Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain

I attended Rashid Khalidi’s course, History of the Modern Middle East, 20 years ago and still think about it. Amid Columbia’s sea of polished and top-of-their-game scholars, Khalidi stood out as brilliant, and every lecture was exceptionally lucid and compelling. But beyond his talent as a lecturer, what was striking was how measured and sober, and even at times seemingly cautious, Khalidi was. He and other members of Columbia’s MEALAC department simply bore no resemblance to the right’s caricature of them. Insofar as their teaching was classifiable as “controversial,” it was not due to any ideology or temperament, let alone the defamatory bad faith accusation of anti-Semitism, but only because they were accurately chronicling an historical reality shaped by mass and ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the powers that be.

This then makes all the more striking Khalidi’s recent denunciation of Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump Administration’s attack on its students, employees, and academic freedom and free speech in general. Columbia, Khalidi writes, is Vichy on the Hudson, a fatally compromised collaborator that is a university in name only. While it is obviously the Trump Administration that is at the forefront of this breakneck authoritarian regression, it’s useful to remember that the historic attacks on the department and critics of Israel in general have always been a bipartisan affair. And it is the mutual culpability of this bipartisanship, giving lie to the shrill but facile Resistance to Trump 1.0, that prevents liberal institutions from........

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