One of the friendlier comments on my Spec piece from last Friday berated this paper’s reporters for failing to delve into Massad’s written material. This isn’t really their job, obviously—even a news analysis piece pegged to Massad’s scholarship would need comment from activists and academics in order to be something other than a veiled airing of grievances. As I mentioned in my article, those activists and academics don’t seem to have much to say about the Massad case. But a glance at this page—which I didn’t even know existed until a commenter linked to it—sure does make you want to lash out at someone. Anyone. Even me:

And why _isn’t_ this stuff—this voluminous evidence of Massad’s hackery—being put out there, in full public view, by the industrious reporters of this venerated university newspaper? Are you listening, Armin Rosen? All we get in articles are a few snippets here and there. It’s the staggering scope of it all—the sheer enormity of it—that makes the case that, if justice prevailed, Massad would now be fighting for a position at a third rate college somewhere and not being considered for a permanent post at one of the greatest universities on Earth.

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This, from an e-mail last week announcing the fall lineup of events for the new Institute for Religion and Culture in Public Life (IRCPL):

“1948-1978: Orientalism from the Standpoint of its Victims

Friday-Saturday, November 7-8, 9am-5pm

Kellogg Center, International Affairs Building, 1501

A conference on the legacy of Edward Said’s work. Lectures by Rashid
Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature,
and Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Middle East and Asian
Languages and Cultures.”

Is Brinkley every going to tell us what is actually going on?  Is Emmitt Truman going to make an encore appearance?

Or, how I almost scooped the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The following is the result of a pretty thorough investigation of the Massad tenure situation. It was written for Bwog about five months ago, and although they had journalistically legitimate reasons for never posting it (specifically the reliability of the anonymous source, who we now know to have been fundamentally correct, if self-importantly conspiratorial), I think it’s still the one of the most thorough assessments of the Massad controversy to appear anywhere. Of course the bit about Brinkley rigging the Ad Hoc committee can’t possibly be confirmed (although, crucially, it is here offered as a single source’s theory, rather than a conclusion on our part). But our suspicion that the tenure decision was Brinkley’s alone turned out to have been totally correct, as did our suspicion that a decision had already been made by November (to give this a bit of context, that bit in the last paragraph is in reference to the hunger strike).

Last week, Bwog made passing mention of one of the juicer conspiracy theories of late: that provost Alan Brinkley put out a mafia-style hit on MELAC firebrand Joseph Massad. An anonymous source explained it thusly: three years ago, Massad was denied tenure and “promoted” to Associate professor–although this was his signal to get out of Morningside, he stayed on until he was next up for tenure. This year, he was endorsed for tenure by his department, but rejected by an ad hoc committee convened by provost Brinkley–the membership of which is know only to Brinkley and the committee members themselves. According to our source, Brinkley rigged the committee specifically to prevent Massad from getting tenure, although this was a forgone conclusion given the school’s decision not to give Massad tenure three years ago.

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