The chief question here is supposedly the “independence” of the tenure evaluation process and its insulation from outside pressure and commentary. My own view is that while this is an admirable ideal in the abstract, it presupposes a corresponding ideal in the intellectual and ethical standards of the academics formally involved in making tenure decisions. That is, it assumes a professorate detached to a great degreee from ideological and political passions and committed to some notion of objectivity. The trouble is, as it seems to me, the latter assumption is no longer very tenable at certain institutions and within certain fields, and that, in turn, has bred a justifiable suspicion in the public mind, even within the community of the highly educated who, in general, embrace liberal values. To put it in a nutshell, there is a widespread and justified belief that in many areas of study, doctrinaire politics and a kind of ideological cronyism are in the saddle, determining who thrives, who survives, and who is given the boot. Cultural anthropology is certainly such a field. Moreover, the dubious reputation clinging to this kind of scholarship understandably leads to a wider disdain for universities as such and undermines the tacit social understandings that enable them to survive. This situation is made worse when the indignation of the professorate at public intrusion into a realm supposedly reserved for trained specialists of considerable seniority is perceived, with some justice, as mere professorial snottiness, a song-and-dance routine performed by mediocrities who want to keep jobs and funds under their exclusive control, despite the slanted partisanship of their ostensibly scholarly views.

This leads to the rather sad conclusion that in some cases, at least, it is wiser to acknowledge that the educated public has something to say about “professional” matters, and even to take it into account when pondering individual cases, than to fill the air with pompous resentment when such criticism arises. It seems to me, futher, that the el Haj case is a prime example of the situation.

That said, I admit to my own strong feeling about el Haj, all the more intense because I am, inter alia, a parent who has forked over plenty of dough for his daughter’s Barnard education (and his son’s Columbia degree), and who is therefore constantly importuned by those institutions for hard cash. At a visceral level, I feel that if they want my money, they have to take my opinions as well (as is also true of my own alma mater, Harvard—but that’s another story).

My opinion of el Haj, bluntly, is that she’s a practitioner of the worst kind of junk scholarship, that she’s impelled entirely by the narrowest kind of political fanaticism, and therefore that she’s not worth a damn as a faculty member. She conjoins the extremism of Rejectionist Palestinian activism with the intellectual slop that characterizes so much of academic “postmodernism”. I note with some asperity that she marshalls, on behalf of her dubious assertion of the unreality of Jewish history, the stock phrases and double-talk that originates in postmodernist, social constructivist “sociology of scientific knowledge”, borrowing the idle nonsense of such tainted sages as Bloor and Latour in order to claim that there is no such thing as objectivity or science, that all such claims are traces of political power plays, and that therefore, one may publish away, endlessly, without any attempt to consult hard evidence or to face up to its implications. Since I have personally commented, at some length, on the futility and self-contradiction of this crackpot version of philosophy of science (and flatter myself that I have had something to do with its current retreat into the academic backwaters), I am grimly pleased to see el Haj resorting to this shabby bag of tricks.

In view of all this, I would like to believe that Barnard and Columbia have the guts to send this baggage packing. If not, I shall be considerable disgusted—and tell them not to expect any checks!

-Norman Levitt