One of My Favorite Teachers

Sometime I’d like to do a post or two on teachers, but this post is a short reaction in response to a recent article about one of my favorite teachers. (Aside: my favorite teachers all have last names that start with “B”, which I kinda like.) Haaretz has a very long article which is essentially an interview with Gabriel Barkay and his thoughts on matters related to Jerusalem. If you know Barkay, you’ll find many interesting things in this article, including personal details.

The only thing I have time to comment on now is Barkay’s qualifications as a teacher, since his firing (many years ago) is discussed in the article. I have no knowledge of the circumstances of his dismissal beyond what the article says; I will only comment on what I know. And I know that Barkay is one of the best teachers I have ever had. His knowledge is so extensive, and his teaching style so effective that I’ve seriously considered just dropping my own projects and doing what I could to further his work (e.g., in helping him writing a book). I have asked him many times to lead our students on various trips or to give special lectures and the students’ response is always uniformly positive. This was the situation in grad school as well; the smart students knew to take every Barkay class you possibly could. Thus I doubt the reason given for his dismissal. I don’t know what the real reason was, but I do know that it wasn’t because he wasn’t a good teacher.

I would also add to this the sad observation that if he was dismissed because of a failure to publish sufficiently (Barkay disputes this was the reason), it only contributes to the sorry state of universities that have teachers that can’t teach. If you can publish, they make you a teacher and give you tenure. If you can teach well but don’t publish, you get fired.

According to the article, the then-new chair of the department who fired Barkay is Israel Finkelstein. Without speaking to the rest of his work, I would suggest the reading of his most popular work, The Bible Unearthed. Truly laughable scholarship. Laughable if it weren’t so sad that a university professor could make such false and misleading statements and yet be considered by some as a great scholar. I have written two brief posts (here and here) about this book. I wish I had time to write more.