I ordered my copy of Rashid Khalidi’s new book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, from Amazon.com. At Amazon, the image of the book cover features the obligatory photo of Israel’s separation barrier (or “apartheid wall” as its critics call it), and an endorsment that goes like this:

“Rashid Khalidi’s extraordinary book is enormously relevant for our times, especially in light of America’s growing involvement in the Middle East.”
JOSEPH STIGLITZ, winner of the Nobel Prize

I made a mental note about the advance praise on the cover of the book, something that’s not very usual.

When the book arrived, my eye immediately jumped: the Stiglitz endorsement is missing. I got curious, so I ran his words through Google, and they turn out to be praise for Khalidi’s previous book, Resurrecting Empire. In fact, that exact endorsement figures front-and-center on the paperback cover of Resurrecting Empire.

As far as I can tell, Stiglitz hasn’t praised Khalidi’s latest book at all. So it’s a good thing the publisher, Beacon Press, has dropped him from the published version of the cover. It’s not a good thing that at all the major points of sale on the Internet, buyers will think that Nobelist Stiglitz has endorsed Khalidi’s Iron Cage. Beacon Press should act now to recall the misleading cover image it previously disseminated to Amazon and others. Khalidi should insist on it.

Last year, Rashid Khalidi came to Princeton to deliver a job talk. His aim: to win the newly-established Robert H. Niehaus ’77 Professorship of Near Eastern Studies and Religion. He didn’t get it. Last month, Princeton announced the appointment of Muhammad Qasim Zaman, a McGill-schooled specialist on Islam from Brown University.

But Khalidi, it turns out, has friends in Princeton’s history department, and they began to push for his appointment there. People tell me that Jeremy Adelman, chair of the department, bulldozed Khalidi through the history faculty (against opposition), and a favorable recommendation has gone up to the so-called Committee of Three (the Faculty Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements). Its recommendation will go to the university president.

An odor arises from this procedure, on this account: the department didn’t conduct a search. In very rare cases, involving candidates of immense distinction, university departments do recruit without searches. But Khalidi doesn’t have such standing, and the proof has already been provided by Princeton itself, which passed him over for the Niehaus Chair.

So Khalidi’s admirers in Princeton are already dropping the university to the abject level of Columbia, which brought him to the Edward Said Chair without a search. One suspects that these admirers know that if a search were conducted, Khalidi might not make the cut, and so they’ve chosen the back-door route.

Until now, I’ve always regarded Princeton as a more demanding setting than Columbia (and I’m an alumnus of both). Columbia has a culture of cutting corners and under-the-table dealing, in which friend recruits friend. This is why it exploded in scandal less than two years ago. Princeton’s history department now seems to have been infected with the same virus. I urge the Committee of Three at Princeton to hold the line against this latest assault on the university’s integrity. The way is simple: it should send Khalidi’s file back, and insist on a publicly-announced search for the position.

In my last Sandstorm column, I criticized Rashid Khalidi’s fact-free assertion that the universities are dominated by conservatives. In an interview, he had focused on schools of law and international affairs. But in a remarkable speech last spring, he issued a blanket indictment of many more academic fields.

It happened at a Columbia rally in support of professors accused by students of political harassment. Khalidi insisted the profs were victims of a concerted campaign run from outside the university, and added this:

It’s a campaign that’s based on an utterly spurious argument that the universities are strongholds of radical and liberal ideas. Would that they were strongholds of radical and liberal ideas. (Applause.) Would that the medical schools and the pharmaceutical schools were challenging the stranglehold of industrial medicine, of the industrial pharmaceutical industry. (Applause.) Would that agriculture schools or business schools were challenging the reigning orthodoxies. Would that economics departments, would that engineering schools, would that schools of international affairs were vigorously challenging the reigning orthodoxies in their fields. Would I could go on and on and on.

(You can read and listen to this speech at the link.)

It’s an astonishing statement. People in these branches of the academy challenge the reigning orthodoxies all the time when they have the evidence to do it. After all, they can be proven wrong. Reputations are impaired when a medical treatment or drug fails a test, a structure collapses, a crop disappoints, a business model loses money, or an economic policy kills growth. Yet each innovation in these areas is the result of people boldly deciding to “challenge the reigning orthodoxies in their fields.”

During my twenty-five years as a university faculty member, I always felt a certain humility in the presence of these risk-takers. In Middle Eastern studies, you get ahead by slavishly mimicking the reigning orthodoxies, which are almost entirely the product of politically-driven fad. So for someone in my retarded field to inveigh against “the stranglehold of industrial medicine,” or deride economics faculty on a campus that’s produced three Nobel Prize laureates in economics over the last decade—well, it’s philistine.

I can’t imagine Edward Said saying something even remotely similar, because he felt a very deep attachment to the idea of the university. “The modern American university seems the last utopian place,” he told an interviewer in 1997, “a liberal ideal that has helped the Middle East, in its manifestations in Cairo and Beirut.” Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor, but he’s no Edward Said: he doesn’t have a scholarly vocation separate from his advocacy. So for him, the rest of the university is damnable, because not all its members subscribe to every last item in his radical political agenda. It’s poor recompense for all that academe has bestowed upon him.