Controversy Erupts at N.Y. College Over Tenure for Palestinian Professor

Another controversy involving Mideast politics has erupted on the Columbia University campus, and this time it is over whether to grant tenure to an anthropology professor of Palestinian descent.

Critics of Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj are trying to block Columbia from granting her tenure, while supporters worry that the controversy over her scholarship represents an attempt to stifle academic freedom.

Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been teaching at Barnard, Columbia’s women’s college, since 2002. Her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, looks at the importance of archaeology in forming Israel’s national identity.

The 2001 book discusses how archaeological discoveries have been used to defend Israel’s territorial claims and contributed to the idea of Israel as the ancient home of the Jewish people. She argues that Israel has used archaeology to justify its existence in the region, sometimes at the expense of the Palestinians.

The book has garnered both praise and criticism, with opponents challenging her conclusions and her research. The dispute has also spilled onto the Internet.

A Barnard alumnus Paula Stern, who lives in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, is starting an online petition against granting Abu El-Haj tenure or a permanent position on the faculty. The petition says her “claim to scholarly recognition is based on a single, profoundly flawed book” that fails to meet the university’s standards of scholarship.

Her supporters have an online petition too which claims that the attacks against Abu El-Haj “are part of an orchestrated witch-hunt … against politically unpopular ideas” and expresses the suspicion that “something like simple ethnic prejudice is at issue here.”