...Brinkley effectively backpedaled from a potential faculty revolt by putting off a final decision on Massad -- after a final decision had been reached. And if convening a second ad hoc committee and re-reviewing an apparently settled tenure case already seems a shade capitulatory, as well as a waste of the faculty's time and energy, consider the candidate involved. Joseph Massad's papers and articles addressing "Zionism as the new anti-Semitism" and encouraging the violent dismantling of "Jewish society in Israel" have appeared in respected outlets like New Politics and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Even if one discounts his reliably hysterical work for the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, his output is that of a scholar who views the academy not as a venue for scholarship and inquiry, but as a mouthpiece. He does more than reduce this school's discourse on the Middle East to recrimination and innuendo. He jeopardizes Columbia's reputation as a serious place of study.

The only thing worse than this feckless treatment of the Massad question is getting the final answer wrong. If the provost and the University are as concerned about the school's academic integrity and intellectual environment as they apparently are about keeping up appearances, they should do now what they allegedly did 10 months ago: deny tenure to Joseph Massad.