As one commenter pointed out, this week's New York Magazine Daily Intelligencer section features a short piece that references an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that speculates that Joseph Massad might be up for a second round of tenure review. Both the New York piece and the Chronicle piece have no on-the-record information to indicate such, though Columbia PR director cryptically explained that "it is consistent with our review process that cases sometimes extend beyond a single academic year or committee." In addition, the Chronicle piece quotes Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, as saying "that while it is 'highly unusual' for a university to establish a second ad hoc review committee, 'it seems to me a good thing in this case, if questions have been raised about the decision making.'"

According to the Chronicle article -- which is only able to be read with a subscription but was luckily forwarded to Bwog in full by tipster David Judd -- "[Alan Brinkley's] decision [to deny Massad tenure] followed what professors describe as a narrow [3-2] vote in favor of Mr. Massad by an ad hoc committee of five scholars who judged his tenure file. When the provost subsequently rejected the bid, professors say, the decision prompted an angry letter from senior faculty members at Columbia who support Mr. Massad. They apparently have persuaded the provost to reconsider the case and give the professor the unusual opportunity of a second chance at tenure at Columbia."

Despite previous statements to the contrary, the Academic Affairs Committee has invited the entirety of Columbia College to tonight's Academic Awards Ceremony. The ceremony will honor Lionel Trilling and Mark van Doren Award winners, Joseph Massad and Andrew Nathan, respectively.

The reception starts tonight in Low at 6 PM with the ceremony to follow. We're assuming the earlier proclamation of a "business-smart" dress code still applies.

For those of you stuck in Butler (or those who only have "casual-smart" or "business-mildly intelligent" wardrobes), check back for Bwog's coverage of the event.

The winners of the 2008 Lionel Trilling and Mark van Doren Awards have been announced. As Bwog reported earlier, Associate Professor Joseph Massad has been awarded the former, while Andrew Nathan, Political Science Department Chairman, has been awarded the latter for his "humanity, devotion to truth, and and inspiring leadership," according to the press release.

The ceremony will be held on Wednesday, May 7th in Low. As all political science undergrads received an email with instructions to RSVP, Bwog believes the event is probably open to the rest of the student body as well. Interested parties can RSVP to academicawards@gmail.com.

According to Ian Corey-Boulet, the co-chair of the CC Academic Awards Committee, "For space reasons, the event is open to faculty from the political science and MEALAC departments (as well as all department chairs), various members of the University administration, political science and MEALAC majors, and the winners' friends and family." Also, if you fall into any of these categories and plan on attending the ceremony, according to the AAC press release, the dress code is "business-smart."

Today Associate Professor Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs has been awarded the 2008 Lionel Trilling Award, according an email sent to the MEALAC listserv. The award is given each year to honor the book authored by a Columbia faculty member "that is deemed to best exhibit the standards of intellect and scholarship found in Lionel Trilling's work," the prize's website says.

Desiring Arabs is an intellectual history of the last 200 years of the Arabic world that focuses on Arab sexuality and Western interpretations of Arab sexuality. Massad—as well as the book itself—has been the at the center of much heated Middle Eastern controversy over the last four years. Massad was also one of the subjects criticized by the David Project-funded documentary Columbia Unbecoming.

Winners of the Trilling Award—as well as the Mark Van Doren Award—are selected by the Columbia College Student Council and the Academic Awards Committee. A Bwog tipster with a friend involved in the latter explains that AACers have been told to remain mum, so other than the fluke MEALAC email, there have been no announcements about the winner.

- JNW

Of 70 Columbia professors, expressed to the New York Sun! Some of them rather prominent! A faculty action committee statement of concern accuses PrezBo of failing "to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom." Particularly rankling to signatories--which include such luminaries as Akeel Bilgrami, Bruce Robbins, Mahmood Mamdani, Gayatri Spivak, Eric Foner, and former Provost Jonathan Cole, as well as predictable lightning rods like Nadia Abu al-Haj and Nick DeGenova--is the impact of outside groups on tenure and other "academic freedom" issues. The New York Sun suggests (albeit very implicitly) that this could be the early stages of the kind of faculty ouster that cost Lawrence Summers his job; meanwhile, the professors plan on presenting their grievances tomorrow at a meeting of the Arts and Sciences faculty.

Conspiracy theorists will note a number of carefully worded references to recent events in the professors' statement: "Tenure, "the hosting of controversial speakers," "villifying members of faculty," "partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East"...this thing could be read as the culmination of faculty discontent with Low Library's handling of the MEALAC controversy, the al-Haj tenure debate, the Ahmadinejad introduction, and Islamofascism awareness week.

But one conspiracy theorist has gone a step further: according to the mysterious "Emmett Trueman," who has been flooding publicaton inboxes with "inside information" about this year's tenure battles, an ad hoc committee has recommended that Professor Joseph Massad be denied tenure (which New Republic resident codger Marty Peretz called a few weeks ago), and the letter is an attempt by the MEALAC faculty to persuade the administration to overturn the recommendation. Also worth noting: at a panel tonight lauding Massad's Desiring Arabs, hosted by the Heyman Institute, the professor noted that he was "personally grateful for this intervention."

According to The Spine, a blog written by New Republic editor Marty Perez, Joseph Massad has been denied tenure. There's no other source on the story so far and no official word on the reasons behind the decision, but Gil Ronen of Israel National news claimed yesterday that the decision to make Nadia El-Haj a tenured professor was part of an internal deal in which Massad's tenure would be turned down.

On Friday, lecture hopper extraordinaire Josh Mathew took the walk down to St. Mary's Episcopal church in Harlem to hear two scholars duke it out on the question of Israel and Palestine.

After making my way past the numerous activists handing out fliers condemning the war in Iraq and the U.S.'s conceivable Iranian escapades, I grabbed a seat in one of the old wooden pews of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th in Harlem.

After recognizing a few familiar faces amongst this unusual congregation, I saw sitting up at the altar Dr. Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, and his cospeaker Dr. Tanya Reinhart, Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and the University of Utrecht.

Massad and Reinhart's co-lecture "Channeling Israeli Apartheid" capped off Israel Apartheid Week's series of lectures, which focused on topics like divestment, marriage laws, and the media.

Although Massad's lecture began with an acknowledgment of Israel's "substantive and psychological" desire for peace, he soon added that Israel has simply requested that the world recognize its "right to be a racist state." Followed by a round of laughter, the phrase became the central rhetorical device of Massad's speech, serving as the semi-sarcastic tagline to many of his sentences. Massad criticized all existing solutions proposed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as having accepted Israel's racist nature, racist laws, and system of apartheid. For example, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, the late President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat recognized Israel's "need to be a racist," and following Arafat's death, his successor Mahmoud Abbas has also been persuaded to recognize this "right to be racist." In his conclusion, Massad, rejecting the proposed two-state plan, and recommended a "decolonized, binational state" as the only acceptable solution.