Awaiting the First Triumph: Deny Massad Tenure

Although the popular blog, Judeosphere, Joseph Massad has indicated that Joseph Massad was denied tenure, my sources at Columbia say that this has not yet been announced. Like Nadia Abu El Haj, many have criticized Massad's scholarship as lacking in substance, accuracy, integrity, etc. Combined with that were complaints by students about inappropriate behavior in class.

We can only hope that Columbia will recognize Massad for the huge embarrasment he is and not risk yet another humiliation (inviting Ahmadinejad being the most recent). Will Columbia take the first step towards the ongoing rumors we have heard about a deal whereby Massad is denied tenure but the equally inappropriate Abu El Haj is granted tenure simply because El Haj was deemed to be less politically embarrassing?

In a recent editorial, the Columbia Spectator explored the patterns in Massad's anti-Zionist and anti-homosexual screeds, and called for the university to deny Massad tenure. We add our voices to this call - and equally call upon the university to send Nadia Abu El Haj packing as well - our university deserves better!

Wrote the Columbia Spectator:

Indeed, the extent to which “academic freedom” can act as a shield for the most unfounded, anti-scholarly rhetoric is one of the few substantive lessons that can be gleaned from Massad’s body of work. With this in mind, his “magnum opus” is a 2002 article for New Politics entitled “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy,” itself a study in how an important examination of a provocative and difficult question—in this case, whether the Zionist project is inherently racist—can degenerate into an intolerant and wildly anti-academic rant.

Supporters of Israel should welcome the pointed challenges that the most provocative and well-reasoned anti-Zionist discourses present. But nobody should welcome a scholarship in which poisonous and intellectually flimsy methods of argumentation act as stand-ins for the careful, academic thought process that universities are supposed to encourage and reward. And nobody should welcome the day when our University determines that the world’s most important issues deserve nothing more than the immature and polemical treatment that Massad gives to them. We’re not about to give Bill O’Reilly a full professorship. Massad doesn’t deserve one either.