Joseph Massad challenges Minouche Shafik’s testimony at Columbia

Columbia University professor Joseph Massad emerged on Wednesday contradicting claims made by the school’s president earlier that day before a congressional panel.

Massad told the Electronic Intifada that, contrary to Shafik’s claims, he is not to his knowledge under any investigation by university officials, nor has he been removed from his post as chairman of the school’s Academic Review Committee.

“I remain the chair of the Academic Review Committee, a one-year position, for the next few weeks, which is the normal end of my chairmanship,” Massad said. “Indeed, I just had a meeting with the committee staff yesterday [16 April] and informed them that I will miss the next and final meeting on 8 May, due to my travel schedule. No one has contacted me at all from the university with regards to my current chairmanship. I will also remain a member of the Academic Review Committee next year, which is a three-year appointment.”

Massad’s statement contradicts Shafik’s testimony to the committee, during which the university president said Massad is “under investigation” and was “spoken to” over an Oct. 8 op-ed he published in the Electronic Intifada. Massad in the op-ed lauded Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel as “incredible” and “awesome.” Shafik said that she was “appalled” by the op-ed and that Massad was told the language in his piece was “unacceptable.”

Shafik also suggested Massad was removed from his role as the chairman of the Columbia Arts and Sciences Academic Review Committee, which conducts reviews of the school’s departments and guides “administrative decisions.” After Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) informed Shafik that Columbia’s website still listed Massad as the chairman of the committee, Shafik backtracked from the claim and pledged to remove Massad from the chairmanship.

The discrepancies could spell trouble for Shafik, given that the House committee’s Republican members said they would not hesitate to hold another hearing should they deem one necessary. The committee is in the process of obtaining internal documents related to Columbia’s response to campus anti-Semitism.

In his interview with the Electronic Intifada, Massad said he has not been informed of any university investigation into him and met last week with Columbia’s provost, Angela Olinto, who “conveyed to me her support.”

Massad also said that Columbia administrators did speak to him about his op-ed—but that they offered him support. According to Massad, Gil Hochberg, Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies chairwoman, told Massad she found his op-ed “descriptive” and determined it “did not contain praise for the 7 October attack.” The school’s executive vice president, Amy Hungerford, also met with Massad roughly three weeks after his op-ed was published to express “her concern about my safety and well-being, as I was the target of much hate mail and many death threats,” Massad said.

“President Shafik misconstrued what happened,” Massad wrote.

Massad remains the chairman of the Arts and Sciences Academic Review Committee, according to Columbia’s website, which was quietly amended in the wake of the hearing to refer to Massad as the committee’s “outgoing chair.” According to Massad, the school did not force him out of his leadership role, and the professor says he will remain a member of the committee going forward.

“I remain the chair of the Academic Review Committee, a one-year position, for the next few weeks, which is the normal end of my chairmanship,” Massad wrote in his statement. “No one has contacted me at all from the university with regards to my current chairmanship.”

“I will also remain a member of the Academic Review Committee next year, which is a three-year appointment,” he wrote.

A Columbia University spokesman said Massad “has chaired his final meeting of the academic review committee,” though Massad said that’s due to his “travel schedule” rather than action taken by the school.

“Indeed, I just had a meeting with the committee staff yesterday [16 April] and informed them that I will miss the next and final meeting on 8 May, due to my travel schedule,” he wrote in his statement.

In addition to her claims on Massad’s chairmanship, Shafik testified Wednesday that professors who “behave in any discriminatory fashion” are taken “out of the classroom if necessary.” Columbia’s class directory shows Massad is scheduled to teach a summer course on the “history of Zionism” and two courses during the fall semester on culture and nationalism in the Middle East.

Massad received his doctorate from Columbia in 1998 and was granted tenure at the school in 2009. The decision generated controversy at the time, given Massad’s long history of disparaging both the Jewish state and pro-Israel students.

The professor “has long argued in his scholarly and journalistic work that Israel is a ‘racist Jewish state’ and a ‘colonial settlement’ whose ‘ultimate achievement’ is the ‘transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew,'” according to a 2009 Minding the Campus article.

In 2004, a female student accused Massad of threatening to kick her out of class over her pro-Israel views. A Columbia academic panel found the allegation “credible” and said Massad “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” as a professor by failing “to show respect for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from his own.” In 2009, Massad compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Tenured professors at Columbia can be terminated if they are “found to be professionally unfit, as demonstrated, for example, by gross inefficiency, habitual and intentional neglect of duty, other serious breaches of academic conduct, or serious personal misconduct,” according to the school’s faculty handbook.