Last Friday Columbia University finally released the list of donors to its
Edward Said Chair, held by Rashid Khalidi (also director of Columbia’s
Middle East Institute). Among the donors is the United Arab Emirates, a
nation that appears to have an interest in paying American universities to
do its ideological bidding. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the UAE’s
unelected president since 1971, is also a backer of Georgetown’s Center for
Contemporary Arab Studies and the source of a $2.5 million gift to
the Harvard Divinity School. Harvard froze that money in August–after the
source of the gift became public along with the anti-American, anti-Semitic
venom coming from Zayed’s now-defunct think tank–and is
still in deliberations over whether to give it back. Columbia, after keeping
its list secret for months, couched the release in a puff-piece about Said
in the Columbia Record, the print-only newspaper of the Office of
Public Affairs, according to a source. Daniel Pipes’s <A
href=”http://www.campus-watch.org”>Campus Watch has issued a press release
with the full list of donors here. With enough pressure
from students, alumni, and the media, Columbia too might be brought to think
again about keeping the UAE’s problematic gift–but getting it to go even
that far won’t be easy.