By JENNIFER HOWARDThe highly public feud between Norman G. Finkelstein of DePaul University and Harvard Law School’s Alan M. Dershowitz has taken an unusual procedural twist, with Mr. Dershowitz attempting to weigh in on Mr. Finkelstein’s bid for tenure at DePaul.
How Mr. Dershowitz’s move will play out remains to be seen. Mr. Finkelstein’s department supported his tenure bid, but the dean of his college has refused to support him. A final decision is expected next month.
There’s no love lost between Mr. Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science, and Mr. Dershowitz, a law professor. The two scholars have attacked each other repeatedly in the past few years, hurling accusations of plagiarism and polemicism at one another.
They’ve taken adversarial stances on such issues as the Israel lobby, anti-Semitism, and what Mr. Finkelstein terms “the Holocaust industry.” Mr. Dershowitz threatened to take legal action against the University of California Press if Mr. Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005) went to print with allegations that Mr. Dershowitz plagiarized portions of his 2003 book The Case for Israel (The Chronicle, July 22, 2005).
Last fall, with Mr. Finkelstein up for tenure, Mr. Dershowitz sent the DePaul law school faculty and members of the political-science department what he described, in a letter dated October 3, as a “dossier of Norman Finkelstein’s most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions.”
“I hope that this will serve as an introduction and primer to the so-called scholarship that Finkelstein will present this term as he is considered for tenure,” Mr. Dershowitz wrote.
Mr. Finkelstein said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Dershowitz had embarked on “this frenetic and relentless campaign to deny me tenure.”
“He sent to every member of the law school … a dossier which came, I think, to about 50 pages, leveling or, I should say, recycling all of the allegations he’s been putting forth for the past couple of years. And he sent a copy of that dossier to every member of my department.”
The packet included what Mr. Dershowitz’s letter called “some of the lies I am absolutely confident that Finkelstein told” on such points as Israeli torture and whether or not Mr. Dershowitz writes his own books.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday with The Chronicle, Mr. Dershowitz confirmed that he had sent the information to “everybody who would read it.” He said he had compiled the material at the request of some two dozen DePaul students, alumni, and faculty members who were alarmed at the prospect of Mr. Finkelstein’s receiving tenure.
Asked what he hoped to accomplish, he said, “Revealing the truth — all I’m doing is disclosing the truth.”
Mr. Dershowitz continued, “It would be a disgrace to DePaul University if they were to grant tenure. It would make them the laughing stock of American universities. … His scholarship is no more than ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies.”
He added, “I think, by every standard, he’s worse than Ward Churchill. … He’s a propagandist, not a scholar.”
Given Mr. Dershowitz’s history of clashes with Mr. Finkelstein, some might conclude that the matter had by now become more personal than professional. Mr. Dershowitz denied that. “For me, it’s not personal. It’s institutional.” He said that Mr. Finkelstein sent “a message to other pro-Israel writers: If you dare write anything scholarly in favor of Israel, I will call you names, I will call you a plagiarist.”
Mr. Dershowitz’s involvement has stirred serious concern among the DePaul faculty.
Gil Gott, a professor of international studies at DePaul who is chairman of its Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Council, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday that the council had taken up the matter at its November 17, 2006, meeting. (Mr. Gott was not then chair of the council.)
According to the minutes of the session, the council voted unanimously to authorize a letter to DePaul’s president, Dennis H. Holtschneider, and the university’s provost, Helmut P. Epp, along with the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law school. The letter was to express “the council’s dismay at Professor Dershowitz’s interference in Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion case” and also to explain “that the sanctity of the tenure and promotion process is violated by Professor Dershowitz’s emails.”
The minutes add: “A discussion followed in which members expressed their views that this was a very disturbing intrusion which attacked the sovereignty of an academic institution to govern its own affairs.”
Asked whether it was unusual for a scholar to weigh in on tenure deliberations at another university, Mr. Dershowitz responded, “What’s so unusual about a concerned academic’s objecting to his receiving tenure? He would be the first person in history ever to receive tenure based on no scholarship other than personal attacks.”
Mr. Finkelstein contacted The Chronicle last weekend to discuss his concerns about the status of his case. He said that his department had investigated Mr. Dershowitz’s claims and “concluded that none of the scholarly allegations that Dershowitz leveled against me had any merit.”
But he added: “DePaul is in a growth mode, and they see me as an albatross because they’re getting all this negative publicity because of me. And they want to get rid of me. And now the question is, what’s going to prevail? The principles of fairness, the principles of academic freedom, or power and money in the form of a mailed fist?”
According to Mr. Finkelstein and to departmental reports sent to The Chronicle, his department voted 9 to 3 in favor of granting him tenure, with the majority voicing strong support for his scholarship and giving him high marks for his pedagogy. One of the reports described him as “an outstanding teacher whose contributions to student learning and transformation are impressive.” It concluded that “while not all members of the department share a love of polemic and inflammatory rhetoric as practiced by Norman and his adversaries, there is clearly a substantial and serious record of scholarly production and achievement.”
The College Personnel Committee subsequently voted 5 to 0 in favor of tenure for Mr. Finkelstein. But Charles S. Suchar, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, shot down the recommendation in a March 22, 2007, memo, a copy of which was also obtained by The Chronicle.
In language similar to that used by Mr. Dershowitz, the dean wrote, “I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views.”
Because the process is not yet complete, the DePaul administration has not made a public statement about Mr. Finkelstein’s case.
“No comment at this time,” Mr. Suchar wrote in an e-mail message. “The promotion and tenure review process is still under way, and final decisions are not expected until mid- to late May.” The final decision on whether Mr. Finkelstein receives tenure rests with the provost and president of the university.
Also online are both Mr. Dershowitz’s Web site and Mr. Finkelstein’s.
Furor Over Norm Finkelstein
04.03.2007 | Inside Higher Ed
By Scott Jaschik
Norman G. Finkelstein has been more controversial off his campus than on it. On his frequent speaking tours to colleges, where he typically discusses Israel in highly critical ways, Finkelstein draws protests and debates. When the University of California Press published Finkelstein’s critique of Alan Dershowitz and other defenders of Israel in 2005, a huge uproar ensued - with charges and countercharges about hypocrisy, tolerance, fairness and censorship. But at DePaul University, Finkelstein has taught political science largely without controversy, gaining a reputation as a popular teacher.
But the debate over Finkelstein is now hitting his home campus - and in a way sure to create more national controversy. Finkelstein is up for tenure. So far, his department has voted, 9-3, in favor of tenure and a collegewide faculty panel voted 5-0 to back the bid. But Finkelstein’s dean has just weighed in against Finkelstein.
In a memo leaked to some supporters of Finkelstein and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, Chuck Suchar writes that he finds “the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s published books to border on character assassination” and that Finkelstein’s tone and approach threaten “some basic tenets of discourse within an academic community.” Suchar says that Finkelstein’s record is “inconsistent with DePaul’s Vincentian values, most particularly our institutional commitment to respect the dignity of the individual and to respect the rights of others to hold and express different intellectual positions.”
While the leaked memo led to some false online reports that Finkelstein had been denied tenure, his case is very much alive and no final decision will be made until June, according to a university spokeswoman, who added that the dean’s memo was not meant for public consumption and that no administrators could comment.
Debates over scholars who take controversial views on the Middle East are, of course, nothing new to academe. But Finkelstein’s case may be in a category all its own. He portrays himself as a courageous scholar, bringing rationality to discussions of the Holocaust and Israel - all the more bold for being Jewish and doing so. While criticizing people who invoke the Holocaust to justify political positions, he constantly identifies his parents as Holocaust survivors.
His supporters tend to characterize Finkelstein as the victim of right-wing, pro-Israel forces - and there are plenty of conservative supporters of Israel who despise Finkelstein. But among the groups he’s currently sparring with is Progressive magazine, a decidedly left-of-center publication that regularly publishes pieces that are highly critical of Israel’s government. Finkelstein and his supporters also say that criticisms of his tone are an excuse for attacks on his political views - and that issue appears to be key to the DePaul dean’s review.
Much of the criticism from the dean focuses on Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. The book argues that supporters of Israel use the Holocaust unreasonably to justify Israel’s policies. While the book does not deny that the Holocaust took place, it labels leading Holocaust scholars “hoaxters and huxters.” A review of the book in The New York Times called it full of contradictions (at one point he rejects the idea that the United States abandoned Europe’s Jews and then he later praises a book for which that idea was the central thesis) and full of “seething hatred” as he implies that Jews needed the Holocaust to justify Israel. The reviewer, Brown University’s Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, described the book as “a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ “
Finkelstein said he could not comment on his tenure case in detail until later in the week, although he confirmed via e-mail that he had been approved at the departmental level and college levels, and that the dean was opposing his tenure. He also questioned the fairness of being judged by whether he adheres to Vincentian values. He said that the issue was never mentioned in his annual reviews and that he had always been told that his research would be judged by “the conventional academic requirements for scholarship.” It is wrong for DePaul to raise these issues now, he said. “You can’t spring new criteria at the second stage of the last year of a tenure-track position,” he said.
In Dean Suchar’s letter, he starts by noting that there has been no dispute at DePaul over the quality of Finkelstein’s teaching. He has received “consistently high” course evaluations, Suchar writes, and many students report that they have had “transformative” experiences in his classes.
The dispute over the tenure review focuses on research. The College Personnel Committee, a faculty-elected body that reviewed Finkelstein’s candidacy and unanimously endorsed it, raised concerns about the “tone” and “frequent personal attacks” in Finkelstein’s work, Suchar writes. That committee, however, concluded that “the scholarship was, on balance, sufficiently noteworthy and praiseworthy to merit their support for the application for promotion and tenure.”
Suchar disagrees. “I find this very characteristic aspect of his scholarship to compromise its value and find it to be reflective of an ideologue and polemicist who has a rather hurtful and mean-spirited sub-text to his critical scholarship - not only to prove his point and others wrong but, also in my opinion, in the process, to impugn their veracity, honor, motives, reputations and/or their dignity,” Suchar writes. “I see this as a very damaging threat to civil discourse in a university and in society in general.”
Finkelstein has also threatened to sue DePaul if he is denied tenure, Suchar writes, adding that this fits into the pattern. “Disagreements over the value of his work seem to prompt immediate threats and personal attacks. This does not augur well for a college and university that has a long-standing culture where respect for the dignity of all members of the community and where values of collegiality are paramount.”
Suchar’s memo was sent to a universitywide committee that will now review the case, which will then work its way to the president.
Supporters of Finkelstein take issue with the dean’s letter. “This is all because of Dershowitz wanting him to be fired. These people play rough,” said Peter N. Kirstein, a professor of history at Saint Xavier University who has blogged about the case and who is on the board of the Illinois conference of the American Association of University Professors. (Via e-mail, Dershowitz - who has previously battled with Finkelstein - said he had no information about the case.)
Kirstein questioned why the dean would mention Finkelstein’s threat of a lawsuit. “Doesn’t this country allow people to do things like suing?” he asked.
It would be appropriate for a dean to question the accuracy or significance of a professor’s work, but not to focus on its tone, Kirstein said.
On the question of the tone of one’s writing, Kirstein said he had plenty of experience. In 2002 he was suspended from his job after he sent an e-mail to a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy, calling the cadet “a disgrace to this country” and criticizing the “aggressive baby-killing tactics” of the military. Kirstein was reviled by many conservative groups and defended by many civil liberties groups.
“Tonality is usually a red herring to destroy controversial speech that elites don’t like,” Kirstein said.
Anne Clark Bartlett, a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul, said that it is “not common” for deans to write letters disagreeing with the views of a department and collegewide panel reviewing a tenure candidate. But she also said that the faculty handbook did give deans that right.
Bartlett, who said she does not know Finkelstein, said that she has not taken a stand on his case and wants to see how the process plays out. She said that it was important that administrators respect that the university’s regulations “give the faculty primary responsibility over promotion and personnel matters” for professors.
Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said that the national office of the group had recently received the dean’s memo and was paying close attention to the case, but had not been asked to play a formal role. He said that the dean’s involvement and raising the issue of tone were not - in and of themselves - cause for concern with regard to academic freedom. He said that any questions about academic freedom would focus on the fairness of the dean’s comments, the due process afforded to Finkelstein, and how those comments were viewed in the totality of the evidence about Finkelstein’s tenure bid.
However, Kreiser said that the AAUP believes that “ordinarily a dean would defer to the judgment of a faculty member’s peers.” AAUP policy calls for administrators to have “compelling reasons” that they can present before they overrule a faculty recommendation on tenure.
“The dean would have to provide compelling reasons,” Kreiser said. The question going forward will be: “Were the dean’s reasons compelling?”
Feud Weakens Prof’s Tenure Bid
04.04.2007 | The Harvard Crimson
By KEVIN ZHOU, Crimson Staff Writer
DePaul University Assistant Professor Norman G. Finkelstein, who has been no stranger to controversy in years past, will face difficulty gaining tenure this summer after the dean of DePaul’s College of Arts and Sciences overrode recommendations made at the departmental and college review level.
Finkelstein, who is in his sixth year at DePaul, said in an interview yesterday that Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz-perhaps his most outspoken critic-was responsible for leading the effort to deny him tenure.
“I would call it, for about ten weeks, a relentless campaign,” Finkelstein said, adding that comments made by Dershowitz amounted to “character assassination.” “Had there been no outside pressure, I’m fully confident that I would make it through” the tenure process, Finkelstein said.
Finkelstein alleges that Dershowitz is trying to discredit him with baseless claims to draw attention away from strong criticisms that Finkelstein has leveled against Dershowitz’s work on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
According to Finkelstein, both the political science department and the College Personnel Committee at DePaul voted to recommend tenure for him, but the dean disagreed with these recommendations.
DePaul University Spokeswoman Denise Mattson said that Finkelstein’s tenure case is ongoing and will be up for final review at the University level around June. She declined to comment further.
In an interview yesterday, Dershowitz confirmed that he had sent a letter last September to DePaul faculty members lobbying against Finkelstein’s tenure.
The letter, which Dershowitz said contained “self-proving information,” referenced dozens of alleged instances in which Finkelstein had made-up quotations of Dershowitz, the Israeli Supreme Court, and others.
Dershowitz posted the letter on his public website.
Responding to claims that he was engaging in character assassination, Dershowitz stated, “When I quote back his own language to him, that is, in fact, character assassination, but he is the assassin.”
Dershowitz added that he had sent the letter in response to a request by Patrick Callahan, a former chair of the DePaul political science department, who had asked Dershowitz to point out the “clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein’s part.”
Callahan could not be reached for comment.
However, Finkelstein said yesterday that he believed the reason why Dershowitz was actively working to deny him tenure was over his most recent book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,”
“I caused real damage to his reputation,” Finkelstein said. “I think that Dershowitz is desperate to discredit me to be able to say that this Finkelstein guy couldn’t even get tenure at a third-rate Catholic University, so how can we take him seriously?”
This new dispute between Dershowitz and Finkelstein is only the latest chapter in a long and embittered relationship.
In “Beyond Chutzpah,” Finkelstein argued that supporters of Israel deflected criticism of the country by labeling the accusers anti-Semites.
In the original version of the book, he contended that Dershowitz did not actually write “The Case for Israel,” and that he might not have even read it. The University of California Press eventually removed this claim from the final version of the book.
-Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.
Will America’s Largest Catholic University Give Tenure to a Fan of the Hezbollah?
04.05.2007 | FrontPageMag.com
By Steven Plaut
The timing could not have been better. Just as the Jewish holiday of liberation, Passover, was about to begin, the news was spreading throughout the blogosphere that one of America’s most openly anti-Semitic and anti-American pseudo-academics was about to be “passed over” for tenure. That tentative decision is now being attacked by the Left as supposed suppression of academic freedom, although in fact it is merely the introduction at long last of some semblance of academic quality control into a university that has been under attack for lacking such.
Norman Finkelstein is a 53-year-old untenured assistant professor of political science at DePaul University, no doubt one of the oldest assistant professors in America. Before coming to DePaul in 2003, he had been fired by several schools in the New York area for being a pseudo-scholar and for his hatemongering activities. Finkelstein is regarded by the anti-Defamation League and by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a Holocaust Denier and is similarly defined by Martin Peretz from the New Republic and by others. Finkelstein is an open fan and endorser of Holocaust Denier David Irving.
Born Jewish but having no affiliations with the Jewish community or institutions, Finkelstein has made a career out of turning out hate literature attacking Jews and Israel, the most famous of which is his scurrilous “The Holocaust Industry.” He is celebrated by every Neo-Nazi organization and web site on earth, which delight at the irony of being able to feature a nominal Jew who endorses their political agenda. Finkelstein also appears regularly on Counterpunch. Finkelstein is the Hezbollah’s favorite American “academic” PR chief and has publicly embraced Hezbollah and Hamas terror for many years. In the middle of the barrage by Hezbollah against Israeli civilians last summer, Finkelstein declared that his “chief regret is that I wasn’t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah against terrorist intimidation and attack.” He added: “I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity - We are all Hezbollah now.”
Finkelstein has been dismissed as a charlatan by nearly every serious academic who has reviewed his writings. In the New York Times, Professor Omer Bartov (Brown University historian) described Finkelstein’s book on the Holocaust as a “novel variation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century popular with German Nazis. Leon Wieseltier from the New Republic wrote that Finkelstein is “poison, a disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock,” while Gabriel Schonfeld, the editor of Commentary Magazine, has written (Commentary, January 2001) that Finkelstein’s writings are “crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by Neo-Nazis around the world.” Enrst Zundel, the Canadian Neo-Nazi deported to Germany where he is now in prison, proudly proclaimed Finkelstein the “Jewish David Irving.” He meant that as a compliment. Finkelstein has long written vulgar smears against Holocaust survivors, and in particular against Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has written quite a few articles exposing Finkelstein and his fraudulent pseudo-scholarship.
DePaul officials are reportedly blocking Finkelstein’s prospects of getting tenure in spite of sycophantic endorsement of his case by most of his colleagues there in the Department of Political Science. The DePaul officials are to be heartily congratulated for taking such a courageous stand against charlatanism and fraud!
No less impressive is the fact that the efforts to force the political science department at DePaul to adhere to real academic standards - against the will of nine twelfths of the department’s members – are reportedly in large part those of Professor Chuck Suchar, Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Suchar, a sociologist, is hardly a vintage member of the vast rightwing conspiracy. He is a leftist who in the past sponsored and defended a series of events and lectures at DePaul attacking “American imperialism”. But Suchar seems to have drawn the line in the sand when it comes to naked attempts by the political science department at DePaul to award tenure to someone whose record is devoid of any scholarly achievement or academic publications. And if Suchar displays the courage of his convictions and sticks to his guns, he will emerge as the hero of this entire sad episode at DePaul. If you would like to send Suchar a cyber-pat on the back, he can be reached at csuchar@depaul.edu and also csuchar@wppost.depaul.edu.
DePaul is a Catholic school associated with the “Vincentians.” Among Suchar’s grounds for vetoing the political science department’s skullduggery was his belief that keeping a buffoon of hate like Finkelstein on the faculty would violate the ethical standards of the Vincentians. How seldom we hear about real commitment to ethical behavior on campus these days!
In recent years Finkelstein has turned his personal web page into a sewer of vulgarity, obscenity, and defamatory personal smears against anyone who has ever dared to criticize him or defend Israel. There he has also published death threats, including one against Irshad Manji, who runs Muslim Refusenik, a web site for dissident Muslims who reject Islamofascism and terrorism, and another against Dershowitz. Finkelstein has allied himself closely with a Brazilian-Arab Neo-Nazi cartoonist named “Latuff”, best known for winning the second prize in the Iranian Holocaust Denial cartoon contest. Finkelstein not only runs Latuff’s vile “cartoons” on his web site, but commissioned Latuff to draw an obscene cartoon of Professor Alan Dershowitz masturbating, after Dershowitz had denounced some of Finkelstein’s own antics. Finkelstein falsely accused Dershowitz of having engaged in plagiarism, and unfortunately Dershowitz never filed suit against him for it.
While some in the media are spinning the DePaul decision to block Finkelstein’s tenure as cowardice because of supposed nervousness about Finkelstein’s “controversial writings,” the truth is far simpler. Finkelstein is simply not an academic at all, but rather a fulltime scribbler of hate and vulgarity. Indeed, the only reason he was ever hired by DePaul in the first place is that the political science department there was seeking someone born Jewish to indoctrinate students into far-leftist jihadi hatred of Israel (and also hatred of America). Finkelstein’s courses were always one-sided exercises in political indoctrination, which no doubt explains why they were popular among the anarchist-Maoist wing of DePaul student radicals who signed up for them.
As noted, Finkelstein has no publications at all in academic journals, the first and main requirement for granting tenure at any serious institution of higher learning in the world. Instead, Finkelstein turns out one anti-Israel propaganda diatribe after another. Getting Bash-Israel books published is not particularly difficult these days, given the commercial appetite of publishers for such material, but it hardly earns Finkelstein any serious academic laurels. Finkelstein is quite simply a pseudo-scholar and a charlatan who spends most of his time collaborating with Neo-Nazis, Holocaust Deniers and Islamofascist terrorists. DePaul seems to have made up its mind that the time has come at last to maintain and enforce real academic standards. DePaul, long the worst bastion of anti-American campus indoctrination in the greater Chicago area, has decided that actual scholarship is to be required of its faculty members. And a growing number of people at DePaul have simply had enough of Finkelstein’s infantile antics.
The same far Left that had absolutely nothing to say against DePaul when it fired Professor Thomas Klocek because he had dared to express a pro-Israel opinion outside the classroom is suddenly all up in arms over what appears to be a decision to deny Finkelstein tenure. Finkelstein himself seems to be blaming Dershowitz and his followers for “sabotaging” things for him at DePaul.
Finkelstein’s tenure proceedings also shed light into the dark secret corners of academia, and especially into the mysterious processes through which universities hire and promote. Most non-academics have no idea how such things work.
Professors at serious universities are recruited, promoted and granted tenure primarily on the basis of their scholarly research and only secondarily on the basis of the quality of their teaching (measured - somewhat foolishly - by student evaluations of professor popularity). In the social sciences, research performance is measured mainly by articles in refereed international academic journals. To the surprise of most non-academics, publishing books does not “count” for much in academia, mainly because book publication does not undergo the same peer review as do journal article publications. Finkelstein has published nothing at all in international refereed academic journals, although he does have a few screeds in Marxist and Palestinian propaganda journals. Finkelstein’s “academic record” consists entirely of his hateful “books”.
While the details vary from department to department and from university to university, in general a non-tenured faculty member gets tenure in the following way: if his department recommends that he get tenure, a “professional committee” is set up to review his publications and to solicit outside letters of evaluation from experts from around the world. It then makes recommendations that must be approved by a campus-wide promotions committee and by higher officials (Deans, Rectors, Presidents), all of whom are supposed to oversee the honesty and professionalism of promotion procedures and decisions.
The problem with all this is that it is very easy to manipulate and neutralize the quality control procedures at many universities. This is especially true when it comes to political extremists among the faculty up for tenure. A non-objective professional committee can be easily compiled and recruited from among faculty members friendly to the candidate or sharing his radical political views. These can then purposely solicit letters of evaluation from other political extremists who glowingly endorse the “academic qualifications” of the candidate out of political solidarity. Hence even a buffoon like Finkelstein with no scholarly achievements may have enough political “friends” capable of manufacturing on his behalf raving sycophantic letters of evaluation, sometimes even written by academics at distinguished universities.
In the case of Finkelstein, his department reportedly voted 9 against 3 to recommend him for tenure, despite Finkelstein’s embarrassing lack of scholarly publications. Those three dissidents who were opposed submitted a minority report, and their valiant behavior proves that courage and intellect are not dead at DePaul. The other members of the political science department at DePaul are by and large the same leftists who hired Finkelstein in the first place. They did not hire him for his scholarship but for his politics of hate.
The DePaul “professional committee” for Finkelstein then made a unanimous five-vote recommendation to grant him tenure, but that was reportedly because a sixth committee member who opposed the tenure was denied the possibility of casting a vote. This “unanimous” recommendation says little about Finkelstein’s credentials, but serves as a mountain of proof about how easy it is to manipulate academic tenure proceedings and short-circuit all quality control in universities! The naked manipulation by Finkelstein’s political science collaborators at DePaul and the fact that the “professional committee” behaved with such unprofessional partisanship were what triggered the veto by Dean Suchar and perhaps also further opposition from other DePaul senior officials against Finkelstein!
So will Finkelstein now be goosestepping his way to the unemployment office in his jackboots? He and his followers are still trying to browbeat the DePaul officials into changing their minds about his tenure, and there are panicky calls coming from far-leftists all about to rush to Finkelstein’s aid. Naturally, they are all blaming “rightwingers” (and especially Alan Dershowitz) for poor Norman’s academic demise. The Marathon Pundit blog describes where things now stand:
‘Finkelstein’s fate may end up in the hands of Father Dennis Holtschneider, DePaul’s president, whose arrival in Chicago came after Finkelstein’s hiring. Holtschneider’s first crisis was the Klocek affair. A youngish-president, he appears to be about my age, forty-five, and he let his inexperience show as he mishandled the Klocek incident and its aftermath. Other flare-ups during “Holt’s” reign include the Ward Churchill fiasco and the school’s Chicken Little reaction to the DePaul Conservative Alliance’s attempt to hold an “affirmative action bake sale.”‘
So where does all that leave America’s leading cheerleader for the Hezbollah? The same Finkelstein who may have attended the Holocaust Denial conference last year? Will DePaul’s odium at last be removed? Well, it looks like his job prospects are not that bad. Perhaps DePaul’s loss will be the University of Tehran’s gain.[If you would like to tell DePaul's President Holtschneider what YOU think of all this, his email address is president@depaul.edu . The names and emails of the other officials are here.]
More on tenure:
- Chomsky on Dershowitz, Finkelstein and tenure
- Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg & Israel scholar Avi Shlaim on tenure
- No tenure for Finkelstein!
- Fisk on Tenure
- National Catholic Reporter on Tenure
- PLAUT ON TENURE
- On Dershowitz and Finkelstein
- Princetonian on tenure
- Tenure and the Times
- Jerusalem Post on tenure
- Jewish Week on Tenure
- JDO Launches Campaign “Operation Drive Out!” to Drive Self-Hating Jewish Professor Hater of Israel- Mocker of the Holocaust- Out of De Paul University
- The Nation on Tenure
- Dershowitz in Wall Street Journal on tenure
- CUNY on Tenure
- Fox News on tenure
- Chicago Tribune on tenure
- Chicago Sun-Times on tenure
- Tenure, from a mile high
- Comment on Tenure
- Alan Dershowitz and Peter Novick in Chronicle of Higher Education on Tenure
- Chicago Jewish News on Tenure
