According to the New York Sun, Massad cited Leila Khaled as an example of women achieving equal rights in the Arab world. (Khaled was the member of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who participated in two airplane hijackings.) One female student who disputed the professor's account of Israeli guilt for the massacre in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 was told to leave the class.
Offering intellectual companionship to Massad is Rashid Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair in Middle Eastern studies. Khalidi was appalled in 1990 not by Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait, but by what he called the "idiots' consensus" against it. Khalidi advised the United States, even after Sept. 11, 2001, to get over its "hysteria about suicide bombers" and dedicated his own 1986 book to "those who give their lives ... in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon." (No, he did not mean independence from Syria.)
Should private universities silence obnoxious opinions by faculty members? Obviously not -- though the idea of relative silence from Berkeley, Cambridge and Manhattan is tempting. Defenders of the Middle Eastern studies department are naturally framing the question as a rights matter, in this case, free speech. But that is not the proper perspective. The more pertinent question is: Do our great universities live up to their commitment to free inquiry, serious scholarship and intellectual honesty by staffing their faculties with the Ward Churchills, Rashid Khalidis and Joseph Massads of the world?
Campus-watch.org reminds us of the 1915 Declaration of Principles by the American Association of University Professors. "The university teacher ... should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators ... and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves."