The Chronicle has something that’s a little more than an article and a little less than an expose on the state of Israel Studies in the American academy. The take-away is that trying to introduce balance to the academy by giving universities money doesn’t work because Israel haters just take the money and run:
For years Mr. Kramer, a senior associate at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, has argued that scholars of the Middle East are biased against Israel. “I don’t think you can bury these programs and chairs in a bunker deep enough to protect them from what goes on in Middle East studies,” he says…
He points to the new Israel-studies chair being established at Columbia as an example. There, just looking for someone to hold the chair has revealed the political fault lines that plague the field. Four Columbia trustees, all of them Jewish, have pledged more than $3-million for the position… While the decision to create the chair came well before the controversy over Middle East studies at Columbia, the appointment of the search committee has created a minor controversy of its own. The six-member committee includes two scholars known for their pro-Palestinian views: Mr. Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of anthropology, who signed the petition seeking Columbia’s divestiture from Israel.
The article doesn’t mention it, but there are numerous examples which make Kramer’s suspicions more than just distrust of Columbia – when pro-Israel donors tried to establish an Israel studies chair in Berkeley, the Middle East Studies department hijacked it and brought in anti-Zionist Oren Yiftachel. There’s just no way that people who shamelessly lie in the classroom are going to have the honesty to implement donors’ wishes. People who want to incubate pro-Israel views have to go outside the academy.
[Cross-posted on IsraPundit]
