Official Bio
"Campus Watch Editor's Note: Campus Watch has been instrumental in bringing attention to problems with Columbia University's Middle East Studies faculty. We are now pleased to present a new, detailed series of studies on those faculty members. Written exclusively for Campus Watch by Hugh Fitzgerald, noted commentator on the Middle East and Islam, the series provides a detailed look at the "scholarship" behind the recent controversies that have wracked Columbia. We invite you to read Fitzgerald's introductory essay, and the entries in alphabetical order.
A faculty member at Columbia since 1986, Lisa Anderson is described in her biography as "one of this country's most eminent scholars of the Middle East and North Africa." But Anderson is the author of one book, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980, and only an editor, co-editor, or contributor of articles to other books. Most recently, she was one of the four co-editors of The Origins of Arab Nationalism, with Rashid Khalidi, Muhammad Muslim, and Reeva S. Simon.
Administration is apparently her forte and primary interest: setting up conferences, fund-raising, putting out fires, and the other hectic vagaries of modern university life, seems to agree with her. She currently serves as the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs; she has been president of the Middle East Studies Association. In addition, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Council on Ethics, the Social Science Research Council, and is co-chair of Human Rights/Middle East.
Her most recent achievement was in raising money, almost entirely from Arab sources for an "Edward Said Chair in Middle Eastern Studies." Though Edward Said was neither a scholar or teacher of either Islam, or of the Middle East, but a celebrated polemicist, Anderson found nothing peculiar in naming this chair after him—rather as if one had decided to create the "Noam Chomsky Chair in American Political Theory." Indeed, she managed to raise $4 million, and was instrumental in keeping the sources of that funding secret for as long as possible. Much effort had to be expended to persuade Columbia to reveal those sources, though New York State Law requires such information to be reported when it involves foreign funds.
And finding the perfect occupant for the chair, she held it for him until such time as he, Rashid Khalidi, could extricate himself from the University of Chicago, and arrive to sit on it himself. She gushed that she "can't "honestly think of a better person to recruit to Columbia." In the whole wide world of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, to bring to the university that once boasted Joseph Schacht, and Arthur Jeffery, and Richard Gottheil, she could not "honestly think of a better person.""