President vows no political partiality for Center for Middle East Studies

[justy387]

Source: The Jerusalem Post
http://my.brandeis.edu/news/item?news_item_id=103590

When the controversy at Columbia University erupted last fall over charges of anti-Israel bias in courses on the Middle East, many American Jews saw the brouhaha as another alarming sign that pro-Arab academics had gained the upper hand in university Middle East studies departments.

"My problem is not the anti-Zionism or even that many of them are anti-American, but that they are third-rate," Reinharz said in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post at his Brandeis office, referring to university Middle East studies departments. "The quality of the people is unlike any of the qualities we expect in any other field."

For more than a generation, they argue, academic seriousness in the field of Middle East studies has been replaced by polemics and middling erudition. The result is that those teaching courses on the subject today not only are failing to provide good scholarship in the field, but are indoctrinating generations of highly educated Americans to be hostile to the Jewish state, they say.

Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia's Middle East Institute and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, says he does not agree with Reinharz's assessment of problems in the field. In Khalidi's view, the problem is "organized and systematic attacks on the entire field of Middle East studies," which have resulted in "an unending witch hunt against people who can be portrayed as 'extreme' through selective and out-of-context quotations, innuendo and outright falsification."

[BrklynLiberal]

1. And his past vows and promises have been so meaningful and

proved so fulfilling. NOT!

[Igel]

2. "No political partiality" means "the way I think things are."

A history professor I know was complaining that his department was about to become political by accepting money for an endowed chair. It would be horrible. It would shatter his career and those of his students if the dept. was politicized.

The dept. was offered money for an endowed chair in Armenian history. The Turkish consulate told the guy--an expert in Ottoman history, who went there frequently with his students with some Turkish government funding--that if his dept. accepted the money, he'd have trouble getting permission to research there, collaborating with researchers there, and accessing archives. And his funding .... He freely admitted that his research was subject to self-censorship, he didn't dare pick topics that would piss off the Turkish government.

No, he couldn't allow his dept. to become politicized.