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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/columbia-historian-rashid-khalidi-open-letter">theguardian.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">I spent decades at Columbia. I\u2019m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Rashid Khalidi</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">August 1, 2025</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-maincontent"><p>Dear Acting President Shipman,</p><p>I
am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate
the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a
similar fashion.</p><p>These decisions, taken in close collaboration
with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach
modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for
more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/oct/08/rashid-khalidi-palestine-israel-scholar-columbia-university-retires">I have retired</a>,
I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the
fall as a \u201cspecial lecturer\u201d, but I cannot do so under the conditions
Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in
June.</p><p>Specifically,
it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of
Columbia\u2019s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately,
mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/israel">Israel</a>,
so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli
policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling
effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has
repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will
serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.</p><p>Under this
definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a
nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the
ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach
about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the
ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated
by Israel in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza">Gaza</a> with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.</p><p>The
Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military
dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic
theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the
fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis
in my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the
discriminatory nature of Israel\u2019s 2018 Nation State Law \u2013 which states
that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in
Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian \u2013 or of the apartheid
nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under
military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East
history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.</p><p>It is
not only faculty members\u2019 academic freedom and freedom of speech that is
infringed upon by Columbia\u2019s capitulation to Trump\u2019s diktat. Teaching
assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion
sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the
constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome
apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel,
and to crack down on alleged discrimination \u2013 which at this moment in
history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide.
Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to
these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been
snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to
render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.</p><p>You
have stated that no \u201cred lines\u201d have been crossed by these decisions.
However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with
surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and
staff must submit to \u201ctrainings\u201d on antisemitism from the likes of the
Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or
Israel <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit">is antisemitic</a>, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/inside-the-new-group-giving-antisemitism-trainings-at-harvard">anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism</a>.
It has accepted an \u201cindependent\u201d monitor of \u201ccompliance\u201d of faculty and
student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor
of Israel. According to <a href="https://president.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/July%202025%20Announcement/Columbia%20University%20Resolution%20Agreement.pdf">Columbia\u2019s agreement</a>
with the Trump administration, this \u201cMonitor will have timely access to
interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all
Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of
Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews\u201d.
Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these
external non academics.</p><p>The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and
scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields
should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such \u201ctrainers\u201d or an outside
monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of
the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be
infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces
animating the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/trump-administration">Trump administration</a>.</p><p>I
regret deeply that Columbia\u2019s decisions have obliged me to deprive the
nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course \u2013 as
many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades \u2013 of the
chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall.
Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving
them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a
public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that
will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will
go to Gaza\u2019s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by
Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor
any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.</p><p>Columbia\u2019s
capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free
inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an
anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a
place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on
high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions.
Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest
crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which
Columbia\u2019s leadership is now fully complicit.</p><p><em> \u2013 Rashid Khalidi</em></p><ul><li>
<p>Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/columbia-university">Columbia University</a> and author of The Hundred Years\u2019 War on Palestine</p></li></ul></div></div></div>
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