Prof who aims to research ‘Zionism and propaganda’ is denied sabbatical by NY school

Jewish Voice for Peace has put up a petition on behalf of member Harriet Malinowitz, an English professor at Long Island University who is researching Zionist propaganda.

This fast-growing petition tells a sad story about the decline of academic scholarship in the face of Israel criticism-phobia.

In a nutshell: professor Harriet Malinowitz gets support from her department for proposal to take sabbatical and write about Zionism and Propaganda. University administration inexplicably denies proposal. Union gets involved, and University accepts sabbatical if professor takes early retirement and “agrees that the deal ‘not be used or introduced as evidence’ in the future.” Evidence for what?

Said professor, Harriet Malinowitz, refuses the offer, and now asks for your help by signing this petition..

Malinowitz lists her specialties as “Lesbian and Gay Issues in College Writing, Propaganda, Rhetoric of Zionism and Palestine, Writing Theory and Pedagogy, Women’s Studies.”

Here is more of the story, and the petition, as told by Bronwyn Jones (a prof with excellent street cred), who cites the struggles of other writers, including Norman Finkelstein, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Joseph Massad, Jimmy Carter and (posthumously) Rachel Corrie. Jones’s introduction, excerpted:

My colleague, Professor of English Harriet Malinowitz, has been denied a sabbatical at Long Island University-Brooklyn for her research on Zionism and Propaganda—and the university administration, overriding faculty recommendations, refuses to state a reason.

Sabbaticals are rarely denied, and colleagues in her own department with much sparser publication records have been granted sabbaticals (and even tenure), strongly suggesting that her proposal received discriminatory treatment. Their motives appeared even more suspect when, after the union took it on, they offered to give her the sabbatical after all—but only on the condition that she take early retirement immediately afterward and agree that the deal “not be used or introduced as evidence” in the future. She refused this offer.

This appears to be just the latest attack on academic freedom for scholars who challenge conventional wisdom and raise thorny questions about Israel and Palestine. It also seems to be the latest attempt by a struggling, tuition-driven private institution to put intellectual values on the back burner while it tries to build up its donor base.

Prof. Malinowitz’s sabbatical proposal was approved by her department personnel committee and co-chairs, but Dean David Cohen and Vice President for Academic Affairs Jeffrey Kane violated the union’s Collective Bargaining Agreement by sending a negative recommendation to the Board of Trustees without giving Prof. Malinowitz a chance to respond. And despite repeated requests for clarification, and letters of protest at the lack of transparency and fairness from other faculty, VP Kane still won’t disclose the rationale for his decision.

We need to let LIU President Kimberly Cline and the rest of the LIU administration know that this raises serious questions about LIU’s academic freedom and integrity….

In the past, Harriet has spoken out on these issues as well, possibly adding retribution to the administration’s motives. As long as they reject transparency and refuse to give any reason at all for denying the sabbatical, one can only speculate about what those reasons are; assembling the known facts may best suggest that which otherwise remains shrouded in secrecy.

It’s time LIU, along with many other contemporary institutions, became accountable to genuine educational values rather than just the bottom line—just as it’s time for scholars who write critically of Zionism to stop having their work speciously attacked and suppressed, whatever donors, corporate Board members, and politically motivated “stakeholders” might think. There has been a litany of such cases; assaults on free inquiry and expression about Zionism have embattled writers from political scientist Norman Finkelstein, anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad to President Jimmy Carter and (posthumously) the activist Rachel Corrie.

We ask LIU President Cline to use her power as President to reverse the sabbatical decision and grant Harriet Malinowitz the time to write that every serious scholar who devotes much of her time to teaching needs. Beyond that, we ask President Cline to make LIU fully transparent about the research it does, and doesn’t, support—which is especially crucial when its decisions fly in the face of faculty recommendations. LIU’s mission statement claims that “the Campus serves as a conservator of knowledge, a source and promulgator of new knowledge, and a resource for the community it serves.” If this claim is to be publicly recognized as legitimate, LIU needs to be accountable to the imperatives of academic freedom and open debate about all sorts of issues—whether they are popular, or palatable to the administration, or not. The suppression of controversial scholarship anywhere is a threat to free speech, the generation of knowledge, and open discussion everywhere.

I’d add that it’s pointless to talk about such outrageous cases without addressing the issue of donor pressure, which Jones refers to. Remember that when Steve Walt published The Israel Lobby paper in the London Review of Books, the first thing neocons did was to campaign for Robert Belfer to drop his sponsorship of Walt’s chair at the Kennedy School. Belfer was also on the board of the American Jewish Committee. Belfer refused to bow to the assault. But Walt and Belfer are the exceptions. And this case is another example of how Zionism has dumbed down vaunted Jewish intelligence.