University continues to consider hiring embattled Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi for its newly-endowed Robert Niehaus chair in Contemporary Middle East Studies. Khalidi, a specialist on Palestinian politics and history, has become controversial for his highly politicized mix of polemics and history. He has sought to rebut criticism, arguing that questioning his scholarship infringes on his first amendment rights. Speaking at Columbia University on April 4, 2005, for example, he said, “Freedom of speech and academic freedom are particularly necessary for unpopular and difficult ideas, for conventional ideas, for ideas that challenge reigning orthodoxy.”

Khalidi is right about the importance of freedom of speech, but he misses the point. Academic freedom is meant to protect scholarship, not replace it. For any history professor, the core of scholarship is the ability to uncover and interpret primary source material. High school students might select sources uncritically in order to prove their thesis, but history professors must evaluate not only what the source says, but also its veracity and perspective. Judgment matters. Next to plagiarism—of which Khalidi has also been accused recently—deliberate omission, failure to judge sources, and eschewing primary source and field research are the greatest academic sins a professor can commit.

In 2004, Khalidi authored Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East in which he argued that U.S. government officials had entered into the Iraq conflict ignorant of Middle Eastern history. Unlike others academics and critics of Bush administration policy, Khalidi refused to travel to Iraq to conduct his research. Instead, he made Iraq a template upon which to impose his theories. His failure to engage Iraqis is reflected in his ignorance of Iraqi history. His narrative failed to mention Saddam Hussein’s murder of tens of thousands of Shi‘i Marsh Arabs, and the ethnic cleansing of cities like Kirkuk and Sinjar. Polemics may forgive sins of omission, but scholarship should not. Worse, while his narrative ignores Saddam’s chemical weapons attack on Kurdish civilians, in the Iraqi equivalent of Holocaust denial, he questions Saddam’s complicity in a footnote...