Nadia Abu El Haj

The recent tenure battles regarding professors Nadia Abu El Haj and Joseph Massad have led to renewed allegations that undue “outside political influence” is threatening the academic freedom that is at the heart of Columbia University.

I did not want to talk about this controversy at first, especially while it was being decided at Barnard. That stage of the scrutiny is now over and the introductory paragraphs of the recent opposing Internet petitions show that plenty of bad faith is being exercised on both sides.

In celebration of my bat mitzvah, my family traveled to Israel and embarked upon a tour of the City of David, an archaeological site in Jerusalem that contains remnants of a typical ancient Israelite house and what is believed to be the palace of King David, who ruled in the 10th century B.C.E. We walked through the nearby Southern Excavations, where I felt the Bible come alive as the texts I had read manifested themselves in structural forms: the purifying bathing installments for the priests and temple visitors, the marketplace where sacrificial animals could be purchased, stones inscribed with biblical references written in Hebrew.

Whatever words are added to the “controversy” over professor Nadia Abu El-Haj’s bid for tenure are already framed to aggrandize the negative attitudes leveled against academics who are critical of Israel. More op-eds and letters-to-the-editor will only lend attention to what would otherwise be a calm, thorough, confidential procedure.

Last night, Barnard religion professor Alan Segal lectured on the lack of academic accuracy in the work of assistant professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose tenure process has sparked controversy due to her book in which she denies the existence of the ancient Jewish state of Israel.

Because professor Abu El-Haj examines sensitive and often contentious topics, the debate over her tenure has become a heated fight that blurs the line between the merit of scholarship and the implication of her ideas.

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