"The undersigned faculty members of the Department of Middle Eastern, South
Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University feel outraged after reading
the assertions made by Nicholas Dirks,
our former colleague and the newly appointed chancellor of the University of
California, Berkeley, in an interview recorded by the Public Affairs office at
Berkeley on the eve of a meeting of the Regents to approve his appointment ("In
Conversation: Chancellor-designate Nicholas Dirks," UCBerkeleyCampuslife). While discussing the divestment petition
at Columbia in 2002 (which, to set the record straight, called on Columbia to
divest, not from "all things Israel," as mischaracterized by the interviewer,
but from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other companies that supply military
hardware used by Israel against the civilian population of the West Bank and
Gaza), Chancellor Dirks referred to "all sorts of other controversies that
developed about the climate for Jewish students on Columbia's campus." He
described this climate as hugely not just anti-Israel, but by implication
anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic, and connected this issue with "the nature of
instruction in the department of Middle East studies." Our sense of outrage stems from Dirks' denial of the fact that the very
committee set up by then-Vice President Dirks found no evidence whatever for
concerns about the climate for Jewish students let alone about the nature of
instruction in our department. We feel affronted by the fact that the
Chancellor's defaming the department means that he now rejects the committee¹s
finding and seems instead to accept as true the false accusations leveled
against us by an external hate group that has since been exposed and
discredited."