by SPENCER DAVIS
When Rashid Khalidi canceled the History of the Modern Middle East course he was set to teach as a special lecturer this fall, he cited Columbia’s July 15 adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism as the reason.
However, his 2021 decision to retire as a full-time faculty member was not related to concerns over academic freedom. Instead, as Khalidi explained in an interview with Spectator, he was worried that Columbia was prioritizing its financial interests over its academic ones.
“They don’t really care about the educational values that I thought Columbia represented and that I think it did represent when I first arrived,” Khalidi said in an interview with Spectator.
Born in New York City in 1948, Khalidi grew up around Columbia, where his father earned his Ph.D. in 1955.
“I used to play in the steps of Low Library when the poor man was at Butler,” Khalidi said.
Khalidi first taught at the University from 1985 to 1987 before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he developed a large lecture course titled History of the Modern Middle East, which covered the history of the Middle East from the 18th century to the present.
He returned to Columbia in 2003 as the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies, a position in the history department named for the Palestinian-American academic and Columbia professor whose book “Orientalism” transformed the field of postcolonial studies.
“A lot of his writing was on Palestine, and that had an enormous effect at Columbia because people engaged with his ideas, and many of them came around to a different view than they had started from,” Khalidi said of Said’s work.
When Said threw a rock across the Lebanon-Israel border in 2000, then-Provost Jonathan Cole, CC ’64, GSAS ’69, and then-University President George Rupp came to his defense in a Spectator op-ed on the grounds of academic freedom.
“There is nothing more fundamental to a university than the protection of the free discourse of individuals who should feel free to express their views without fear of the chilling of a politically dominant ideology,” Cole wrote.
Since Khalidi was offered the position in 2002, he has faced backlash over his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2005, the New York Department of Education dismissed Khalidi from leading a course for K-12 teachers after a New York Sun article took issue with his views on Israel. Khalidi said that he and the Middle East Institute, which he led, were featured in the New York Sun “two or three times a week.”
“Sure, the comfort level of these Jewish kids is important,” Khalidi told the New Yorker in 2008. “And some of them have real complaints. But education is about the exchange of ideas, it’s about arguments over ideas, and you can’t have an argument over ideas if you carry the ‘comfort level’ of a kindergarten.”
Despite the backlash, Khalidi continued teaching at Columbia for two decades.
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