But gender differentiation is practiced in the United States too, and sometimes there are arguments for its utility, even for its justice. For instance, I hear rumors that some degree of same-sex education is efficacious, like in math classes where girls can supposedly have different and maybe better forms of solidarity or competition without boys, and of course in phys. ed. where gender segregation seems to be legitimated by the axiom that female bodies differ physically from male bodies. (Perhaps it’s harder to legitimate gender segregation in other courses because the corresponding axiom, that male minds differ from female minds, is so much more problematic.) And there have long been arguments for women-only feminist spaces – the controversy over excluding transsexual people from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival comes to mind.

Oddly enough, a glance at a couple of western feminist critiques of Saudi Arabia suggests that western observers are irked as much by their personal subjection to local custom as by the restrictions on local women:

“I was also as a single woman accustomed to the freedom of New York City, where I can move about unfettered by gender restrictions, even feeling safe on the city’s subway late at night. In Saudi Arabia I would lose all that and I didn’t know how my internal navigation would cope.

Taking the Jeddah airport bus from the plane to the terminal, I observed that some women did not have veils or even scarves, and I decided to remain bareheaded. By the time we reached the baggage claim area, however, my resolved faded as I could no longer see another woman without a head scarf. I reached into my bag and put mine on.” (From Women’s e-News, “Taking the gender apartheid tour in Saudi Arabia.”)

“…The women’s or families’ sections are often run-down, neglected, and, in the case of Starbucks, have no seats,” the U.S. official wrote. “Worse, these firms will bar entrance to Western women who show up without their husbands.” (Quoted in a NOW article.)

It’s odd, isn’t it, that it would be reckoned “worse” to bar Western women than to provide bad seating to Saudi local women? Of course, these critiques do go on to address the specifics of local practices, but I find it disconcerting to see how universalist critiques of foreign gender relations are so closely linked with a personal desire not to be upset or disadvantaged by strange, seemingly backward foreign customs. (NOW compares it to slavery.)

That said, a quick look at the Human Rights Watch report suggests that many Saudi women are in fact radically against the current system. “You’re faced with being humiliated daily. We really do not have an identity,” a female Saudi professor said. So then it becomes a question not only of how to relate politically and anthropologically to a foreign culture, but of which group in that culture one wishes to side with.

There is also a growing feeling that the status of academia in general in Israeli society is in a steep decline. However, some say that the academic world itself is part of the problem, because it is elitist and cut off from society, and has therefore made itself irrelevant… Faculty from various fields say the high social status that once adhered to the title of professor has been eroded…

The same debates are certainly heard in the U.S., where there’s a lot of anxiety about American anti-intellectualism, but also a horde of critiques of academic elitism. It seems that Israel also converges with U.S. critical discourses on postmodernism:

One of the main arguments of the veteran professors is that the decline of the humanities is partly due to a post-modernist trend “that has given a bad name to the humanities, because they have eschewed their task of presenting a clear scale of values,” one critic of the trend says.

The most sociologically interesting dimension of the strike is that apparently it’s led by senior professors, who didn’t bother to consult their junior colleagues before starting their protest. Last week, apparently, the scientific researchers joined them in their strike. They say, however, that they don’t feel that the public is paying any attention to them; apparently Israeli administrators have taken no definite action so far, and have announced no intention of doing so. They may be hoping that pressure on the faculty will increase as the strike lasts longer.

Apparently, also, a lecturer was suspended from his job after demanding that a student leave class. The student was wearing an army uniform and carrying a gun, and the teacher was “an Arab lecturer who does not identify with the Israeli army and who does not share in the naturalness with which many of us accept those who carry arms among us,” according to a letter written in his support by his colleagues. Obviously this has a lot to do with local Israeli politics; but it also raises, again, the question of how teachers can express their ethics or politics in the classroom, when they clash strongly with their students’ views, or with their students’ very identities. And to investigate this, we would have to return to the question raised by the first article: what is happening to professorial identity today?