Another letter to DePaul's President

Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 12:11:34 -0400
From: nmclaugh[at]mcmaster.ca
To: president@depaul.edu
Subject: Tenure Decisions

2007.08.18

Dear President Holtschneider:

I am writing to express my serious concerns about the tenure cases of Dr. Norman Finkelstein (an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at DePaul University), and Dr. Mehrene Larudee (an assistant professor in International Studies). With the AAUP, I believe your university should allow a appeal process to take place as I understand you have done so in the past. Without this appeal process, the reputation of your university most surely will suffer greatly in the eyes of a large number of the academic community in North American and globally.

Concerns about the Finkelstein case and its implications for academic freedom extend far beyond the ranks of intellectuals who agree with Dr. Finkelstein‘s political views. I, for one, have very different politics from Dr. Finkelstein - I tend to take just the kind of left social democratic positions Dr. Finkelstein criticizes. I also have a different view on the appropriate role of polemics in academic life. In fact, I recently published an controversial article in the /Canadian Journal of Sociology/ that argued against the dominance of what I called a kind of Verso press radicalism in Canadian sociology. And I also believe that intellectual life in both Canada and the United States requires, at this moment in history, more scholarly analysis, a deepening of civil political debate across ideological divides and less polemics and polarized personal attacks. There is no doubt in my mind that the letter you wrote denying Dr. Finkelstein tenure raises a range of interesting ideas, particularly with regards to the role of the public intellectual in society today. My view, however, is your ideas on these matters would best be articulated in a public forum, in a series of essays or perhaps in your future hiring decisions, but are most certainly inappropriate when evaluating a scholar going up for tenure, especially one with as strong a publishing and teaching record as Dr. Finkelstein.

I have read three of his books, and while I am not an expert in his academic areas of research or on the Middle East conflict I note that those responsible for denying him tenure are also not experts. My informed lay opinion, however, is that while I think /The Holocaust Industry/ and /Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict /are good enough for tenure at most reasonable research universities below the very elite institutions, /Beyond Chutzpah /is a first rate scholarly work by any standards. It is far more theoretically sophisticated and much better written than the earlier books and makes a strong case for his viewpoint in ways that raise a range of important intellectual issues that cannot be ignored by scholars and citizens alike, whatever one might think of his ultimate conclusions. That your institution would deny this scholar tenure /after/ he moved his work up to a new higher level of scholarly sophistication, published with the University of California Press, and received positive external reviews from major scholars in the appropriate fields is seriously problematic. That your institution would do so, while claiming not to be influenced by outside interference in the process is simply not credible given Alan Dershowitz‘s inappropriate and unprofessional campaign and the evidence of his influence on your campus process. There are a range of serious questions that have been raised about the fairness of this process; issues that, at the very least, your institution must answer in an appeal process to have any credibility whatsoever as a supporter of basic academic freedom and scholarly engagement. Hopefully your university will reconsider your decision to ignore the serious concerns about the process that have been expressed by many scholars and by the AAUP, thus distancing yourself from the shameful behavior of Professor Dershowitz and those on your campus who have engaged in similar breaches of the scholarly peer review process. In my view, only then can your university take its rightful place among institutions committed to academic freedom and scholarly standards.

Yours Sincerely,

Neil McLaughlin, Associate Professor
Sociology, McMaster University
Canada



More articles on tenure denial: More articles leading up to the tenure decision:


















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