Jacob Gershman has the scoop, including some details I didn't know about: Massad had already been denied tenure once, in 2007 and, according to Gershman, the excuse for giving him the extraordinary opportunity to go up again was that "Massad had switched his field of specialty from political science to cultural studies."
It's often alleged, as in the Finkelstein case at DePaul, that someone's anti-Israel views prevent him from getting tenure, or otherwise succeeding in academia. Putting aside the merit of those claims, Massad's case involves exactly the opposite scenario. He landed at Columbia to begin with as a disciple of leading Palestinian activist and Columbia professor Edward Said. And given not just the quality of his "scholarship," but his hostility to the international gay rights and feminist movements (which shouldn't matter for tenure purposes, but who are we kidding?), and his haranguing of a questioner at a university event based on his (Israeli) nationality, it's hard to imagine a university like Columbia tenuring him if he wasn't a leading Israel-basher, and therefore was able to pose as both a "progressive" and a martyr to academic freedom.
The good news is that if Columbia had denied Massad tenure, it would have been under severe pressure to hire someone just as anti-Israel to replace him, to prove that its decision wasn't politically motivated. And that replacement almost certainly wouldn't hold some of Massad's most cringeworthy positions and statements, such as: the "Gay International" conspiracy to create homosexuality in the Arab world; that "such practices [as the torture of Abner Louima by NYC police] clearly demonstrate that white American male sexuality exhibits certain sadistic attributes in the presence of non-white men and women over whom white Americans (and Brits) have government-sanctioned racialised power"; that the movie "Exodus tells the story of the Zionist hijacking of a ship from Cyprus to Palestine by a Zionist Haganah commander;" his dismissal of the significance of "honor killings" in the Arab world; and his insistence Israel is analogous to Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians to the Nazis' Jewish victims.
I think it's regrettable from the standpoint of academic integrity that Massad received tenure, but, in a perverse way, it's good news for supporters of Israel. We can look forward to many more years of Massad discrediting the "anti-Zionist" cause.
As an aside, here's an example of exactly what's wrong with much of campus pro-Israel activism. A Columbia student expresses her concern that Massad received tenure. She acknowledges (wrongly) that "Massad is a distinguished scholar," and "admittedly a talented, accomplished professor," and in any event she has no way to judge the "academic legitimacy" of his most inflammatory (and ridiculous) arguments. But she's upset because Massad disturbs Jewish students' "sensibilities." Ugh! To the extent that Massad has mistreated Jewish or Israeli students, that's a legitimate concern. But to the extent that he makes Jewish students feel bad because they don't like the implications of his legitimate arguments, that just victimhood politics that are just as bad, and as inadmissible in a debate about tenure, coming from Jews as from anyone else. The student in question, in other words, has written a post complaining about Massad's tenure that actually supports his case for tenure, because she relies on the fact that he hurts her feelings instead of educating herself as to why he's been accused of shoddy scholarship.
I wonder if he signed the letter -from 1,000 law profs' praising Sotomayer ? Knowing only, most likely, that she is A ) female and B ) minority.
This post does make me cringe doubly, though. On the one hand, this guy is clearly deranged and should never have been given any kind of academic position, on the other hand the post seems to conveniently forget the author's usual championing of the ideals of free and fair exchange of ideas, etc.
Alas, not the case in normal Houses of Representatives.
It's a common plaint of the left that 'defending someones 1st amendment rights' implies a requirement to PAY that person to express his views. Witness the Ward Churchill debacle at CU. Luckily there, a judge realized the distinction, and threw out the jury verdict, although he did it on, IMO, slightly tortured grounds.
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It's always best to go to root cause, and drain the swamp.
Dump tenure. Problem solved.
Especially given that he's already been portrayed as "a martyr to academic freedom", I'd expect you to take great care to avoid the impression that you think he shouldn't receive tenure because he's critical (ahum) of Israel.
If you think this student was wrong to describe him as a "distinguished scholar", explain why. Doing that requires more than listing past posts about dumb things the man has written. What exactly is the extent of his scholarship?
This is the list of his works on his wiki page. That includes three books published by distinguished academic publishers (U. Chicago, Routledge and Columbia) and a list of journal articles and book reviews in journals whose prestige I am in no position to assess. (Here's a more comprehensive list, from his personal web page.)
Certainly in social science (and law), where objective truth is harder to come by than in the hard sciences, we should be careful to distinguish between arguing about the truth of someone's work, and arguing about the merit and distinction of that work.
If a professor made similar comments about gays and was not either a) a minority and/or b) a Muslim - would there be any chance in hell they would be considered for tenure? Imagine if a Christian professor had said such things about homosexuality? There would be self-righteous protests, letters expressing righteous fury and indignation, and a full-out faculty boycott to protest the mere consideration of such a candidate.
This is example number 99999 of the horrid bias in academia, and a reason why many people like myself chose not to pursue it as a career.
Again, for the record, I agree with exactly nothing of what I've heard about mr. Massad's opinions. (And, BTW, he's not a muslim, according to his wiki page.)
I try to be intellectually honest in all my endeavours, but unfortunately I am but a mortal man, with all the shortcomings that that entails.
Quite right. Overall it strikes me as sensible, smart, and apt.
On the other hand,it is unusual for a university to grant somebody tenure in department X after he was denied in department Y. The implication is that departments differ in their standards of quality. Departments do, of course, but it's embarassing to admit it.
Has anyone heard of this happening elsewhere?
I know when I was thinking of going up in business economics, law, and political science at UCLA back in 1984 I was told that I should choose between bus econ and the law-poli-sci consortium, since bus econ was more likely to turn me down and a split decision would be awkward. (I do not mean to imply that law and poli sci were lower quality--- the situation was complicated in different dimensions, and in the end I came to Indiana before any firm decisions were made.)
I never said or implied that he shouldn't be granted tenure because he's anti-Israel.
He doesn't say homosexual behavior is wrong, he says homosexual identity is a product of Western cultural colonial imperialism, via a conspiracy he calls "Gay International." It's an atavistic form of cultural nationalism, whereby no "foreign" ideas should be allowed to pollute the legitimate cultural legacy of the Arab world, where homosexual encounters are furtive, illicit, and unacknowledged. He also suggested that persecuting homosexuals is a legitimate response to this cultural aggression, which, as you know, is hardly the sort of thing that usually makes you a heroic martyr among the progressives. And that's my point: I don't think anyone in academia should be punished or rewarded for their views on homosexuality, but in fact Massad's views are the type that would normally be punished in academia--if he wasn't anti-Israel. Being anti-Israel has created a progressive halo for him that has helped his career.
Massad is not a Muslim. He was born into a Palestinian Christian family.
So no need to imagine.
And yet, it does seem to be the reason why you care...
Let's concede for a minute that the biblical and natural law case against hommosexuality is correct (something by the way in which I do NOT believe). It doesn't necessarily follow that ANY criticisms of homosexuality are therefore sound or decent. Think Fred Phelps; he agrees with Rasmusen that homosexuality is immoral. Think the "Whore of Babylon" crowd who agree with evangelicals who argue the Roman Catholic Church is in error in certain religious doctrines.
The problem with Massad is that his criticisms of Israel AND of homosexuality seem of the same tenor -- that is deluded conspiracy, or bigoted crackpottery.
If one has a good case, in principle, it does not help to support it with a bad, bigoted argument which is what Massad seems to be doing in both cases:
Massad argues that building an identity around having sex with men is a Western concept. Apparently having sex with men is unremarkable in the Muslim world; that "everyone" does it as a way to obtain relief before marriage.
Similarly one could argue that there is no race in the Muslim world; that all Muslims are equal regardless of skin color, so that building an identity around one's skin color is a Western, non-Islamic concept. (I take no position as to the validity of the argument.)
I think giving Massad the respectability of tenure will sharpen the arguments of pro-Israel folks, who will be forced to take his positions seriously and counter them convincingly.
As noted in the post, he did make some idiotic comments about gays. He basically said that there were no "gay men" in Arab culture, only men with different sexual roles. This is contradicted by the fact that gays (not sexual roles) are clearly mentioned in the laws of various Arab countries, as well as in Islamic religious texts, etc.
But many non-Westerners, particularly Muslims, are given a pass as to anti-Semitic, anti-gay or misogynistic rhetoric, due to political correctness and ignorance of the real diversity of opinion in their countries of origin.
The problem with academia is not liberals. It's that often foreigner professors with "radical" (read: crackpot) can market their ideas in a capitivating way to students who are too inexperienced to guage the relative merit of their academic work, and the foreign professor uses automatic accusations of "colonialism" or "racism" to intimidate his critics.
The good news is that these days, such tactics are much less successful than in the past in academia. Yes, you have to stake out your own positions and build a name for yourself. But even if you have tenure, going through a conflict like this is its own punishment. His name will continue to be associated with anti-Semitism and other anti-intellectual biases, which will affect his reputation as a scholar regardless. As a lone voice with no following in the academic world, you are not an accomplished scholar but a crackpot, a personality.
Scientists would care if creationists were getting awarded tenure. Of course, if there is an issue you care about, you'd like to ensure that academic standards are being upheld. That doesn't mean that you oppose tenure to those who do meet such standards.
I doubt it's "everyone." However a great deal of heterosexual Arabs do have homosexual behavior as a temporary stop gap measure. The problem is heterosexual men want the closest substitute for a woman and that is a teenage boy hovering around puberty. AND they want the teenage boy to play the feminine role. I don't think ANY heterosexually oriented teenage boy can really be into this. It's abuse.
Remember, campuses are supposed to be safe places where nobody's ideas are ever challenged and nobody ever feels bad.
That's why I made a distrinction, in my 11:23 comment, between social science and hard science. Creationism is "beyond the pale"/"off the reservation" in a way that Massad's claims may not be. (I write "may" because I don't know enough about the man or his field to be able to say for certain.)
In the hard sciences, it is clear that one should distinguish between what one would like to be true, and what actually is true. The big problem with all the bible thumpers is that they don't do that. They often start by saying how horrible or unthinkable it would be if genesis were wrong, and argue from there. In biology, it is clear that this is not an acceptable form of argument, and it is relatively easy to distinguish between such reasoning and valid reasoning.
In social science, work should - theoretically - also be value neutral ("wertneutral"). Unfortunately, that distinction is much less easy to make. For that reason, one should be very reluctant to declare certain lines of reasoning beyond the pale.
To use this claim about homosexuality in the Arab world as an example: This is a claim about reality akin to every other empirical claim in sociology. We may not think it is very plausible, but the way to deal with an implausible claim, if we must, is to examine the research done and point out the flaws. And because this is possible, Massad's claim is part of the ordinary scientific discourse. If it should be the case that his research is sloppy, prejudiced, and otherwise flawed, that would be a value neutral reason to deny him tenure.
I suspect that his research is in fact many of those things, but I haven't looked at it carefully enough to be sure. Nor do I care to. If anyone else would like to attack this decision, that is where they should focus their criticism: on the quality of his scholarship, not on his conclusions.
On the gay issue, given that homosexual activity was punishable by stoning, how does Massad or anyone else know whether homosexual identity would or would not emerge in a more liberal society, with or without Western influence?
What a pathetic shit hole of a life that you must lead, fretting about who and who is not granted tenure at universities with which you have no affiliation.
That raises the question of the difference between his (core) scholarship and whatever other writing he may do. It is a difficult question how much the latter should play a role in the tenure process.
OTOH, look at the wiki-summary of his dissertation, which was published in 2001:
The origins of nationalism and national identity is a subject that I occasionally like to read about, if I have time, and this seems like something I might like to read in the future. His second book, on Palestinian nationalism, is in the same vein, although it already seems (from the summary) much less value-neutral.
Without reading his work, all I can do is argue for calmth in criticising the university's decision.
The point is, the guy's not Ward Churchill. I don't see - or you don't give me access to - what lets you talk so dismissively about his tenure case, assuming he was only tenured because of politics. Because from where I'm sitting (a political science department, for what it's worth), it looks like an unusually productive young scholar was given a much harder tenure case than he deserved because of his political, polemical pieces.
Here is one review from a Web site called Al-Bab demolishing many of Massad's ideas in Desiring Arabs as crude populism couched in academic language.
Most of Massad's comments about gays are just very ordinary heterosexism, common to Western and non-Western cultures (just replace "Western" with "liberal" in the USA). A hetero scholar writing about gays even in his own culture is often not a reliable source
That informed source, according to Jweekly.com, is "David Biale, (...) Emanuel Ringelblum professor of Jewish history and director of the program in Jewish studies at U.C. Davis."
But the thing I was asking about is something different. What makes you so dismissive of his academic work, and so at ease at putting the word "scholarship" in scare quotes when you talk about him? You're only quoting his most polemical lines here, so I'm not sure what's leading you to conclude that as a whole his work is crap.
Now, I have no problem with folks protesting Ahmadinejad's visit in 2007, but why is she so proud of "prevent[ing]" (her word) him from speaking in 2006? Aren't universities supposed to be fora for the exchange of ideas?
Would she also agree that it was fair for a mob of students to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at a major university, as in fact happened at Berkeley in 2000 or so? Netanyahu may not be quite the racist Ahmadinejad is, but certainly some of his positions are unsettling.
Again, do we really want alumni lobbying to determine who gets tenure? Note that we see no discussion about the merits of Abu El-Haj's archeological work, merely an assertion that its implications are awkward for Israel, and an extrapolation that the denial of tenure was justified on that basis.
(Again for the record, I also have no idea as to the merits of the archeological work in question. I don't even know who El-Haj is.)
If this is "pro-Israel campus activism," we can do with less of it.
What was your first clue?
BGates, do you contend that nothing in Netanyahu's policies and rhetoric are troubling? Merely because his rhetoric is less incendiary than Ahmadinejad's does not excuse it.
That's not what happened in the actual history of the ship Exodus, but that's what happens in the movie. So if the guy is talking about the movie, he's absolutely correct and it's inappropriate to try to consider this a point against him.
Does he consider Jews to be a "race"? If a Jew converted to Islam and recited "There is no god but Allah, and Muhummad is his prophet" would Ahmadinejad still consider him a Jew, the way the Nazis considered converted Jews to still be Jews? Because if he wouldn't, then he's a religious bigot, but not a racist.
Sorry to be off topic, but the New York State Senate is just the opposite.
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3362/a-new-fact-on-
the-ground-nadia-abu-el-haj-wins-tenure-at-barnard-college
To my knowledge, Abu El-Haj has never done any archaelogical work, at least not if by that we mean the sort of work that archaelogists do. Abu El-Haj is a sociologist who advanced a tendentious theory critiquing the work of archaelogist, dismissing their evidence of Jewish civilization as effectively fabricated for the most part. When I asked an associate professor of archaelogy at another university who has much personal experience of digs in Israel what he thought of El-Haj's work, his response was to snort derisively and dismissively. (Yeah, count that as no more than hearsay at most, but it encouraged me to believe that there was good reason to question El-Haj's bona fides, notwithstanding all the prestigious institutions she has been associated with, awards, etc.)
Certainly the low point in a post which, at its height, barely got off the ground. It's hard to believe HuffPost couldn't come up with a more persuasive liberal Zionist to make this argument. Where's Dershowitz?
Was that the question?
But to find an answer I would look to Islamic societies of the 20th century up to the 1980s when the current wave of fundamentalism started -- many of those would be more liberal than today, with varying degrees of Western influence. I would also compare fundamentalist communities in the US, where they take as their guide the Old Testament strictures about reserving sex for marriage.
Anyway, although I didn't learn anything of value in the course (or at the school generally), at least I got an "A" in the course, which wasn't too hard, given that all anyone had to do in the class was recite a bunch of idiotic leftist platitudes against colonialism, imperialism, "the Other," blah blah blah. Otherwise, although I have a Jewish name, I never heard any anti-Semitic statements in the class -- not that I would have cared anyway, given that he's a loser, and losers act like losers. So overall, I'd say that he fits in with all the other misfits at Columbia. All I can say is that I'm glad that I graduated and no longer go there.
I have no dog in this hunt, and have no idea who either you or ME2 are, but that's a pretty bizarre and uncivil statement to make. Do you know who ME2 is, or have any factual errors in his comments to point to, or do you just feel that anything critical of this Massad person or his apparent views must be false?
This in particular seems to be quite an uncontroversial argument, and it could probably be made about any non-Western society such as China, Japan Indonesia, etc. Any historian of sexuality from Michel Foucault to the present knows that the notion of a gay identity, meaning an individual who is exclusively homosexual as opposed to exclusively heterosexual, is something that was first described, and to some degree invented, by the disciples of psychiatry, developed during the 19th century in Western Europe and the US. Homosexuality was described by psychiatrists as a pathology until the 1970s, and only then was this changed such that homosexual identity became accepted by the medical community as a legitimate form of sexual identity.
What Massad shows is that this history of psychiatry was foreign to Arab culture, and this allowed sexuality to be freer and more fluid in Arab culture. He argues that this freer, less defined practice of sexuality is a good thing, and that Arabs should resist the imposition of Western notions of restrictive sexual identity.
In no place in his book does he ever say that sexual acts between two men or two women are wrong or evil or that such acts don't occur in the Arab world with as much frequency as in the Western world. Rather his argument is that they are defined quite differently according to Arab culture, and that Arabs should resist Western definitions of such acts. He also argues that they should resist Islamist condemnations of such acts as well.
Now that I've described the argument, you are free to critique it or not, but at least be accurate in your understanding of what is quite a complex book.
As far as your questioning of my description of the Core Curriculum, it's a fact that when I was there 10 years ago, students had to take two "multicultural studies" classes. Officially, it was called the "Major Cultures" requirement or something, but it was informally called the multicultural requirement. I remember receiving a blue sheet with a list of courses broken down under headings, like African-American studies, Native American studies, Middle Eastern studies, etc. -- basically, the standard perceived victim cultures by academia (e.g., there were no Jewish or Irish cultural courses allowed for the requirement). This requirement was added to the Core because of complaining by politically correct elements that there was too much of a focus on "dead white guys" at the school (the same elements also complained that Butler Library had the names of "dead white guys" chiseled on the building). I remember trying to sign up for African-American and Native American classes for both required courses, but the school wouldn't let me take any courses in those areas. In fact, I rarely got into the classes that I actually wanted to take at the school; I was constantly forced to take classes that I didn't want to take because the school believed in treating its undergrad students like crap. My understanding is that the school didn't have enough professors for those courses, so they generally limited those courses to majors in those fields. I wound up in Massad's class essentially by default because I couldn't sign up for any of the other classes that I was hoping to take for the requirement.
As far as not transferring -- I wish I would have. But I just wanted to get out after four years -- transferring would have likely added another year (or at least more expenses) because Columbia's Core Curriculum courses don't count towards majors in useful subjects at other schools. Other factors make transferring from Columbia impracticable. Also, the Core basically is done after two years, so, as an optimist, I was hoping that the classes would get better once I finished with Lit Hum and the like. I was wrong.
Anyway, if you're interviewing people for Columbia's admissions department (which they've asked me to do too, but I've declined), it's not a surprise that you wouldn't hear too many negative statements about the school. As far as your experience in the 1980s being different than mine, I think the school probably has gotten a lot worse since the 1980s. By the time I was at the college, I think the 1960s protest generation had basically taken over the humanities departments; since they're largely interested in "social change," they've generally stuck to hiring like-minded people who use their positions as platforms for preaching their political views to captive audiences.
Hey, I'm not happy with my experience at Columbia, but I guess the "customer is always wrong there," so whatever. All I can say is that I discourage anyone I know from going there, and I'm not giving them any money -- ever. So Massad &Friends can have a blast complaining about America, Israel, or whatever -- I won't be a part of it in any event.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/world/africa/
08iht-letter.4.11780135.html
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/12/17/alien-legacy-0
This Alien Legacy:
The Origins of "Sodomy" Laws in British Colonialism
"This 66-page report describes how laws in over three dozen countries, from India to Uganda and from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea, derive from a single law on homosexual conduct that British colonial rulers imposed on India in 1860. This year, the High Court in Delhi ended hearings in a years-long case seeking to decriminalize homosexual conduct there. A ruling in the landmark case is expected soon."
Next question?
I'm still not clear, though, how Massad would explain mistreatment of homosexuals by Arab governments of the sort reported in that NYT article. In his view, it is not somehow an effect of Western culture on the Arab world, though it would appear to most of us here that the Arabs own this, along with other expressions of intolerance and illiberality, whether or not in the past they might not have responded in the same harsh fashion?
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