“Even people who have conflicts of interest can do the right thing...but if they do not, we will have continuing controversy,” she says.

Saliba discounts the charges, calling the allegations “slander in the worst possible way.”

He says that while he has no objections to the appointment of a committee, he takes issue with Bollinger’s management style, which he says has been influenced by outside political pressures.

“Up to this very minute, the president has not contacted me and listened to what is my side of the story,” Saliba says. “That is [the] worst level of discrimination.”

THE HOME FRONT

Last month, Harvard’s Dershowitz visited Columbia and asserted that MEALAC professors are “encouraging the terrorists” in the Middle East. Dershowitz—an outspoken defender of Israel—said he would support the creation of another committee if Bollinger’s grievance committee reaches a “biased” result.

But aside from the comments by Dershowitz, the Columbia fiasco has not sparked much more conversation in Cambridge.

Charles Jacobs, president of the David Project, says that Jewish students at Harvard have contacted the organization in hopes of arranging a Harvard screening of “Columbia Unbecoming.” The details have not yet been worked out, he says.

E. Roger Owen, Meyer professor of Middle Eastern history, says the political debate at Columbia has had little influence on academia at Harvard.

“Columbia, being in New York, gets invaded by the ideologies of the city itself,” says Owen. “The Arab-Israeli dispute, which is hot in New York, tends to be represented on campus in a much more direct way than it would be on the Harvard campus.”

“The Arab-Israeli dispute has gone with [Middle East studies] for the past 50 years,” he says. “It’s something we all deal with and it’s remarkable that so little of what we teach does incite controversy.”

—Staff writer Javier C. Hernandez can be reached at jhernand@fas.harvard.edu.