Nov 15, 2007 11:34 AM

Shut it down: Columbia’s names of shame

by James Panero

Courtesy of The New York Sun, what follows is the list of Columbia faculty who would prefer to censure a critic of a dictator than censure a dictator himself. Many of the names will be well known to anyone who follows Columbia’s radical politics. (And Mark Strand, what were you thinking?)

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Lila Abu-Lughod, Qais Al-Awqati, Paul Anderer, Mark Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Zainab Bahrani, Akeel Bilgrami, Richard Billows, Elizabeth Blackmar, Partha Chatterjee, Lewis Cole, Jonathan Cole, Elaine Combs-Schilling, Susan Crane, Jonathan Crary, Julie Crawford, Hamid Dabashi, Patricia Dailey, Tom DiPrete, Brent Edwards, Eric Foner, Aaron Fox, Katherine Franke, Victoria de Grazia, Page Fortuna, Steven Gregory, William Harris, Andreas Huyssen, Rashid Khalidi, Alice Kessler-Harris, Marilyn Ivy, Brian Larkin, Lydia Liu, Sylvère Lotringer, Mahmood Mamdani, Peter Marcuse, Reinhold Martin, Mark Mazower, Mary McLeod, Brinkley Messick, Rosalind Morris, Keith Moxey, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Mae Ngai, Bob O’Meally, Neni Panourgia, John Pemberton, Richard Peña, Julie Peters, Pablo Piccato, Sheldon Pollock, Elizabeth Povinelli, Wayne Proudfoot, Bruce Robbins, David Rosner, George Saliba, James Schamus, David Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mark Strand, Paul Strohm, Michael Taussig, Kendall Thomas, Nadia Urbinati, Marc van de Mieroop, Karen van Dyck, Dorothea von Mücke, Gauri Viswanathan, Gwendolyn Wright.

Meanwhile, Our Man in Columbia has a letter in today’s Sun slamming his former professors and noting one important figure not on the list.

The letter comes as no surprise, alas. I had the unfortunate pleasure of having seminars with three of the signatories when I was a graduate student at Columbia.

Two of them had no trouble keeping their opinions to themselves during class time. Professor Anderson once compared President Bush to Hitler when I asked him why it took the Jews so long to leave Nazi Germany. Professor Huyssen called Pope Benedict XVI a "bad man," compared him to East German Marxists, railed against Fox News, and suggested September 11 is important also because it is Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno’s birthday.

Perhaps Mr. Huyssen and his comrades could learn a thing or two from their distinguished colleague, Orhan Pamuk, who is currently teaching at Columbia. This man has been effectively exiled from his own country of Turkey for discussing the taboo subject of the Armenian genocide. His name does not appear on the list of signatories.

MARCUS PLIENINGER
Astoria, N.Y.