February 23, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
PRESS CLIPPINGS
On campuses around the nation, endowed professorships have become “another weapon” in the academic skirmishes of recent years between supporters of the Palestinian cause and those who back Israel, writes Moment magazine (February).
Professors who hold endowed positions generally have tenure and prestige, the magazine says, and are more free than their non-endowed brethren to focus on research, scholarship, and, in some instances, “putting forth their views into the public arena.”
As a result, philanthropists on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli issue are vying to endow positions they hope will advance their personal agendas.
American Jews have been financing Jewish studies since 1925, the magazine says; in the 1960s, they also began endowing positions in Holocaust studies. During the cold war, the “federal government began pouring resources into the emerging field of Middle East studies,” as the region became strategically important to the White House. At the time, Middle East departments “presented Israel as a small, innocuous nation,” an image that changed drastically following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel emerged as a regional superpower.
Beginning in the 1980s, royalty from the Persian Gulf region — flush with oil money — began to endow professorships and centers in Islamic and Middle East studies in the United States, sending “large swaths of the Jewish [donor] community” into action. American Jews countered by establishing tenured professorships in Israel studies, a new academic specialty that they hoped would “offset the balance.”
Furthermore, according to Moment, Jewish donors are increasingly choosing to establish Israel chairs within Jewish-studies departments, where “they perceive faculty committees are more likely to be sympathetic to Israel” than their counterparts in Middle East studies.
Ali Banuazizi, co-director of the program in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Boston College, argues that what some Jewish donors are doing is detrimental to Israel and prevents Israeli-studies scholars and students from gaining a broader regional perspective.
“What does it say about us, academics, scholars, intellectuals, if we can’t get it together and teach in the same department? Are we going to reflect the adversarial state…or are we going to try and establish a more objective and civil, and hopefully productive, dialogue?”
Stanley Katz, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University and former president of the American Council of Learned Societies, remains sanguine about the situation.
“There’s some good coming out of all this,” he says. “People are mobilizing to raise money for chairs. If universities are responsible in seeking out good scholars, everybody gains.”
The article is available online at http://www.momentmag.com.
