The following are excerpts from a flurry of email correspondences between Barnard President Judith Shapiro and myself regarding the tenure bid of Assistant Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Originally I had sent a letter to President Shapiro imploring that she do the right thing and deny tenure to this academic impostor who passes off a political agenda demonizing the State of Israel and its legitimate historic roots, as if it were methodical archaeological scholarship. Shapiro replied to my letter initiating the correspondence on an “unbecoming” note comparing me to the bumbling patsy, Mr. Collins in Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice, and SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy to her lordship, the blue-blooded Lady Catherine. This was all aimed at throwing up a smoke screen in order to divert attention from the serious issue of El-Haj’s upcoming tenure decision, since there seems to be a lack of credible defenses available to contest allegations of El-Haj’s scholarly falsehoods and slander of a distinguished archaeologist. One positive development that came out of this will be future meetings between Candace de Russy and Shapiro. Candace will try to convince her to deny tenure to El-Haj on the basis of faulty and misleading scholarship. For those intent on writing to President Shapiro, feel free to do so despite her whining about the “hysteria it is generating”. This may be one of those rare incidences of a bona fide academic debate taking place representing both sides of the coin, with input from genuine scholars, the Va’ad ha-Emet, which seems to send the academic establishment flying off into a tailspin...