< <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i14/14b00201.htm>http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i14/14b00201.htm>
From the issue dated November 30, 2007
ON THE CONTRARY
Why Norman Finkelstein Would Have Tenure - in Israel By NEVE GORDON
Take a minute before you conclude that the pro-Israel lobby is the sole
culprit behind the witch hunt directed against scholars who criticize
Israeli military rule over Palestinians. Consider Norman Finkelstein. If
he had been on the faculty of an Israeli university, rather than DePaul
University, he probably would be an associate professor by now.
I say that because several years ago I came up for tenure at Ben Gurion
University of the Negev under similarly contested circumstances. As in
Finkelstein's case, when I was recommended for tenure the president was
promptly inundated with letters from outsiders seeking to influence the
process. Like Finkelstein's, my sin was criticizing Israel's policies in
the occupied Palestinian territories. All the calls for my dismissal
emanated from America - not from Israel. In one typical letter, the
president of the Zionist Organization of America used ominous threats to
urge the university to fire me. Yet, unlike in the Finkelstein case,
ultimately intimidation failed.
Why, then, have such tactics succeeded in the United States? Why do
Israeli scholars have more academic freedom than their American
counterparts?
The answer is rooted in the fact that many American universities are
being reconstructed as corporations whose major objective is to sell
products, most obviously degrees to students. The corporatization of
academic life means that faculty members are perceived as both producers
and products. They are expected to come up with inventions and patents
that can be sold to corporations, as well as with research funds and
citations that have a pseudomarket value, since they help elevate the
university's ranking. As saleable products, faculty members are valued
according to a corporate calculus rather than an academic one. To put it
bluntly: Finkelstein was considered a liability to the corporation;
therefore he was sacked.
The remaking of universities as corporations has also altered
accountability. Those at the helm have become more accountable to boards
of trustees, shareholders ( i.e., major donors), and customers ( i.e.,
students, parents, and viewers of athletics events) than to the
university's original mission (i.e., seeking truth and educating the
next generation) and the faculty members who carry it out. Consequently
administrators behave like corporate executives and are hardly invested
in intellectual achievements or democratic processes.
In Israel, by contrast, all faculty members are unionized, and their
salaries are determined according to rank and a series of relatively
objective academic criteria. Law and business professors earn the same
as their colleagues in literature and philosophy. That has a major
impact on how we think about faculty members. They are not seen as no
more than products, as Finkelstein seems to have been.
In addition, the corporate ethos that dominates American campuses has
helped destroy mechanisms of faculty governance and has led to the
ascendancy of administrative rule. I do not want to unduly romanticize
Israeli universities, but it is worth pointing out that faculty members
at my institution elect department chairs, deans, and our provost. The
fact that deans and provosts at American universities are beholden to
administrators and donors renders them susceptible to external pressure.
I doubt that Charles S. Suchar, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences at DePaul University, would have refused to support the
decision of the promotion committee on Finkelstein's tenure if he were
primarily accountable to the faculty and the mission of academic
excellence.
The pressures brought to bear on tenure cases in America by the
pro-Israel lobby are only one part of a much more complex story. There
will, after all, always be attempts from outside to suppress unpopular
voices in academe, and there will always be people within higher
education who act as accomplices in efforts to stifle academic freedom.
Neither group, however, would be as likely to succeed if the faculty
governed its own university. And that is precisely where American
academics have failed. It is not enough to expose the pro-Israel lobby.
The menacing tide of corporatization must also be opposed. Academic
freedom can be guaranteed only once the idea of the university is
restored and the structure of universities transformed.
Neve Gordon is a senior lecturer in politics at Ben Gurion University of
the Negev and is currently a visiting professor at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor.