Cornell professor, president condemn course for ‘radical,’ ‘biased view,’ faculty committee fires back
Menachem Rosensaft, a pro-Israel law professor at Cornell University, condemned the school’s course on Gaza for its “inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship” in an op-ed Wednesday.
The op-ed follows similar criticism from the university president, who faced backlash from a faculty committee accusing him of violating academic freedom in response.
“My principal objection to this course is not that it has a decidedly and unabashedly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bent,” Rosensaft wrote in The Cornell Daily Sun.
“What I find most problematic and unacceptable about it is that it is firmly rooted in shoddy, selectively and inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship,” he wrote.
Rosensaft stated that when he first learned of Professor Eric Cheyfitz’s course, titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” he told Interim President Mike Kotlikoff that it would “promote and inflame political divisiveness at Cornell and encourage antisemitic manifestations against Israeli and Jewish students.”
Rosensaft also wrote:
The course description leaves no doubt that Cheyfitz intends to convey a narrative that casts Palestinians writ large as protagonists while Israelis and, by extension, Jews will be portrayed as villainous antagonists perpetrating “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel” against a background of “plausible genocide.” Not only is such a narrative historically false — more importantly, it also constitutes antisemitism on steroids, and is likely to incite antisemitic rhetoric and worse against Israeli and Jewish students and faculty at Cornell.
The professor further criticized the course for framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of a “global war against ongoing colonialism,” which justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.
Arguing that there is a double standard in academic discourse, Rosensaft stated that such a course would certainly be rejected if it suggested that Jews had exclusive rights to the land or justified violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians.
He stated that academic freedom and First Amendment rights should be applied equally across the ideological spectrum.
Similarly, President Kotlikoff criticized the course for its “apparent lack of openness and objectivity,” in an email to Rosensaft last month, responding to the professor’s concerns, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Further, Kotlikoff stated that he is “extremely disappointed with the [school] curriculum committee’s decision to offer the course.”
“I personally find the course description to represent a radical, factually inaccurate, and biased view of the formation of the state of Israel and the ongoing conflict,” Kotlikoff stated.
In response, the Executive Committee of the Cornell University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors accused the university president for violating “faculty academic freedom.”
“Kotlikoff’s remarks are an egregious threat to bedrock principles of academic freedom, as well as Cornell’s commitment to ‘any person, any study,’” the committee wrote.
The group also deemed the president’s remarks “an abuse of his institutional position” and called for him to apologize to Cheyfitz.
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IMAGE: Memorijalni centar Srebrenica/Youtube
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