tenure

Students enjoy the urban studies program both for its fresh, diverse curriculum and for its accessible faculty and staff. But by denying tenure to the program’s director, the final deciding committee imperiled an institution in which the University should—and does—take great pride. This unfortunate decision cannot be revisited, but in its wake the University must ensure that the urban studies program sees continued success.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, a controversial professor of anthropology at Barnard College, has been given tenure. This is a warning to Jewish students at Barnard and Columbia—you will now have one more professor to avoid. Already, the lowest forms of life are crawling out amid the ivy. A swastika was painted on a door of a Jewish professor at Columbia, a noose on a black professor’s door, more hate incidents in other places—do you think that there is no connection?

A statement released Friday by Barnard College confirmed professor Nadia Abu El-Haj has received tenure, after an e-mail sent by a departmental administrator first alerted the anthropology department listserv of the news.

"The Week," a recurring feature in National Review, is a quick, brutal, and unabashedly straightforward column.

It’s a wonder that MEALAC professor Joseph Massad isn’t a hoax perpetrated by conservative activist David Horowitz. No doubt Horowitz excites over academics who so perfectly epitomize everything wrong with the academy, and whose published works read like dossiers from Campus Watch.

With the decision on whether or not to tenure the controversial historian Joseph Massad still pending at Columbia, Barnard College has begun the process of deciding whether to tenure yet another controversial young Middle Eastern scholar.

I was truly shocked to read some of the leading letters and reviews used in this campaign against Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure. While in Israel her work has been discussed with depth and seriousness (even if critically) in academic seminars, in the United States one witnesses a crude attempt to silence this perspective.

I lived with Nadia Abu El-Haj in Jerusalem while we were conducting dissertation research. Hers was on the topic of the politics of Israeli archaeology, and mine was on the Israeli military court system in the West Bank and Gaza.

As a generation of controversial Columbia academics trudge toward tenure, get ready for a fight.

Don’t look now, but there’s a revolt afoot. It arguably doesn’t matter whether Nadia abu al-Haj, author of the controversial and theory-bloated Facts on the Ground (the curious can find almost the entire book on Amazon Reader), is granted a lifetime post at this University.