does the future look bleak.

Elsewhere, David Horowitz wrapped up this week's anti-Islamofascist carnival by offering America's complacent masses one final, terrifying anecdote:

"The Vice President of the Muslim Students Association at Columbia protested my use of the word 'jihad' during my speech, which she said meant spiritual 'struggle' rather than 'holy war' The only problem was that I hadn't used the word 'jihad' in my speech at all. It was just one of the talking points she had been given in advance of the event. When I asked her whether she would denounce the terrorist group Hamas, which along with the Muslim Brotherhood created her organization, she evaded the question."

UPDATE, 2:06 AM: Amreen Vora, Vice President of Columbia MSA, wrote to Bwog to say that she never made such a comment, and in fact was not present at the Horowitz event at all.

Also in unholy league with the Islamists is the Columbia Coalition Against the War, a group so dangerous that Horowitz surrounds its name with quotation marks, as if to suggest that they only kinda-sorta exist, but not really, because if they actually existed they wouldn't have quotation marks around their name, right?

Next controversy, please.