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  • Ideology over Integrity in Academe

    Dafka
    Jan 2 2008


    Ideology over Integrity in Academe
    By James R. Russell
    The Current (Columbia University)
    Fall, 2007



    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/current/article s/fall2007/ideology-over-integrity-in-academe.html

    http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4450

    Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a
    million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a
    girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor
    of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the
    castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to
    this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust
    of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is
    a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there
    in antiquity.



    I could refute the claims that Nadia Abu El-Haj makes in her book,
    but respected specialists have done so already in Isis, the Journal
    of Near Eastern Studies, and elsewhere. Facts on the Ground fits
    firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and
    evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a "discourse." There is
    no right or wrong answer, just competitive discourses. It does not
    come as news that people employ the data of archaeology to prove
    points of interest to them - information in any discipline used by
    human beings does not exist in a vacuum. But, as reviewers noted,
    Facts on the Ground expands upon this insight, quite unremarkable in
    itself, to propose that Israeli archaeologists use altered or
    falsified data and do so to a single ideological end. That purpose is
    to demonstrate a previous Jewish sovereignty and long historical
    presence that did not in fact exist, thereby to cloak the "colonial"
    essence of Zionism. This aspect of the book is malign fantasy.



    Though alumnae of Barnard have declared they will stop giving money
    to Alma Mater if El-Haj is tenured, it is unlikely their protests
    will have any effect. She is fully supported by other ideologues in
    positions of power at Columbia and by outspokenly anti-Israel
    academics around the globe. Most of the good lack all conviction, as
    usual.



    How did we come to this? Anti-Zionism has a long, diverse history,
    and the moral horror of the Nazi Holocaust in the 1940s did not
    diminish its appeal. In the early days of Zionism, in the early 20th
    century, many Jewish leftists rejected the idea of mass emigration to
    a historical national homeland and opted instead for the Bundist
    programme of a Yiddish-based Jewish polity in a Diaspora environment.
    The Soviets opposed the Bund but Zionism and Hebrew even more,
    supporting Israel only briefly on tactical grounds in the late
    1940's. Stalin drew away from Israel and began the anti-Semitic
    campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans." The word translated as
    "rootless" is Russian bezrodnyi, a far more potent term composed of
    the negating prefix bez-, "without," plus the root rod-, which means
    anything from "birth" to "deeply-felt intimacy" (the adjective
    rodnoi) to "the Motherland" (Rodina) itself. Stalinist policies
    re-institutionalized in Russia an anti-Semitism in which Jews were
    shunned as homeless - barely human - by their very nature. In this way,
    the very qualities of selfless internationalism that Jewish leftists
    had assiduously cultivated in the cause of world revolution were
    turned against them.



    The Soviet posture strengthened anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist trends
    in the Western Left; and when Israel, a democratic state, became
    increasingly alienated from the Eastern bloc and joined in alliance
    with France, Britain, and, later, the United States, Leftists saw
    this as confirmation of its imperialist nature. Winning the Six Day
    War in 1967 did not help: if only the Jews could be cuddly victims
    again. But it was hard for the New Left to remain loyal to the
    imbecilic Soviets, and the flirtation with Mao could not last long.
    The Third World became the cause du jour, and especially the Arab
    world and the Palestinian terrorist movement.



    Further help came from Columbia, from Edward Said's 1978 book
    Orientalism, which proposed a vague socialist agenda, a conspiracy
    theory, and a new set of victims of imperialism quite unlike the
    Soviets. These were of course the Arabs - and it was even better that
    the proximal villain was the ever-sinister, colonizing, comprador
    Jew. But there is a problem. Said dealt with the 18th and 19th
    centuries, for the most part, but the Arabs were not the political
    player in the region then: Ottoman Turkey, a powerful empire and seat
    of the Muslim Caliphate, ruled them. Millions of Christian Greeks,
    Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Armenians labored under Ottoman
    misrule too. The first four broke away, but the Armenian homeland was
    in Anatolia itself. So in 1915, during World War I, the Turks decided
    upon genocide, and carried it out.



    Said did not mention the Armenians even once in his book, for it
    would have made his passive, victimized Islamic world look rather
    less passive and not at all the victim. It is a glaring omission.
    Said's book was properly dismissed by many prominent reviewers as
    amateurish and dishonest - though on other grounds. They did not even
    notice the Turkish and Armenian aspect. The book might have been
    consigned to well-deserved oblivion.



    But a year after its publication, revolution erupted in Iran. And
    Orientalism would become the guidebook and intellectual primer for a
    new wave of "anti-imperialism." Following the overthrow of the Shah,
    Khomeini's radical Islamic followers proclaimed an Islamic
    revolutionary ideology with many of the same romantic and apocalyptic
    features that had attracted the masses - and armchair revolutionaries
    here - to Communism. (An amusing aside: Harvard held an exhibition and
    symposium in May 2007, partially funded by our Provost's Office, on
    posters of the Iranian revolution. I was asked to present a paper on
    Soviet propaganda art, then hurriedly disinvited when the organizers
    realized, as they said to me, that comparing the Iranian masterpieces
    to those of an atheist régime might offend President Ahmadinejad. One
    is touched that Harvard is so alert to the sensitivities of a
    Holocaust denier who murders gay people and routinely calls for the
    incineration of Israel. So much for academic integrity on the banks
    of the Charles.)



    Gradually, Middle East studies as we knew it at Columbia disappeared,
    to be replaced by what you have now. As it seems to me, Middle East
    studies at Columbia and elsewhere has become politicized; and other
    branches of the humanities have also fallen prey to ideology. Where
    university administrators do not actually share such extreme views
    and methods, they are anxious to preserve the appearance of
    tranquility and due process in the interests of the institutional
    image, even if that appearance is utterly superficial. I therefore
    doubt that any challenge to El-Haj can succeed; and perhaps efforts
    within universities like Columbia waste energy that might more
    effectively be channeled elsewhere. Jewish kids will keep on taking
    Lit Hum and enjoying convivial Shabbat dinners, but in a real sense
    the battle at Columbia may be lost.



    What is to be done? When Berlin was divided and the Communists seized
    the Humboldt University in their half of town, refugee scholars
    founded the Free University in West Berlin. What have you in New York
    City? NYU is not much different from Columbia. But there are two fine
    institutions of learning in Manhattan where genuine Near Eastern
    studies, untainted by Jew-baiting, apologia for terrorism, and
    unscholarly chicanery, might find a home, aided perhaps by the
    donations of alumnae and alumni of Barnard and Columbia. The nearer
    one to Columbia is the Jewish Theological Seminary on 122nd Street
    and Broadway. The farther one (in Arabic, al aqsa - and with its noble
    neo-Moorish dome and minaret the appellation almost fits) is uptown,
    in Washington Heights: Yeshiva University. Instead of writing angry
    letters to Lee Bollinger, alumni can pool their resources to help
    create rival MEALAC departments; and Columbia students desirous of an
    authentic education in subjects like Middle Eastern history can earn
    their transferable credits there.



    But, one might say, Jews have fought so hard to get into the Ivy
    League. Yes, and Jews in Europe fought hard for emancipation, too:
    some learnt skills and lessons along the way that proved useful when
    they realized it was time to go and rebuild our own country. Others
    held on and wouldn't leave. There is an old story about people who
    wandered and came to a plain, where they settled and built a village.
    But the place turned out to be the back of a great fish: it dived,
    and they drowned. So, there is another great university, actually a
    number, but a bit farther away. I have in mind the Hebrew University
    of Jerusalem and the other universities of Israel. It is particularly
    appropriate to support them now, when they are threatened by boycott.



    The Free University of Berlin is a historical example of how one can
    cultivate an alternate research center of higher quality than ones
    that have been corrupted, where efforts at reform yield diminishing
    returns. But there is an example closer to home. I was graduated from
    Columbia College in 1974 and delivered the Salutatory address on a
    medieval Armenian mystic. Professor Nina Garsoian had developed in
    the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department (MEALAC)
    a great program in Armenian Studies, and I was the first
    undergraduate joint major in the subject. But the subject has
    languished since her retirement in 1993. (I was denied tenure at
    Columbia in 1992 and shortly thereafter was appointed to America's
    oldest chair in the field, here at Harvard.)



    After a series of farcical "searches," MEALAC last semester offered
    the Armenian position, at only a junior level, to a former pupil of
    mine. Carefully considering the character of the search process
    itself and the state of the subject and of Near Eastern studies at
    Columbia overall, she declined the post, accepting instead a job as
    director of the Zohrab Center, a library and research and cultural
    institute at the Armenian Diocese in Manhattan. The Zohrab Center and
    Harvard's Armenian Studies program have already begun our first joint
    project, bypassing Columbia altogether - leaving it behind its
    ideological Berlin Wall.



    This latest scandal leads me finally, though, to grimmer reflections.
    In nazified Dresden,the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer - not Otto,
    the conductor, but the academic whose book LTI (Lingua Tertii
    Imperii) was the first study of the jargon to which the Third Reich
    reduced German - noted that people of every class and profession except
    his own had helped him now and then through the Hitler years. His
    fellow academics, though, were fascist enthusiasts, unwilling to
    help. Nothing of equivalent horror is going on today, but perhaps the
    amorality of Klemperer's colleagues should be a warning against
    expecting that because men are learned, they must also be right.



    When I wrote "What is to be done?" I had in mind Nikolai
    Chernyshevsky's Chto delat'; so let me close with a marvelous verse
    of the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. I think of it when I walk
    down 116th & Broadway, and see all that ivy concealing all that rot.
    Tvorchestvo vo dvortsakh ne vodvoritsya. "Creativity will not take up
    residence in palaces." Or in plain American, "Include me out."



    James R. Russell
    Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University

    http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&a mp;PageID=1846
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