In the fall of 1999, Hamilton Hall was abuzz. Columbia’s English department had announced that Edward Said would be teaching a seminar in the spring. Said had achieved a kind of mythic reputation on campus. A polymath and a public intellectual, he was the apotheosis of the liberal arts education we were meant to be pursuing.
But Said was suffering from leukemia. His name had been conspicuously absent from the course catalog for as long as any undergraduate could remember. No one doubted that the chance to study with this kind of legend would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Open only to English majors who were seniors, the seminar also required a writing sample. Excited as I was to be among the lucky few to be accepted, I was also nervous. I would be sitting before the world’s most prominent intellectual opponent of Zionism. I wore a head-covering in accordance with Jewish tradition, and with the name Yosie Levine, with or without a kippah, Professor Said would know my identity. His 1978 book Orientalism was a paradigm-shifting critique of Western perceptions of the Arab world. Said had served with Yasser Arafat on the Palestinian National Council.
Professor Said lived up to the hype. He was a giant, a master pedagogue. Every word was measured, every argument unassailable. The breadth of material at his fingertips was staggering. When he spoke, one had the sense that this was the way English was meant to be spoken.
He was also demanding. Pity the student who came to class unprepared. He once asked us if someone could explain the meaning of the word “fen.” When we responded with silence, Said marched over to the window of the seminar room. “Do you see that building?” he asked as he pointed. “It’s called Butler Library. It houses books. You might try reading some of them.”
For fifteen weeks, we studied Irish literature. The topic of Israel never came up. The word “Palestine” was never uttered. Here were texts written by Irish authors who often felt as though they were suffering under the yoke of oppression. Said could have covered the intellectual distance between the Emerald Isle and the Promised Land in a New York minute. There were ample opportunities to politicize his seminar room. He never did. The idea wasn’t to indoctrinate us—just to teach.
Campuses these days are abuzz again. Hamas’s savage attack on October 7 has triggered protests and counter-protests across the nation. At moments like these, students could benefit from moral clarity—or at the very least, the absence of provocation.
A teacher at Stanford singled out Jewish students and had them move away from their belongings to make a show of what he claimed Israel was doing to the Palestinians. Professors at Columbia and Cornell made headlines when they offered up laudatory language to describe Hamas’s atrocities against civilians. At Yale, a professor took to social media to share that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”
College students from my synagogue have told me their classroom experiences over the past few months have ranged from toxic to frightening.
It’s surely true that university presidents can set a tone of moral integrity. But equally if not more important than the statements of figureheads are the examples set by the teachers both within and beyond the walls of our college classrooms.
Accomplished professors generate a halo effect. Because they’ve achieved renown in molecular biology or nineteenth-century Italian literature, they become authorities—whether or not they are talking about their areas of expertise or contemporary politics.
To be sure, Said was a vocal advocate for the causes in which he believed. But he didn’t cheer the murder of civilians. And he didn’t demonize students on his campus with whom he disagreed. That I or any of his students may have found his views objectionable never stood in the way of his being an outstanding educator. Today’s academics might learn a thing or two from Said’s example. They ought to be using their pedagogical powers to inspire and challenge young minds to think critically, not to foist a political agenda upon them.
On today’s overly-politicized campuses, college students could gain immeasurably from teachers who have the restraint to simply be teachers.
Yosie Levine is the Rabbi of The Jewish Center in New York City.
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Image by Barenboim-Said Akademie gGmbH licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
