Controversy broke out after Prof. William Robinson of the University of California-Santa Barbara recently forwarded an e-mail, with brief, tendentious commentary, to his sociology class entitled “Parallel Images of Nazis and Israelis.” Alan Levine, a recent UCSB graduate, shows how the content of the e-mail — the presentation of 40 pictures without description or explication — reflects poorly on Robinson’s performance as a professional scholar.

For example, Robinson paired a picture of Jews waiting in line during the Holocaust with one of Palestinians in a line today, not bothering to say that Jews waited in line for gas chambers whereas Palestinians wait at security checkpoints. Levine rightly concludes:

Either Professor Robinson was intellectually dishonest — prioritizing his agenda over truth — or he was too lazy to verify facts. That is the epitome of poor scholarship, regardless of the subject matter. But Robinson has tenure and therefore his performance is not an issue. As long as he does not break rules, he can perform as poorly as he wants. That’s the lesson of his case. It is embarrassing that a UC professor can engage in such low level demagoguery. An undergraduate would have been failed for this work, but tenured professors get away with it.