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Wednesday December 13, 2006

U.C. Berkeley pulls plug on Israeli dig; profs wonder who’s next

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

An ancient Israeli archaeological site now has one more relic — the support of U.C. Berkeley.

U.C. last month announced it will sever ties with the Tel Dor site, 25 miles south of Haifa, a dig Berkeley professors and students have participated in for the past 21 years. For professors leading the excavation, that was frustrating enough. But the idea that Berkeley could be a trendsetter — that’s terrifying.

“Tel Dor is out by the beach in the middle of nowhere. It’s a safe place to be — I’ve taken my infant son there twice and I plan to take him back this summer. There’s some violence [in other parts of Israel], as there has been for the past 3,000 years,” said Sarah Stroup, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Washington, who will now take over the task from Berkeley professor Andrew Stewart of recruiting dig volunteers.

“For a university to pull out and say ‘Israel is too dangerous to have our name attached to it’ is rather troubling. And I worry about it as a growing trend.”

In late November, U.C. Berkeley announced the suspension of its affiliation with Tel Dor along with any other “instructional activities including field research courses and study trips” in nations for which the State Department has issued a travel warning. Along with Israel, courses in the Philippines will also be curtailed.

In an explanatory release circulated by the university, it stated the recent move was undertaken “to ensure the safety of students, to minimize the personal and institutional liability and to align campus policy with the policy that the University of California has long maintained for suspending Education Abroad Programs.” The university curtailed its study abroad program in Israel at the outset of the second intifada.

Tel Dor group leaders could only shake their heads at the university’s rationale.

“Ultimately, everyone is just bowing to the dictates of the insurance companies. It’s unfortunate that they’re the ones who should have such an impact on educational programming,” said Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, a professor of archaeology and bible studies at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s University who’s been digging at Tel Dor since 2000.

“It’s not the universities that ultimately decide based on the political situation, it’s insurance costs. And that I don’ t like.”

Rabbi Doug Kahn, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, was also displeased by Berkeley’s move. Along with Tom Dine, the CEO of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Berkeley Hillel Executive Director Adam Weisberg, he’s written a letter to the University of California’s Office of the President.

George Breslauer, U.C. Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost, said his hands were tied and Berkeley had to pull out of Israel and the Philippines in order to adhere to an overall U.C. policy governing the system’s 10 campuses.

“It was only this year in the context of the war breaking out that in July we were alerted to our liability as a university because we had a course for credit in Israel when the university system had a policy against Education Abroad programs” in nations on the State Department warning list, he said.

“We consulted with the university’s lawyers to find out if we were legally exposed. And they said, ‘hugely.’”

And for those wondering why requiring would-be Tel Dor participants to simply sign a waiver wouldn’t solve Berkeley’s problems, Breslauer adds that university lawyers felt waivers would not hold up in court.

It is uncertain how significantly U.C. Berkeley’s move will affect Stroup and Bloch-Smith’s efforts to recruit American volunteers to work the site. Bloch-Smith noted that Berkeley provided the majority of the 70 or more volunteers who labored at Tel Dor in past summers. Student participants often received U.C. Berkeley credit for their efforts, which they could easily transfer to whichever institution they attended.

Students can now receive University of Washington credits, which Stroup says will transfer to “any university I know of” — but are not quite as prestigious as U.C. credits in the eyes of academia.

Fewer volunteers naturally means less work will be done and Tel Dor, an ancient port city, is an extremely large site. Without the assistance of Stewart, her former instructor, Stroup said she’d probably cap her team at around 25 volunteers.

Stroup took U.C. Berkeley at its word for the rationale behind the pullout, but felt it fell into a disturbing pattern of American universities distancing themselves from Israel.

“I’m troubled by what seems to be a growing anxiety in some American universities about contact with Israel. It’s troubling for a variety of reasons and part of the problem is people don’t understand Israel well. One of the best ways to learn more about the Mideast is to travel there,” said Stroup, who received her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2000.

“Tel Dor offers people the opportunity for cultural learning and exchange. And, yes, the archaeology is also fantastic and that’s why we’re there, but [one can receive] a broader cultural understanding … Academically, it’s un-hip to show support for Israel.”

Bloch-Smith said the danger facing volunteers on the largely isolated Tel Dor site was minimal. Once during the recent Lebanon War a siren went off indicating residents had 30 seconds to a minute to take shelter, but that turned out to be a false alarm.

“On the one hand, certainly as a parent, I’m sympathetic. You are putting students in with a certain amount of risk,” she said.

“But I live in Philadelphia. If you sent kids to teach in schools in some neighborhoods here, they’d probably be facing a greater risk.”

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