Alumni hope to deny tenure for scholar at Barnard College

Alumni of Barnard College in New York are circulating an online petition asking that tenure for Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, be denied because of a perceived anti-Semitic bias in her research, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The criticism centers around El-Haj’s recent book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which argues in part that Israeli archaeologists have themselves produced biased research that bolsters their country’s “origin myth.” The petition has garnered more than 1,000 signatures.