The Fraught Task of Hiring Pro-Zionist Professors

Have you ever met a Zionist Foucauldian? Some 30 years ago, I half-jokingly asked my fellow graduate students in a social-theory course if they had ever encountered such a creature. No one had. The question amused them.

That query came to mind as I read the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism’s most recent publication. Convened two years ago in response to a torrent of campus incidents occurring in the aftermath of October 7, the committee’s remit was to address “deeper cultural and structural dynamics that enable antisemitism to persist.” In its latest report, the task force documents and justifiably deplores invasions of lecture halls by protesters, such as the one that occurred this past January. The authors frown upon professors who expound on “fraught subjects unrelated to [the] topic of the course” (they reference an astronomy class whose syllabus includes the line “as we watch genocide unfold in Gaza”).

Turning to the question of curriculum, the report observes that “an academic perspective that treats Zionism as legitimate is underrepresented in Columbia’s course offerings, compared to a perspective that treats it as illegitimate.” To recalibrate this imbalance, it proposes “the establishment of new chairs at a senior level in Middle East history, politics, political economy, and policy.”

One surmises that the Columbia administration — along with other American universities shaken down by a dubiously philosemitic government — will implement these recommendations. Perhaps it will do so out of a sincere desire to achieve balance. Or maybe it will cynically recruit pro-Zionist scholars to keep MAGA off its back.

Either way, Columbia is in a colossal bind, mostly of its own devising. It is stuck between the university it is and the university it is being forced to become. The easiest path forward is to distill its ideologically tinged anti-Zionist faculty with — let’s be honest — an equally ideologically tinged counterpart. But can such a faculty even be built in the era of tenure’s imminent collapse? More importantly, should it be built? Should institutions of higher education, and the professors in their employ, replicate the mistakes that got us here in the first place?

The task force’s report is well-reasoned, fair-minded, and nuanced — at least to those who subscribe to liberal premises of academic free speech. Of course, not every professor on an elite liberal-arts faculty like Columbia’s is a liberal. In fact, I would venture that the plurality or even the majority of scholars in these spaces aren’t liberals at all. They would better be described as “far left”; they maintain core philosophical convictions that are explicitly anti-liberal. One can’t make sense of how Jews on campus feel without recognizing this fact.

When pondering the question of academic bias, pundits and pollsters tend to clump liberal and far-left professors together. Surveys often wedge scholars into one of two categories: liberal/Democrat/left or conservative/Republican/right. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech advocacy group, performs this elision when it avers that “for decades college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal).”

But when considering the humanities and social-sciences divisions of universities targeted by the Trump administration, it’s expedient to think in terms of a trinary, not a binary. That trinary is composed of: 1. an obscenely small cohort of conservative scholars, 2. a larger, greying group of liberals, and 3. a significantly larger column of far-left researchers.

The imposition of a blue/red binary on academic spaces obscures this crucial left/liberal distinction. More useful is the scholar of education Nicholas Havy’s framing of professorial positions in an intriguing new study, which uses digital trace data from Twitter, now called X. Havy posits a separate “far left” category as distinct from “liberal” and “moderate.” It accounts, by the way, for 36 percent of professors representing 440 colleges.

Think of it this way: Is it prudent to assume that Martha Nussbaum and Andreas Malm, Pod Save America and Chapo Trap House, Chuck Schumer and Jill Stein are all in ideological alignment? It isn’t, because the divide between liberals and the far left may be every bit as yawning as that between liberals and conservatives. In fact, far-left opinions often overlap in strange ways with conservative ones. Both view the Enlightenment as original sin, an enduring catastrophe of world-historical dimensions. Both are deeply suspicious of liberal democracy, rights-based discourse, political secularism, meritocracy, narratives of human progress, equality, and so forth.

Which brings us to Israel. This one subject has roiled Columbia University since October 7, leading to protests, counterprotests, police raids, congressional inquiries, governmental crackdowns, the resignation of President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, and, eventually, the antisemitism task force. Liberals tend to view the Jewish state as a legitimate, albeit flawed, democracy (though for despairing liberals, Israel is fast undermining that legitimacy). Much of the far left, for its part, has been fixated on Israel since its inception. It views this country as a settler-colonial enterprise, a cause and effect of Western hegemony, genocidal in its origin and telos.

Contemporary far-left scholars, I stress, are scholars. They do exactly what all scholars do: research, peer-review publications, teach. The Foucauldians and postcolonialists in my own subject area are good to think with. I assign them on my syllabi. My students find their work intriguing, if a bit obtuse.

I’m sure that most far-left scholars are ethical professionals and refrain from directly imposing their anti-Zionist critique on students in ways that contravene the task force’s red lines. I am also sure that there are certain questions they don’t ask, texts they don’t assign, assumptions they won’t interrogate. As with scholars of all stripes, their politics surface indirectly.

I’d like to suggest, then, that the problem at hand is about quantity, not quality. The explanation for the ideological imbalances at Columbia and elsewhere goes like this: Leading American liberal-arts faculties (as opposed to business schools, theological seminaries, and STEM divisions) have rostered far-left scholars at a significantly higher clip than their liberal and conservative counterparts.

If correct, this explains why many Jewish students dread perusing next semester’s course offerings. They feel that their faculties are saturated across the board with scholars who, whether they articulate it explicitly or in more subtle ways, are deeply opposed to Israel’s existence. It’s not that these students are averse or unaccustomed to Israel bashing; there is no more politically divided and argumentative family today than the American Jewish family. It’s just that the issue keeps coming up — in every class, every stroll across campus, every trip to the library.

The task force’s fix — “the establishment of new chairs at a senior level” — is understandable, but problematic. Let’s broaden this proposition and imagine that universities in the government’s crosshairs decide to recruit pro-Zionist faculty at all ranks.

Who would staff the selection committees? Not the current group of specialists, obviously. This leaves the decision to professors who are not specialists in the relevant areas and/or administrators. Goodbye expertise! So long, faculty governance!

From where would the new recruits come, given that the graduate schools are even more ideologically captured than the undergraduate divisions? Once on campus, would the freshly onboarded be tarred as “DEI hires”?

Most dauntingly, how do you ideologically expand your faculty in an era of severe fiscal contraction? Given the rapidly dwindling number of tenure lines, how many resources can be devoted to this one issue? Columbia, after all, is a world-class university, not a think tank devoted to Middle Eastern affairs.

There is no easy, fair, noncosmetic, or popular solution to the problem of radical imbalance on American college campuses. But there is plenty of blame. Blame the administrations. One would think that with a resource as priceless as guaranteed lifetime employment, administrators would have rigorously monitored the aggregate of tenure appointments with the goal of ensuring intellectual diversity. As any conservative scholar can attest, that rigor never existed. Blame professors who sat on those tenure committees.

More abstractly, blame generations of scholars who betrayed “theory.” Theory is not an armored personnel carrier rumbling up the hill of your utopia. Even one theoretical tradition leads different thinkers to very different places. Back in graduate school, I read Left- and Right Hegelians. One of the former was Karl Marx, who somehow inspired both atheists and liberation theologians (and Zionists too). I encountered Durkheimians, Weberians, Arendtians, Symbolic Interactionists, and so on, whose politics on Israel (and everything else) were all over the map, completely unpredictable, and in some cases, utterly incomprehensible.

And I miss them greatly, just as I miss scholars whose thought was too idiosyncratic to be contained by politics.

I have never personally met a Zionist Foucauldian. Maybe that is too much to ask. But why do the ubiquitous disciples of the sage whose work has been cited nearly 1.5 million times so consistently arrive at the same very predictable set of political positions? Then again, Foucault himself, I was surprised to recently learn, may have been pro-Israel, at least according to Edward Said. The theorist may be more supple than his epigones, but the epigones are entrenched everywhere. And that is a problem the pure reason of the task force can’t solve.