Here is a more or less typical alarum pushing the conventional story: Religious crackpots destroy everything. Archaeologist and ancient historian Eric H. Cline doesn’t quite put it that way, but he comes pretty close in a recent call to academic arms. By his reckoning, the sacred discipline of biblical archeology is being desecrated by “amateur enthusiasts” who lack “proper training and credentials” but whose “fantastic claims” find their way to the public by way of “vanity presses, television, and now the Internet.”
According to Cline, the situation has reached crisis proportions. “Biblical archaeologists are suddenly finding themselves in a position similar to the evolutionary biologists fighting intelligent design—an entire parallel version of their field is being driven by religious belief, not research principles.” No doubt there are a lot of crackpots out there, including religious crackpots. But Professor Cline might consider whether the enemies of genuine scholarship are not closer to his academic home; indeed very much at home in his academic home.
G.M. James George’s Stolen Legacy is a fantastical account of ancient history written decades ago and putatively revealing that Western culture hijacked everything from black Africa. It continues to sell briskly and is assigned in college classes as an example of Afrocentric “discourse from the margins.” Nadia Abu El-Haj of Barnard College recently published Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. She argues that the modern discipline of biblical archeology is not scientific at all. Rather, it is dominated by—you guessed it—Jews, who use “history” to justify the State of Israel. The book won an award from the Middle East Studies Association, despite the fact that reviews by archaeologists found it amateurish and politically driven.
One wonders why Cline is silent about such threats to the integrity of his discipline. Perhaps, like so many in the academy, he assumes that the crackpots on the left are well-meaning idealists who are, perhaps, a little blinded by their zealous commitment to justice. No need to worry when they win academic awards, get tenure, and gain control over their departments. Better to sally forth against the real enemy: the religious zealots with their vanity presses and dangerous websites.
Neuhas' rather gentle tweaking of Cline in fact makes a damning and, to my mind, unanswerable case against the complacency of the academic left. ("Academic left." Isn't such a phrase redundant these days?) Really, there are only two options open to any academic. You can either A) Support the traditional standards of scholarly inquiry, or B) Measure all research against an arbitrary ideological yard stick.
Too many academics today will loudly proclaim they favor standard "A" when at question is something right-of-center, and protest that standard "B" is the only way to go when that something is left-of-center. The Ward Churchill case was a perfect example of this nonsense. For Churchill's academic supporters, proven instances of plagiarism and academic fraud should not have been how his work was evaluated. Because Churchill espoused "indigenist liberation" he shouldn't be constrained by irrelevancies like "facts" and "non-imaginary historical incidence!" "By Jove, there is a left-wing political agenda to advance here! Sure by any scholarly standard his work is a joke, but man, we do like his politics!"
If Cline was really worried about scholarly standards he should be penning articles condemning the shoddy practices rife within the universities, not outside of them. Yes, outside crackpots need to be taken down a peg, but it is very unlikely they could visit any harm upon the academy really. Only that garbage produced within the colleges and universities can really undermine them, like the puerile work of a Churchill or the "if it's not anti-Semitic itself, you can certainly see it from here" work of a Nadia Abu El-Haj.
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