Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

An extraordinary conference will take place at the University of Chicago on October 12th called In Defense of Academic Freedom. Several distinguished academics and public intellectuals will examine the threats to academic freedom posed by recent controversial tenure decisions and other campus developments which have stifled the free exchange of ideas. The conference will explore these issues in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict since some of the most contentious issues revolve around it. The impetus for this certainly began with Norman Finkelstein’s ouster from DePaul University. But it also includes the furor generated by Walt-Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and cancellation of their speaking engagements under real or perceived pressure from Jewish groups and leaders; the recent cancellation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s scheduled talk at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis due to his alleged anti-Israel stance; and the campaign to deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure at Barnard College.

Among the speakers will be: Tariq Ali, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt and Neve Gordon. It is sponsored by the DePaul Committee on Academic Freedom and Verso Books. The program begins at 2PM in the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

tags academic-freedom, campus-politics, in-defense-of-academic-freedom-conference, norman-finkelstein-tenure-dispute, tenure-disputes, walt-mearsheimer-controversy-over-the-israel-lobby

I don’t know what’s going on in Chicago these days. I’ve always thought of it as a progressive, tolerant and diverse place by and large. But something’s gotten into Chicago folk over the past few months…First DePaul University unceremoniously dumped Norman Finkelstein for reasons that even the school’s administration’s haven’t been able to articulate convincingly to anyone but Alan Dershowitz.

Then the Chicago Global Affairs Council, after inviting Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to speak about their new book on the Israel Lobby, canceled the invitation unless they agreed to debate Abe Foxman. It seems that some Council members (no doubt also supporters of AIPAC) decided Walt and Mearsheimer were far too incendiary to speak without some rejoinder from the pro-Israel community. The two original speakers quite rightly balked at being so singled out and thus they were also unceremoniously booted.

Hearing this, some Jewish Chicagoans scoured the Jewish community for a facility (synagogue of community center) that would house a Walt-Mearsheimer event. Guess what, none could be found.

And returning to DePaul, not content to be made a laughingstock of the academic world in their treatment of Finkelstein DURING the tenure process, they’ve practically stuck their asses in the air and asked the world to kick them with their latest round of campus buffoonery. It seems Norman Finkelstein is such a danger to the faculty, administrators and students of DePaul that the classes he was to teach during his final year there have all been canceled. His office has been shuttered and he has been denied another office. Even his possessions in his old office have not yet been released to him. This is the equivalent of a corporation’s calling security guards to escort a disgraced ex-employee out of the building. Except in that case they usually give the poor shlub a cardboard box with his possessions in them:

On Friday, August 24th…DePaul’s University…decided to cancel Professor Norman G. Finkelstein’s classes for the autumn quarter.

…What is the stated reason for the cancellation of Finkelstein’s courses…? Professor Finkelstein, it seems, in the judgment of DePaul’s administration, constitutes a security threat to DePaul faculty and staff. In a previous article, I documented that Finkelstein simply confronted Dean “Chuck” Suchar outside of 990 Fullerton on June 14th after the special LA&S emergency meeting devoted to discussing the procedural and academic freedom violations in the Finkelstein and Larudee cases…Suchar apparently alleged that he felt harassed by Finkelstein, calling for the administration to issue a restraining order against his colleague.

In an irony sure not to escape Dissident Voice readers, Finkelstein is being barred from teaching courses devoted to examining “Freedom and Empowerment” and “Justice and Social Equality”. In addition, Finkelstein is being thrown out of his office and might not even have access to office space this coming academic year at DePaul.

According to what I’ve read, this is behavior that is absolutely unheard of in the usually laid back world of academe. To me, this is like a university administration holding up a big sign saying: “SUE ME, PLEASE, for lots of money!” I don’t know much about faculty employment contracts. But I do know that DePaul has broken so many usual conventions that should Finkelstein wish I bet he could sue them for a great deal of money.

An academic blogger is quoted in Inside Higher Education denouncing DePaul’s decision:

John K. Wilson, on his blog College Freedom, wrote: “If anyone doubted whether DePaul was violating Finkelstein’s rights, that doubt must end with this decision…. Even if DePaul pays off Finkelstein, it is violating his academic freedom (and the freedom of its students) by refusing to let him teach and effectively silencing his voice in its classrooms.”

Finkelstein, not the sort to take any insult lying down, has has let the Administration know he will give as good as he gets:

DePaul University has canceled all of Norman G. Finkelstein’s courses, taken away his office, and put him on administrative leave for his final year, but the controversial political scientist said that will not stop him from coming back to teach this fall. If necessary, he said, he will go to jail.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Finkelstein told The Chronicle that he intends “to show up on the first day of the academic year to teach my classes (students are currently searching for an alternative venue) and to use my regular office in the political-science department. If the university attempts to impede my movements, I intend to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and go to jail. If incarcerated, I intend to go on a protracted hunger strike until DePaul comes to its senses.”

“It is regrettable,” Mr. Finkelstein continued, “that I have been driven to such drastic actions to defend basic principles of academic freedom and my contractual rights, upon which DePaul has been riding roughshod for so long.”

I don’t think the Vincentians at DePaul bargained for what a tough Jew Norman Finkelstein would turn out to be. And I think they better reconsider their idiocy before it bites them big time. How much more horrible publicity like this can they take? Apparently, they’ve hired the celebrities’ favorite crisis PR flack Howard Rubenstein to guide them through this gauntlet of bad press of their own making. But I don’t even think Rubenstein can make lemonade out of the lemons he’s been given by DePaul.

The American Association of University Professors as well has taken strong exception to DePaul’s treatment of Finkelstein:

Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors, said…that the fact that DePaul is continuing to pay Finkelstein does not end questions about the university’s “extraordinary” actions. Knight noted that Finkelstein’s classroom conduct has never been questioned, and said that removing a professor from teaching in such a case is only justified by real fears about a danger the professor could pose. “That’s a terrible commentary to be making on an individual,” Knight said, and should require real evidence and faculty input.

Unless there has been a real hearing and the opportunity for due process, Knight said, the move is not a matter of placing someone on leave, but a “summary dismissal…”

Given all of these nightmares in Chicago, the DePaul Academic Freedom Committee and other local students and peace activists have decided to plan a mass public forum on academic freedom scheduled for the University of Chicago campus on October 12th. The conference’s keynote speakers are Noam Chomsky (MIT), John Mearsheimer (Univ. of Chicago), Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Neve Gordon (Ben-Gurion University, Israel), and Tariq Ali (New Left Review). They ought to invite Dean Suchar and President Holtschneider to be the panel respondents. Maybe they’d learn something.

tags aaup, academic-freedom, depaul-suspends-norman-finkelstein-cancels-courses, tenure-battle

June 8th was a black day for academic freedom and a black day for free and open debate about issues of concern to the Jewish community like the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a banner day for the intellectual thought police represented by Alan Dershowitz who has triumphed with an intense, fiercely fought and ugly smear campaign entirely devoid of intellectual content. Instead the campaign was fought on overheated rhetoric and twisted arguments. And Dershowitz has won. DePaul has rid itself of the meddlesome professor by denying him tenure.

This statement from DePaul’s president beggars belief:

“Over the past several months, there has been considerable outside interest and public debate concerning this decision,” Rev. Dennis Holtschneider said. “This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.”

Some will consider this decision in the context of academic freedom. In fact, academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul. It is guaranteed both as an integral part of the University’s scholarly and religious heritage, and as an essential condition of effective inquiry and instruction. On a daily basis, DePaul faculty and students explore the most important ideas of our time, including difficult and contentious issues, and they do so in ways that adhere to professional standards of academia and respect the dignity and worth of each individual.

Dershowitz and the pro-Israel hatchet-folk didn’t have any impact on the internal campus debate surrounding tenure? Right.

I want to make clear that while I don’t agree with Finkelstein’s anti-Zionist position, I think he has much to say in his critique of the Jewish community’s obsession with the Holocaust as the supposedly defining element of Jewish identity. And as eminent a historian as Raul Hilberg–dean of Holocaust historians, in fact–agrees with me. I urge anyone who cares about intellectual fairness and justice in this case to read the DemocracyNow interview with Hilberg and Avi Shlaim, an Oxford historian. They are not always in full agreement with Finkelstein. They take him to task for the incendiary nature of some of his discourse. But what they say in his support is very strong and very important:

I am impressed by the analytical abilities of Finkelstein. He is, when all is said and done, a highly trained political scientist who was given a PhD degree by a highly prestigious university. This should not be overlooked…

However, leaving aside the question of style — and here, I agree that it’s not my style either — the substance of the matter is most important here, particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not obligated to pay that money. That takes a great amount of courage in and of itself. So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.

This smug statement by Dershowitz makes me sick:

“It was the right decision, proving that DePaul University is indeed a first-rate university, not as Finkelstein characterized it, ‘a third-rate university.’ Based on objective standards of scholarship, this should not have even been a close case.”

Harvard should be ashamed that it gives academic cover to such a mendacious, overblown bully.

DePaul has made a very serious mistake. It has set a very bad precedent for American universities. Given the worldwide recognition that Finkelstein’s academic books and articles have received it is ludicrous to say he has not met the threshold for publishing. And if you want to argue that he’s not a nice person or collegial enough or that he has a sharp tongue–well, get in line with the tens of thousands of other tenured professors who share those qualities.

I an incredulous that DePaul would essentially deny a professor tenure claiming (though of course this is a smokescreen reason) that Finkelstein’s rhetoric toward his academic peers was overheated. Here’s what Peter Kirstein–who has read the dean’s memo denying tenure–has to say:

The university’s decision to deny tenure is basically a repetition of the Suchar Memorandum’s charge of inappropriate tone, collegiality and manners. I think this case will continue to be examined by national organisations that exist to protect professors from such arbitrary and egregious display of contempt for controversial research that may offend some but on its merits represent significant and valuable scholarship.

UPDATE: In the president’s letter to Finkelstein (pdf file) he quotes this lame passage from the faculty tenure committee which voted 4-3 against granting him a promotion:

…Some may interpret parts of his scholarship as “deliberately hurtful” as well as provocative more for inflammatory effect than to carefully critique or challenge accepted assumptions. Criticism has been expressed for his inflammatory style and personal attacks in his writings and intellectual debates. These concerns are relevant in the recognition that an academic’s reputation is intrinsically tied to the institution of which he or she is affiliated. It was questioned by some whether Dr. Finkelstein effectively contributes to the public discourse on sensitive societal issues.

Then the president continues:

…Reviewers at all levels…commented upon your ad hominem attacks on scholars with whom you disagree…Your unprofessional attacks divert conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration…Your work not only shifts toward advocacy and away from scholarship, but also fails to meet the most basic standards governing scholarly discourse within the academic community.

…Nor can I conclude that your scholarship honors our University’s commitment to creating an environment in which all persons engaged in research and learning exercise academic freedom and respect it in others.

Can you imagine this academic jackanape has the chutzpah to accuse Finkelstein of not respecting “academic freedom??” And since when do college faculty NOT engage in ad hominem attacks or even savage debate about subjects on which they are passionate? This is beyond lame.

Kirstein also reports that another DePaul professor who prominently supported Finkelstein was denied tenure. This makes a laughingstock of the DePaul president’s statement above.

I am glad that Finkelstein has the right attitude toward this travesty of academic justice and his persecutors:

“As it happens, I was just this past week teaching about Paul Robeson in my political science class. When Robeson was crucified for his beliefs, he said, ‘I will not retreat one-thousandth part of one inch.’ That’s what I say to the thugs and hoodlums who are trying to silence me. They don’t want to talk about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. So they make Norman Finkelstein the issue.”

No doubt, Finkelstein has enough fame that he will publish and earn a living from his books and the lecture circuit and not need an academic appointment. But should he wish to return, one has to wonder what university would hire him and be willing to risk the “hit” it would take from Dershowitz and his academic Brownshirts. There would be a massive campaign to enlist alumni to cancel donations much like Daniel Pipes’ blackmail at Brandeis recently. It would get ugly. What faculty department or university president is willing to take on such a burden? DePaul didn’t.

The Inside Higher Education has one of the better articles on the subject.

tags academic-freedom, ad-hominem-attacks, dershowitz-smear-campaign, Holtschneider-DePaul-President-denies-norman-finkelstei, tenure

Referring in a Jewish Advocate interview to recent Israel-related controversies at Brandeis University, Mort Klein, Zionist Organization of America president, castigated the school:

…Brandeis has turned its back on its Jewish supporters and has alienated past donors, like himself: “The issue is not being pro-Israel, but they’re bringing and affiliating with people who are anti-Israel,” said Klein. “It’s more imperative on Brandeis to be careful who they hire, honor and affiliate with because they have more credibility as a Jewish-oriented institution.”

He was referring respectively to Khalil Shikaki, Tony Kushner and Jimmy Carter. Mort Klein was a past donor to Brandeis? As a college fundraiser I’m used to blowhards like this boasting of how much money they USED TO GIVE to make a point about how disenchanted they are about one thing or another. Invariably, if you check the record they once gave a $25 gift somewhere along about 1972. So much for their former generosity to the institution under discussion.

Mort would like Yehuda Reinharz to appoint a Committee of Academic Purity before whom every faculty candidate would have to appear. There they would pledge allegiance to the State of Israel and Zionism. Anyone who didn’t feel they could do so would, of course, be out of a job. That’s Jewish academic freedom Klein-style.

tags academic-freedom, brandeis-university-israel-debate, jewish-advocate, mort-klein-zionist-organization-of-america

M.J. Rosenberg just gave me a head’s up about Yale’s withdrawal of a faculty appointment to Juan Cole after a concerted campaign against him from Yale Jewish donors and other Jewish neocons. Both Jewish Week and The Nation report that Cole had been approved by several faculty committees before pro-Israel forces managed to muster a a concerted effort to stop him. Philip Weiss writing in The Nation says:

The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that monitors scholars’ statements about the Middle East, was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a “penetrating mind,” and suggesting that Yale was “in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for the attention” Cole would generate. Alex Joffe, then the director of Campus Watch, told me Cole “has a conspiratorial bent…he tends to see the Mossad and the Likud under his bed.” For its part, the Yale Daily News twice featured attacks on Cole by former Bush Administration aide Michael Rubin, a Yale PhD associated with Campus Watch and the American Enterprise Institute. In an op-ed Rubin wrote, “Early in his career, Cole did serious academic work on the 19th century Middle East…. He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary.”

Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has always been important in Cole’s reading of the Middle East. Naturally, Israel is central to neocons, too. Michael Rubin accused Cole of missing the good news from Iraq and of being anti-Semitic. That charge was soon taken up in the Wall Street Journal and in the New York Sun. “Why would Yale ever want to hire a professor best known for disparaging the participation of prominent American Jews in government?” wrote two Sun co-authors. One of them, according to Scott Johnson, was a student of Alan Dershowitz’s at Harvard [ed. Mitchell Webber, a Yale graduate who is now a law student and a research assistant for Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School,]. The other is Johnson’s daughter, Eliana, then a Yale senior. After that article, Johnson, a Minneapolis lawyer and Dartmouth grad, wrote up the case on his blog, which describes itself as a friend of Israel, and attacked Cole as a “moonbat.”

Alex Joffe denies that a network went after Cole. “There wasn’t any organized opposition. It was a question of people becoming aware of it somehow and each getting in his two cents.” Asked about pot-stirrers, Johnson says, “I think if you look anywhere but Yale, you’d be making a mistake.”

Well, if this isn’t a network, neither are the professionals who exchange cards at New York parties. Joel Mowbray, a Washington Times columnist who has assailed the consideration of Cole, sent a letter to a dozen Yale donors, many of them Jewish, warning of Cole’s possible appointment. According to the Jewish Week, “Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors…have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.” Still, Johnson’s point is well taken. It must have been Yale insiders who got the news out to Cole’s enemies, as Cole’s appointment passed one after another of several institutional hurdles.

Jewish Week adds on this score:

Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors, whose identity the faculty members did not know, have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.

And while most faculty members contacted for this piece agree that it is highly improbable that outside pressure played a part in the tenure committee’s decision, the letters and the subsequent calls suggest a campaign to discredit Cole.

So here you have the hardline pro-Israel Campus Watch, Scott Johnson, author of Powerline one of the most widely read right-wing blogs, a student of Alan Dershowitz and daughter of a Scott Johnson writing in the New York Sun, Joel Mowbray of the Washington Times, and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute orchestrating a right-wing pro-Israel campaign to deny Cole the job. And this is only what is publicly known because these people were the ones willing to use their names in voicing their opposition. Who knows whether groups like Charles Jacob’s DAVID Project or even Aipac were involved more surreptitiously. And one shouldn’t forget that while the groups can maintain plausible deniability regarding their own involvement that wouldn’t prevent such a behind the scenes effort by individuals affiliated with those groups.

To anyone idiotic enough to deny or besmirch Cole’s stellar academic credentials, Weiss reminds you of them:

Academics…say that Yale was drawn to Cole by top-rank scholarly achievement. He is president of the Middle East Studies Association, speaks Arabic and Persian, and has published several books on Egyptian and Shiite history. “We were impressed with Cole’s scholarly work, and a wide set of letters showed that he is also highly regarded by other scholars in the field,” says political science professor Frances Rosenbluth, a member of the Yale search committee that chose Cole. Zachary Lockman, an NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, “It’s fair to say he is probably among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country.” Joshua Landis, a professor at University of Oklahoma, describes Cole as “top notch.”

“He was the wunderkind of Middle East Studies in the 1980s and 1990s,” Landis says. “He can be strident on his blog, which is one reason it is the premier Middle East blog…. [But] Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: ‘There are no longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside the Beltway?’ Today, Juan Cole is that academic.”

Of course, Cole is on the left, while Lewis is a neoconservative. And it is hard to separate Cole’s scholarly reputation from his Internet fame. Cole started his blog, Informed Comment, a few months after September 11. He quickly became the leading left blogger on terrorism and the Middle East, delivering every day, often by translating from Arabic newspapers.

And to those critics who claim Cole’s publications have been sidetracked by his blogging take a close look at his publication list.

The pro-Israel crowd has attacked the Columbia Middle East Studies program, attempted to deny Rashid Khalidi an appointment to Princeton. And now they’ve sent Juan Cole packing back to the University of Michigan. David Horowitz has tarred Joel Beinin of Stanford as a “campus supporter of terror.” Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby, who just stepped down from his Harvard deanship accepts that his hopes for academic advancement are finished after crossing Aipac. Cole himself has resigned himself to the same fate:

“I knew when I began to speak out [at his blog, Informed Consent] that I wasn’t going to be hired. I knew my academic career was over. I knew that I can be in this place, be a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan for the rest of my life. But I would never be a dean. I would never be a provost. I would never be in the Ivy League. I’m not surprised. I’m not upset. Actually, the bizarre thing is that Juan Cole was considered by Yale in the first place.”

And Cole added this telling addendum in a Jewish Week interview:

Cole, while refusing to comment on the tenure committee’s vote, told The Jewish Week he believes that “the concerted press campaign by neoconservatives against me, which was a form of lobbying the higher administration, was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity.

“The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Washington Times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies, and false charges,” he said. “The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”

But the fact of the matter is that nothing that Cole says about this subject has not already been said two or three times over by scores of Israeli commentators in newspapers like Haaretz, Maariv and Yediot Achronot. The fact of the matter is that the Aipac crowd can’t muzzle dissent in Israel, but sure can (try to) do so here in the States and has rather remarkable record of success on that score.

While Jewish Week’s coverge of the story generally echoed Weiss’ in The Nation, I found this passage for the former publication slightly off kilter:

The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown; several calls to a Yale spokeswoman went unreturned.

But university insiders say that the uncharacteristic rebuff may have been influenced by several factors, central among them the political commentary Cole writes on his blog, “Informed Comment.”

Often favoring a pugilistic tone and consistently criticizing Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Cole has attracted a visibility that has made him a favorite target of several conservative commentators.

I’d maintain that “the reasons behind the rejection” are quite known and recounted clearly above and even in the Jewish Week article itself. Cole was certainly rejected for his views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It’s a goddamn shame. There’s a lesson to be learned here. If you’re a serious, ambitious academic you better watch your step. If you have views that run counter to Aipac’s you’ll have to learn to censor yourself unless you’re willing to draw the wrath of the Dershowitzes, American Enterprise Institutes and Aipacs of this world. As an NYU professor notes–whatever happened to the free exchange of ideas, academic freedom, etc.?

[Zachary] Lockman…finds the process fearful: “Since September 11 there has been a concerted effort by a small but well-funded group of people outside academia to monitor very carefully what all of us are saying, ready to jump on any sign of deviation from what they see as acceptable opinion. It’s an attack on academic freedom, and it’s not very healthy for our society.”

The pro-Israel crowd strikes again. And freewheeling academic discourse is the victim. We’re all the poorer for it.

The Yale faculty should be ashamed of what a group of its members did in this case. How could they allow non-academics in some cases, and non-Yale faculty in others set the tone for what should’ve been a purely intra-faculty decision? Furthermore, their actions have reinforced a hostility between academia and the blog world since academics who blog are increasingly seeing their blogging included in hiring, tenure review and promotion considerations, and often not in a favorable sense. If you teache and make a false step in your blog you’ll be made to pay. And in some cases, merely writing a blog counts against you since more hidebound academics look down their nose at blogs as mere dabbling since it is devoid of conventional oversight like peer review, formal sourcing, and the “rules of evidence” are considerably looser.

As someone who blogs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’ve commended the very few faculty who blog about this specific field (there are only two or three). I once asked Joel Migdal a specialist on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Washington if he knew of professors in his field who blogged and whether he’d ever considered doing so. Joel looked at me a little like I’d come from outer space. The thought and the concept clearly had hardly entered his mind. I can’t say his reaction surprised me based on what I already knew. But now I can’t even say I blame (not the right word) him for his response. How can any faculty member with a progressive perspective on this conflict considering blogging? Unless you blog with a wholly pro-Israel agenda (by which I mean ‘rightist’) you’re likely to be made to pay.

The university community is not the only one impoverished by decisions like this one. The blog world itself is both diminished and assaulted when our blog peers are assaulted within their professional fields for the perfectly reasonable, though controversial things they may write. For those of us who wish to see the influence of blogs on society and intellectual life increase, we should be aghast at what happened to Juan Cole. And we should all be ashamed of what Scott Johnson at Powerline, who after all must have impeccable academic credentials in this field to have assaulted the qualifications of Cole, has done to a major intellectual figure in the field of Mideast studies.

Billmon has a terrific and bilious (in a good way) post that excoriates Yale for its treatment of Cole. It’s quite a tour de force of fabulous invective. Inside Higher Ed also covers this story.

tags academic-freedom, aipac, alan-dershowitz, american-enterprise-institute, informed-comment, jewish-week, M.J.-Rosenberg, michael-rubin, neoconservatives, philip-weiss, pro-israel, the-nation-magazine, yale, yale-withdraws-juan-cole-faculty-appointment

Joel Beinin in the 'pantheon' of campus terrorism with Rachel Corrie and Sami al-Arian (photo: Rick E. Martin/SJ Mercury News) David Horowitz has never been known for his deft touch in the rough and tumble of intellectual and political debate. In other words, the guy's a hatchet man out for the blood of the academic left. Horowitz reserves an especially fond place in his heart for those he deems enemies of Israel. Further, he reserves the choicest of choice places for Jewish critics of Israel. That's why he chose to steal a picture of Stanford Middle East studies professor Joel Beinin ...

I'd like to turn Allan Bloom's neoconservative rant against multi-culturalism, The Closing of the American Mind, on its head in this post about the Bush Administration's war on foreign intellectuals who wish to teach or speak at American universities. Many of us know about Tariq Ramadan's horror story in being denied a visa to teach at Notre Dame University. He and the ACLU are suing the Department of Homeland Security over that one. But recent news stories note that DHS and the State Department are waging a worldwide campaign to rid this country's campuses of foreign intellectuals who may expose our tender young minds to ideas too dangerous for them to absorb. Not to mention those foreign scientists ...