Thursday, November 29, 2007
Shulamit Reinharz has a good piece in this week's Jewish Advocate that, while focusing on the Nadia Abu El-Haj matter, now decided, poses some interesting commentary on the Academy and its tenure decisions: Freedom or excellence in academe
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.
Note the bolded portion. I keep encountering this in these tenure battles. It's as though our affirming, nurturing, child-rearing that encourages creative thought and "coloring outside the lines" as it were has been translated amongst the grownups who were raised on that stuff to devalue technical prowess and precision in thought. Creativity trumps getting it right.
It's much easier and requires far fewer judgments to be made, yet respect for objective fact and truth-seeking is exactly what has kept the Western Academy advanced over its weaker cousins. Instead, in the interest of diversity, we've gotten so diverse we even have to accept the wrong. In our fear of stifling vigorous debate, we've thrown standards out the window altogether.
"A wall mentioned in the Bible's Book of Nehemiah and long sought by archaeologists apparently has been found, an Israeli archaeologist says.
A team of archaeologists discovered the wall in Jerusalem's ancient City of David during a rescue attempt on a tower that was in danger of collapse, said Eilat Mazar, head of the Institute of Archaeology at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research and educational institute, and leader of the dig.
Artifacts including pottery shards and arrowheads found under the tower suggested that both the tower and the nearby wall are from the 5th century B.C., the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said this week. Scholars previously thought the wall dated to the Hasmonean period from about 142 B.C. to 37 B.C.
The findings suggest that the structure was actually part of the same city wall the Bible says Nehemiah rebuilt, Mazar said. The Book of Nehemiah gives a detailed description of construction of the walls, destroyed earlier by the Babylonians. "
http://comments.breitbart.com/d8t7ors00/