Last spring and summer were dominated by the UCU boycott. Through the Columbia SPME chapter listserv, faculty members helped recruit Nobel Prize winners to sign the statement. In the end, SPME gathered signatures of over 11,000 faculty, over 50 university presidents and 33 Nobel Nobel Prize winners to a statement opposing the boycott.
In early summer, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger published a strong statement opposing the boycott, and ~100 Columbia faculty members on the Columbia SPME listserv wrote him thank you notes. Bollinger’s statement was the centerpiece of an advertisement in The New York Times that also listed signatures of university presidents and Nobel Prize winners.
During the summer, the impending decision regarding tenure for Nadia Abu El-Haj was the subject of protests by Barnard College alumnae and articles in the news media and on blogs. Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), a book about Israeli archaeology, in which she claimed that Israeli archaeologists were distorting archaeological evidence to document the myth of a Jewish presence in Israel in ancient times and had destroyed or tried to destroy evidence of other cultures in ancient Israel. She also claimed that the distinguished Israeli archaeologist David Ussishkin had used a bulldozer to destroy such evidence. In response to the apparent interest in Israeli archaeology, the chapter organized an “Underground Lecture Series.” In September, Professor Alan Segal, one of the most popular professors at Barnard, lectured on the archaeology of the First Temple period. In October, William Dever, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, delivered a lecture based on his book, Did God Have a Wife? focusing on finds relevant to folk religion in the period when the Bible was written. In November, Aren Maeir, a professor of archaeology at Bar-Ilan University. lectured on his excavations at Tell es-Safi, the Biblical Gath, Goliath’s home town. The fourth Underground Lecture will take place in February. The speaker will be Jodi Magness, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, who will lecture on the archaeology of the Herodian period. Abu El-Haj received tenure. However, the purpose of the lecture series was not to influence the tenure decision but to present good scholarship about Israeli archaeology.
In addition, in November, Herbert London, a professor emeritus of the humanities at New York University, currently the president of the Hudson Institute, delivered a lecture on the origins, history, and current status of academic freedom.
In September, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, came to speak at Columbia. Many faculty members associated with the SPME chapter were opposed to having him speak here. But Columbia President Bollinger argued that having him speak was an important manifestation of academic freedom at Columbia. He made Ahmadinejad’s appearance a featured event of Columbia’s annual World Leaders Forum, associated with the annual gathering of world leaders that opens the United Nations sessions. SPME-associated faculty and numerous Jewish organizations helped students organize their protests against Ahmadinejad’s appearance. Awi Federgruen, the co-coordinator of the Columbia SPME chapter, spoke at the protests. At the event, Bollinger introduced Ahmadinejad by denouncing him for, among other things, sponsoring attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. Ahmadinejad complained about Bollinger’s bad manners.
Subsequently, a group of Columbia faculty members unconnected to SPME circulated for signatures a statement denouncing Bollinger. The statement accused him of failing to be sufficiently consultative with faculty about various university business matters, not adequately defending academic freedom (because he did not publicly say that outside interference with tenure decisions would not be tolerated), siding with Bush on Iraq (in his statements to Ahmadinejad), and making statements on behalf of the university about the Middle East in which he lacks expertise (an apparent reference to his position on the UCU boycott). The statement was presented at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In response, the SPME chapter coordinators developed a counter statement that was also signed by numerous faculty, defending Bollinger. Upon request, the chapter coordinators made the statement available to the secretary of the Faculty Senate. Both statements were featured in news articles in the New York Sun and elsewhere.