Constitutional Law

Barnard Professor's Heated Tenure Tract

Although Barnard College in New York eventually granted Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure as an associate professor of anthropology, it was an arduous process that proved a testing ground for academic freedom. Jane Kramer authored an exhaustive piece for The New Yorker on the battle that erupted over Abu El-Haj’s application for tenure. The piece covers the online petition, launched by Barnard alumna Paula Stern, to deny Abu El-Haj tenure. Stern’s opposition to the professor stemmed largely from Abu El-Haj’s 2001 book, Facts on the Ground, which, according to Kramer “looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation of Jewish claims to what is now Israel.”

Kramer writes that the book was widely praised by colleagues. The New York Times reported in fall 2007 that Abu El-Haj’s supporters, largely from the field of anthropology, praised her book as “solid, even brilliant, and part of an innovative trend of looking at how disciplines function.” Stern, however, told Kramer that many other scholars were concerned about Abu El-Haj’s work, particularly her book. Stern told Kramer that after reading the last few pages of the Facts on the Ground she concluded that the Abu El-Haj was “dangerous” and “wrong.” Stern was able to mount serious opposition to Abu El-Haj through the petition, which quickly attracted thousands of signatures only months after the professor’s tenure application was filed. The article also notes that Stern relied heavily on information from historian Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz’s online publication FrontPage to criticize Facts on the Ground. Abu El-Haj tells Kramer, “What happened last year – it wasn’t about me. I was a cog in a big wheel of the issue of the Middle East and Israel.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on April 14, 2008 (boomark / email).