{"id":2114,"date":"2002-11-05T11:06:00","date_gmt":"2002-11-05T16:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox.blog-city.com\/sandstorm_the_columbia_club_of_middle_eastern_studies.htm"},"modified":"2002-11-05T11:06:00","modified_gmt":"2002-11-05T16:06:00","slug":"the-columbia-club-of-middle-eastern-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2002\/11\/the-columbia-club-of-middle-eastern-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Columbia Club of Middle Eastern Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Things go from bad to worse at Columbia University, the Bir Zeit of American academe. Articles in yesterday\u2019s Chicago Sun-Times<\/a> and in today\u2019s New York Sun<\/a> report that Professor Rashid Khalidi<\/a> of the University of Chicago is weighing an offer to join Columbia University, as the Edward Said Professor (of God-only-knows\u2014there are no precise details). The donor is reported to be anonymous; an endowed chair at Columbia runs between $3 and $4 million. All this has been rumored for some time, but now that it\u2019s in the newspapers, it\u2019s fair game for comment.<\/p>\n

Let me begin with the anonymity of the donor. In Middle Eastern studies, concealment of the identity of donors has become a major contributing factor to the field\u2019s deepening corruption. Twenty years ago, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) passed a resolution calling \u201con institutions in Middle East Studies to make regular disclosure of the sources of funding for their programs.\u201d It\u2019s a dead letter. For example, a few years back, Harvard University established a program for contemporary Arab studies<\/a>, \u201cinitiated by generous new funding not previously available to the university.\u201d To my knowledge, that\u2019s the most the program has ever said about its funding.<\/p>\n

Now Columbia University wishes to establish a chair with an anonymous donor, for a person (and in the name of a person) known for Palestinian activism no less than for scholarship. Excuse me, but Columbia must make known the identity of the donor. Otherwise, kind reader, assume the worst: Palestine\u2019s cause has its share of unsavory advocates, and when they don\u2019t come forward, there is usually a good reason. In a couple of weeks, MESA meets in Washington. It should reiterate its resolution of 1982, especially as MESA\u2019s incoming president, Lisa Anderson, is a dean at Columbia. Hopefully, she\u2019ll get the message.<\/p>\n

The other issue of overriding concern here is the apparent absence of any effort by the Columbia administration to promote diversity. Here I don\u2019t mean the false diversity of academic mafias. They think it\u2019s crucial to assemble people of different ethnic, national, religious, racial, gender, and disciplinary backgrounds\u2014provided they say the same thing. I\u2019m talking about intellectual diversity, which used to be a value at Columbia. The only historian of the modern Middle East at Columbia is another Palestinian, Joseph Massad<\/a>, who is a militant follower of Edward Said. (He\u2019s now up for tenure.) Imagine that Khalidi were added, and Massad were tenured, both to teach history. They work in the same area, and their politics, while not identical, are very similar. The whole thing begins to look like a cozy club of like-minded pals, who peer at the Middle East through exactly the same telescope, from exactly the same vantage point.<\/p>\n

I leave aside Khalidi\u2019s scholarship. It is sturdy, nationalist historiography\u2014no stunning breakthroughs or departures, just the usual stuff, done with rather more polish and style. Others can (and will) pick through Khalidi\u2019s political writings for nuggets. I\u2019ve been rather more taken by how little he understands the Middle East generally, and by the sheer density of his ideological filters. (See my Ivory Towers on Sand<\/em><\/a>, pp. 65-66, for the litany of Khalidi predictions about the Middle East that never panned out.) Of course, there\u2019s no substantive penalty for being wrong about anything in Middle Eastern studies\u2014as long as your politics are just right. Here, of course, Khalidi\u2019s credentials are impeccable. I can\u2019t imagine anyone more suited to a chair named in honor of someone who replaced scholarship with politics.<\/p>\n

On top of that, Columbia now has a divestment petition<\/a>, on which its Middle East faculty have an overwhelming presence. (I list them below). On the counter-petition<\/a> which has many more signatories, there is almost no presence.<\/p>\n

Self-referential groupthink is clearly running rampant at Columbia, now reinforced by hidden money, and the administration seems unwilling or impotent to stop it. So the time has come for alumni and supporters of Columbia to weigh in against the cozy conformism on Morningside Heights. The faculty will bleat \u201cacademic freedom,\u201d but at Columbia it\u2019s been reduced to their freedom to provide plum chairs for allies and chums. It\u2019s a privilege they\u2019ve so abused that it\u2019s time for the administration to repossess it. I speak as an alumnus. I\u2019m appalled. And I\u2019m not alone.<\/p>\n

_____________<\/p>\n

The following are signatories of the Columbia divestment petition whose major field is the Middle East, or who hold appointments in the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC).<\/p>\n

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Anthropology, Barnard
\nLila Abu-Lughod, Anthropology & Women’s Studies, Columbia
\nSamir Awad, MEALAC, Columbia
\nGil Anidjar, MEALAC, Columbia
\nJanaki Bakhle, MEALAC, Columbia
\nZainab Bahrani, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia
\nElliot Colla, MEALAC, Columbia
\nElaine Combs-Schilling, Anthropology, Columbia
\nHamid Dabashi, MEALAC, Columbia
\nJoseph Massad, MEALAC, Columbia
\nBrinkley Messick, Anthropology, Columbia
\nMarc Nichanian, MEALAC, Columbia
\nFrances Pritchett, MEALAC, Columbia
\nGeorge Saliba, MEALAC, Columbia
\nNader Sohrabi, MEALAC, Columbia
\nMarc van de Mieroop, MEALAC, Columbia<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, has rejected<\/a> the divestment petition (as has Barnard president Judith Shapiro). That’s a good beginning. Now it’s time for the administration to ask whether there is enough intellectual diversity on the hallways where the petition found near-unanimous support.<\/p>\n

UPDATE+: The Columbia Spectator<\/em> reports<\/a> that there are thirty donors, and that some<\/em> of the names might be released. And Hamid Dabashi, chair of MEALAC, tells<\/a> the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> that the “notion of ideological conformity here is entirely obscene.” (I guess he hasn’t seen the list above.)<\/p>\n

CORRECTION: Joseph Massad is not up for tenure. He just passed his third-year review, and will come up for tenure in four years. If Khalidi joins Columbia next year, students interested in subjects like Israel, Palestine, and the modern Arab world, will get a wide choice: Massad or Khalidi, for the next three years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Things go from bad to worse at Columbia University, the Bir Zeit of American academe. Articles in yesterday\u2019s Chicago Sun-Times and in today\u2019s New York Sun report that Professor Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago is weighing an offer … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21063],"class_list":["post-2114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rashid-khalidi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}