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'The Week': Columbia Edition
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 30, 2007
"The Week," a recurring feature in National Review, is a quick, brutal, and unabashedly straightforward column. The Page 6 of the political world, it is equal parts Mike Lupica and The Daily Show. Like similar columns in other publications, it covers a lot of material, fast. With so much happening on campus, some of it serious, some not, let's give it a try.
Tenure Troubles Continued
According to an anonymous source within the anthropology department, chairman Dr. Brinkley Messick is playing favorites with troubled tenure candidate, professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Messick named Abu El-Haj, the unreachable, aloof, and controversial "scholar," Director of Graduate Studies. The motives behind the move are clear—Messick bypassed far more deserving candidates for the position so as to cement Abu El-Haj within the department. The more responsibility she has, he reckons, the less likely it is that the objective academic committee will deny her tenure. Apparently positions and titles mean more than academic merit. This, however, should come as no surprise; those familiar with e-mails sent out on the AnthroDish listserv contend that Messick has repeatedly voiced his support for "Nadia" in "this difficult time." According to these sources, Messick once claimed that "we have seen this before." If the tenure committee can validate these conversations, they must not allow interdepartmental favoritism to weigh upon their reasoned decision.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Revisited
Columbians have grown to accept the mobile blood bank that regularly sets up on College Walk. Nobody, not even Columbia's LGBT and progressive community, cares enough to call for their expulsion from campus. That's amazing, considering that homosexuals are barred from donating blood. Amazingly, the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is more lenient and accommodating than those of the Red Cross and similar institutions. Why, then, have progressive students and an antiquated University Senate fought to ban ROTC from campus, but allowed the clinics to operate on campus freely? There's no denying that there would be hell to pay if that blood bank was a military recruiting or ROTC table. This blatant hypocrisy is proof positive that the anti-ROTC factions were not "anti-discrimination," as they claimed, but anti-military and nothing more. They have no right to deny students from two noble acts, whether that's donating their blood or serving their country while supporting their education.
It was 40 years ago today...
In the spring, Columbia University will "commemorate" the 40th anniversary of the '68 riots. Watch, just watch as the administration invites back that familiar cast of characters (delinquents) to celebrate where? Where else, Low. CLIO is a twisted and cruel mistress.
Business Gone Bad
Pinkberry, the popular and exorbitantly priced fro-yo chain, finally opened this week. It took the entire summer and most of fall, well over four months, for a small storefront shop with two ice cream machines, a few refrigerators, and a pre-fab interior to open. If it wasn't for the horde of hipster devotees, opening a frozen yogurt shop as the temperature drops into the high 40s would normally spell disaster.
Horowitz Unplugged
When in doubt, fall back on what you know. During his remarkably civil Islamo-fascism Awareness speech, David Horowitz, CC '59, did just that. An avowed partisan in the struggle for academic freedom, Horowitz railed against the state of the academy. The conservative, he said, graduates with a better education because he or she must confront opposing and distasteful ideas—day in and day out—in the classroom. A few students in the room laughed; others argued that, while liberal, they've had a great education. I'm sure other progressives would love to respond to Mr. Horowitz's claims, but they couldn't—they didn't show up. Rather than going to the event and engaging that which they considered disagreeable, they held "counter-programming" to simultaneously avoid and attack something they simply refused to listen to. Horowitz couldn't have come up with a better example of a stunted education if he'd tried.
Deal with the Devil
Finally, best of luck to all those folks going for second-round interviews. You'll be making more than me, your TAs, and your professors in six months' time. Ain't I-Banking grand?
Chris Kulawik is Columbia College senior majoring in political science. Chris Shrugged runs alternate Tuesdays.
Specopinion@columbia.edu.
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The lack of protest against blood drives on campus demonstrates two things:
1. Activist are fickle about when they want to Act Up.
2. There is an understanding that homosexual activity is unhealthy and this is a passive way of agreeing with the blood drive goal of keeping the blood supply clean.
Matt Sanchez
Berlin, Germany
"2. There is an understanding that homosexual activity is unhealthy"
And no one would know more about that than the stars of such riveting cinematic masterpieces as Montreal Men, Jawbreaker, and my personal favorite, Touched by an Anal. If homosexual activity is unhealthy, Matt, (or should I call you Rod Majors?) then you should be dead. I know you like to tell people nowadays that you've found Jayzus and turned straight, but a man who's done as much buttloving as you have and remained healthy is living proof that homosexual activity is anything BUT unhealthy. You even did it for cash, on many occasions, and that strapping military physique doesn't seem to be withering away from the deadly AIDS virus. (Don't worry, Matt, that sentence doesn't mean I'm coming on to you. You don't have to kill me OR do me in the butt)
Seriously, Matt, I'm amazed that you keep on coming back to the blogosphere for more, even identifying yourself as yourself, knowing how much embarrassing stuff is just a Google search away.
WARNING: BELOW LINKS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR SMALL CHILDREN, THEY FEATURE MATT SANCHEZ IN "COMPROMISING" AND "UNHEALTHY" ACTIVITIES
Here's an image of Matt convincing an Act Up activist to not be "fickle": http://www.encyclopediadramati...
And here's one of him "passively" agreeing with the "blood drive goal of keeping the blood supply clean": http://www.encyclopediadramati...
It's pretty funny that conservatives like Chris love to bitch about how unfair affirmative action is. If the quality of his writing is any indication, he's benefiting from a whole bunch of affirmative action: I doubt he would have received a column if he were arguing the liberal point of view so sloppily. I guess the standards on the right side of the aisle are so low that all you need to do is create a grammatically coherent sentence to be elevated to their spokesperson. Then again, one has to keep in mind that the conservative, like Chris, who has emerged from a liberal milieu is more interested in shocking and offending his peer group than he is in constructing logical arguments. Well, hey, better that the Spec be "balanced" than, you know, "factual."
Oh, and by the way? Comparing the NR "The Week" section to the Daily Show? I spat hot chocolate out my nose. You people really ARE out of touch with reality.
Chris
re: Don't Ask, Don't Tell. A petition was started late last year by students and sent for review by the Dean's and President's Office. Due to the bad timing and graduation the petition did not generate a significant amount of momentum necessary to propel it forward (unfortunately), but please be assured that every year LGBT students on campus and student leaders either formally or informally reject the discriminatory practices of the Blood Drive. And although others might be afraid to say it, when in 2005 I protested the ROTC vote on campus, I did so with the belief that the military's discriminatory practice was in my opinion insulting to me directly as an individual -- as a high schooler I really wanted to join the air force special forces, but I could not imagine hiding my own sexual orientation as a means to achieving that desire. Though I am not anti-military, clearly by my own admission, I believe I have become increasingly troubled by its misuse in recent past to become an agent of political will and not that of defending this country in the name of well established rules of international order and war. That particularly under this climate I would go as far as to say that I would fight to prevent its inclusion on our campus so long as it continues to act in ways that are counterproductive to our country and to our world. Though some may argue that the "intellect of well-meaning Ivy League graduates is precisely what we need in the Military," I believe that the military in this case must change direction before our community ought to sanctify its presence. So not only is ROTC anti-discriminatory, it adheres to a military system that is dominated by political desires over constitutional and statutory parameters. Its inclusion in our campus would be the hypocrisy, and not the other way around.
CC '07er
The supposedly "aloof", "unreachable" Abu El Haj has exchanged numerous e mails with me and many other individuals I know who have contacted her. Could it be that she's aloof from a campus "journalist" (which I'll place in quotes since you placed her academic credentials in doubt by calling her a "scholar") who she knows will do a hatchet job on her?
BTW, the archaeologists who've attacked Abu El Haj's work are balanced by numerous equally distinguished scholars who support her work. Why don't we also mention the campaign of vilification & smearing engaged in by Campus Watch, Frontpagemagazine & other right wing shmates against her in which they have fabricated quotations from her work & mischaracterized it as well. Not to mention lying about charges against her which they know are not true.
Commenters complain about her "one book" which was published by the University of Chicago Press & received a distinguished scholarly award. Not to mention her numerous publications in peer-reviewed academic publications.
I don't support everything that Abu El Haj writes. But I damn sure don't support character assassination & ignorance which is what her critics display.
In fact, the archaeologists and historians are almost all on one side.
On the other side are anthropologists who defend el Haj's use of annymous sources.
historians and archaeologists are outraged by the idea that she can, for example, blithely state that Herodian Jerusalem was "not Jewish" without even dropping a footnote. Let alone accuse Israeli archaeologists of routinely "mislabeling Christian sites Jewish," and cite anonymous sources. No date. No location given for such an incident. Just anonymous accusations. Lots of them.
You can't do that. You just can't. It is not worthy of tenure.
Chris- I'm not sure if you're aware of this but you can't get AIDS from joining the military, but you can get AIDS from getting a blood transfusion. I think this might be a more appropriate justification than hatred of our troops for why we tolerate the NY blood bank (which, btw, is NOT the Red Cross).
You also can't donate if you've recently lived abroad. I guess you think that international students should protest too. Or maybe that's just another fault in your logic.
Enjoy your quest to mislead your readers in service of your political worldview.
Um, all blood that is donated is first screened for HIV. Straight people get HIV, too. So Chris is absolutely right---there is no reason to simply ban homosexuals when AIDS is not exclusively a gay disease. If Columbia Liberals are going to be consistent about banning all discriminatory organizations from campus, they should get rid of the blood drive.
The Abu El Haj tenure battle is not just about Israel.
Abu El Haj belongs to a school of scholarship that asserts that no scholar can construce a heirarchy of facticity to place one narrative above another on the basis of the amount of evidentiary support easch story has.
She mislikes the idea that modern Jews are culturally continuous with ancient Israelites.
so she throws it out.
this drives evidence-based scholars nuts!
Anonymous?
William Dever, Jacob Lassner, James Davila, Aren Maeir, Alan Segal - are among the highly regarded archweologists and hstorians who have read and carefully reviewed the book and found it badly wanting in its use of evidence.
the major critics of this paltry scholarship are anything but anonymous.
Amazing how many hide behind anonymity to denounce someone they are more than happy to name. The vile attacks on el-Haj are motivated by political considerations- as is plain to see by anyone with an open eye.
Note that Brinkley Messick signed the Columbia Divestment petition.
this appointment stinks of anti-Israel politics.
It is highly unprofessional, actually unethical for a Department chair to lobby members of the department to support the candidate in a pending tenure decision.
The Nadia Abu El Haj tenure battle is indeed highly ploiticized, but it is the Columbia faculty who are supporting her who have politicized it.
Why is it unethical or even unprofessional? Professors must obby one another on tenure cases all the time, and there is no reason the one who happens to be chair at the moment should be barred from doing so. The chair has very little power over tenured members of the department, and they are the only ones who have a vote. It's also not clear to me that, after winning approval from the Barnard anthropology department, El Haj even needs the approval of Columbia's department. It may be that Barnard tenure decisions go directly from Barnard's president to Columbia's provost, bypasses the Columbia departments altogether.
The second sentence of your post is beyond absurd. Paula Stern, a Barnard alum who lives in Israel (actually, in a disputed portion of the West Bank) attacked El Haj's tenure bid because El Haj supports the Palestinian cause, and then organized the campaign against her. Even if she's right that El Haj shouldn't get tenure, she is the one who politicized the matter.
do you truly believe that a woman who has written a single book would be considered for tenure at Columbia in any other context than the intensely anti-Israel nature of both her book and this department?
don't be naive.
Meet Columbia and Barnard's Anthropology Department
So, how do we prove the Anthropology Department is notorious for its hatred of Israel? Simple enough - simply ask them...or better yet, use their track record:
According to Solomonia:
In 2003, anti-Israel activists mounted a divestment campaign at Columbia. The petition sought to deny the right of self-defense to the Jewish State. Columbia has literally thousands of professors. To their credit, a piddling 106 signed the petition. But of those, no fewer then 21 were from the Anthropology department, one of the smallest departments in the university. A department that includes Nicholas De Genova, the man who wished that American soldiers in Iraq would be slaughtered in "a million Mogadishus."
1. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Anthropology, Barnard
2. Lila Abu-Lughod, Anthropology & Women's Studies, Columbia
6. Alexander Alland, Emeritus, Anthropology, Columbia
23. Partha Chatterjee, Anthropology, Columbia
27. Elaine Combs-Schilling, Anthropology, Columbia
32. Valentine Daniel, Anthropology, Columbia
33. Nicholas De Genova, Anthropology & Latino/a Studies, Columbia
40. Steven Gregory, Anthropology & African-American Studies, Columbia
57. Brian Larkin, Anthropology, Barnard
60. Mahmood Mamdani, SIPA & Anthropology, Columbia
67. Lynn Meskell, Anthropology, Columbia
68. Brinkley Messick, Anthropology, Columbia
70. Rosalind Morris, Anthropology, Columbia
77. Neni Panourgia, Anthropology, Columbia
78. John Pemberton, Anthropology, Columbia
90. David Scott, Anthropology, Columbia
91. Karen Seeley, Anthropology, Columbia
92. Lesley Sharp, Anthropology, Barnard
93. Sandhya Shukla, Anthropology & Asian-American Studies, Columbia
96. Michael Taussig, Anthropology, Columbia
104. Paige West, Anthropology, Barnard
Chris, lots of liberal and GLBT groups ARE pressuring for gay men to be allowed to donate blood. The policy is the FDA's, not that of the Red Cross. Do a little research before you attack liberals.
Judith shapiro was teaching Anthropology at Bryn Mawr when El Haj was a student there.
Shapiro should reveal exactly how well they knew one another and whether it was she who first brought El Haj to the attention of the Barnard anthro dept.
It's good to see that swiftboating is alive and well at Barnard.
Many academics use their connections to get jobs, and it is both common and appropriate for established profs to bring promising young scholars to the attention of their departments. It is also common for these young scholars to be people the established profs have come to know well in other contexts. Even if Shapiro did suggest El Haj for the position, there would be nothing wrong with her actions. Getting good faculty is part of her job, and refusing to recommend people she knows would not help anyone.
Keep in mind that Shapiro is now a lame duck, so any influence she might have had on the Barnard faculty's decision to recommend El Haj for tenure was minimal. There is essentially no way she can pressure Columbia into approving her decision.
Judith Shapiro should say either:
"I knew her at Bryn Mawr"
or
"While we were at Bryn Mawr at the same time, we never met"
Suspicions arise from the fact that it seems very likely that a professor of anthropology at a small college would have had some sort of contact with a student who went on to grad school in anthropology. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. What makes such a thing questionable is the fact that Shapiro never mentioned the relationship.
She or El Haj should clarify the nature of that relationship. and if there is a relationship, i.e., if El Haj was Shapiro's student, Shapiro ough tto have mentioned it.
Hiring a former student is fine. Doing so without mentioning the relationship is not.
Who says President Shapiro never mentioned it? For all I (and probably you) know, she told every member of the anthropology department face-to-face years ago about whatever her relationship with Prof. El Haj might be. The fact that you were not present doesn't mean it never happened.
How did an untenured professor with only one book become "director of Graduate Studies" at Columbia?
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