...To my mind, Abu El-Haj’s tenure case reflects the problems surrounding many tenure cases today. "Academic freedom," more than scholarly excellence, seems to have become the evaluation yardstick. By using the concept of "academic freedom," however, just about anyone is entitled to tenure. People who question this reasoning are coming under attack. In Abu El-Haj’s case, her defenders label people who criticize her work as trying to silence her. But isn’t it possible for criticism to be criticism?

Some Abu El-Haj defenders applaud her courage in taking "unpopular positions on controversial issues." But is tenure about popular and unpopular positions? I thought it was about the quality of a person’s work, about accuracy and truth, according to widely shared scientific and scholarly standards. In the fall issue of Barnard Magazine, in an article about tenure, President Judith Shapiro stresses the importance of students facing "challenges to previous assumptions and beliefs." Does it follow that faculty should teach creationism because it challenges students’ beliefs? Should students be taught that slavery is dignified? That the Holocaust did not exist?

I reject these rationales for granting tenure. Exacting standards are imperative, especially if the research topic is embroiled in ideological controversy, as Abu El-Haj’s work is.

In "Return to the Days of the Mufti" (Haaretz newspaper, Nov. 14, 2007), Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai explains that every time an Israeli archaeologist begins to dig anywhere in the Old City of Jerusalem, members of the Arab and Palestinian community protest loudly that Israelis want to destroy the structural foundations of the Temple Mount mosques in order to construct the Third Temple. In 1929, Grand Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Muslim cleric in charge of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, incited Palestinians against Jews by spreading this lie. The current Mufti is doing the same, using the Temple Mount to inflame people against the Jewish rule that "soils the Muslimhood of Jerusalem."

Contrary to what Abu El-Haj claims about Jewish destruction of Muslim artifacts, it is actually Muslims engaged in ostensible "repairs" to the Temple Mount who are doing everything in their power to destroy the remnants of Jewish (and Christian) past. This activity paves the way, according to Shragai, for pseudo-academics to rewrite the history of Jerusalem, inventing new Palestinian and Islamic terminology that even some Islamic historians define as baseless. As Shragai writes, "Hundreds of academic and religious publications charge that the Temple did not exist at all or if it did exist, that the mosques preceded it." This remarkable statement claims that Islam predates Judaism.

A story in the current issue of The Jerusalem Report parallels this cognitive problem. The interviewer, Eeta Prince-Gibson, asked a woman who lives in the Israeli-Arab city of Umm el-Fahm her opinion about incorporating the city into a new Palestinian state when one is established, rather than have it remain within the Jewish state of Israel. The woman became very emotional and said she wants to remain in Israel. "For 60 years, we’ve lived here." The interviewer then pointed out that Umm el-Fahm was not originally part of Israel and only became attached to the state in 1951. The woman responded, "You Israelis always like to bring up technical things and historical facts that don’t matter." But technical things and historical facts are precisely what matter and can help us resolve debates.

As reported in the Advocate last week, the administrative body of the Temple Mount – called the Waqf – does not permit Israelis to conduct archaeological excavations. Its fear of digs does not arise out of concern for Al-Aqsa’s safety, Shragai tells us. Rather the Waqf fears a challenge to “the web of lies that the Jews were just passersby and not a nation whose roots were planted in Jerusalem” for many centuries prior to the rise of Islam.

Those who deny Jews the right to dig do not want to confront evidence that contemporary Jews are linked to a past whose artifacts lie beneath their feet. Too bad the Islamic archaeological strong-arming in Jerusalem has been transformed into the academically respectable at Barnard.