Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Once More Into the Academic Freedom/John Yoo Fray

Here.

Paul Campos, Serial Advocate for Punishing Professors for Their Ideas

He's weighed in on the Yoo business; details here.

"American Freedom Campaign" Organizing E-Mail-Campaign to Fire John Yoo

The details about this disgraceful attack on the academy and tenure are here.  Professor Yoo holds morally reprehensible views and his legal work on the so-called "torture memos" was obviously shoddy.  Neither consideration constitutes grounds for terminating the employment of a tenured law professor.  Tenure, and academic freedom, would mean nothing if every professor with views deemed morally reprehensible or every professor who produced a shoddy piece of work--while inside or outside the academy--could be fired.  I find it almost unbelievable that a group calling itself "American Freedom Campaign" does not understand this.  (Have they already forgotten the case of Professor Churchill?)  I had previously thought well of the work of the American Freedom Campaign, but this latest stunt is a disgrace and I am removing myself from its e-mail lists.   Readers might e-mail them to protest this blatant attack on tenure and academic freedom.

UPDATE:  Berkeley Dean Edley has issued a solid statement in defense of tenure and academic freedom.  Marty Lederman, who has been a persistent and incisive legal critic of Yoo's work and the Administration's policies in the fake "war on terror," writes in reply to my comments above:

You write that "Tenure, and academic freedom, would mean nothing if every professor with views deemed morally reprehensible or every professor who produced a shoddy piece of work--while inside or outside the academy--could be fired." That's right, of course. But no one thinks a professor should be fired for having views deemed morally reprehensible or for producing a shoddy piece of work.  The claim here is that the morally reprehensible views, and the shoddy work, in this case were put to use in official state conduct that facilitated and immunized horrific crimes. And that makes the question at least a bit more complicated, no?

No.  First, we have certainly seen cases in which people think tenured faculty should be fired for having morally reprehensible views.  Indeed, when I challenged the American Freedom Campaign about their stance on this matter, I got the following reply:

[T]his has nothing to do with John Yoo espousing unpopular or controversial views; this is about John Yoo twisting the law in order to encourage the use of torture by the Bush administration.  As an organization founded to restore the Constitution and respect for the rule of law, we do not believe that a person with such a fundamental lack of respect for the rule of law should be mentoring law students. 

If Professor Yoo's arguments to "encourage the use of torture" and his "fundamental lack of respect for the rule of law" are the reasons he should be terminated, then he is to be terminated precisely for his "views", views which he has expressed in law reviews, as well as to Bush.  Are we really to believe--fifty years after the McCarthyist witch hunts!--that academics should be punished because their bad ideas are then used by bad people to do bad things?   Dean Edley's remarks on this score are pertinent:

As critical as I am of his analyses, no argument about what he did or didn't facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.

As longtime readers of the blog know, I certainly think that Bush and his gang of war criminals deserve to have their status confirmed by a court of law.  If Professor Yoo is convicted of a crime, then this would be a different case.  But it is not even clear (for the reasons noted by Dean Edley) that he is guilty of any crime, and he has, quite plainly, not been convicted of any.   Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else.  Attempts to claim it is more "complicated" are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.  (I am sure that is not Lederman's intent, but I am rather more confident that this is the endpoint of this dialectical trajectory.)  That is not the law in the United States (except in rare circumstances involving a kind of immediacy and danger that have no bearing here), nor should it be for reasons that are familiar to anyone who has ever read John Stuart Mill. 

UPDATE:  A more systematic explanation why it is inappropriate for Berkeley to do anything in the case of Professor Yoo.

Dershowitz and Plagiarism, Again

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, as we noted previously, played a major role in the politically motivated tenure denial of Norman Finkelstein, the former DePaul political science professor who has been a staunch critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.  Dershowitz seems to have been at least partially motivated by Professor Finkelstein's charge that Dershowitz plagiarized portions of a book he wrote in defense of Israel.  Lawyer/philosopher Frank Menetrez (who previously wrote a devastating analysis of Dershowitz's critique of Finkelstein) has now re-examined the plagiarism charge, and documented quite persuasively an instance of plagiarism.  Professor Dershowitz purports to reply to Menetrez here, but it is wholly non-responsive, as Dr. Menetrez himself points out in rejoinder at the same link.  Of course, the plagiarism at issue in Dershowitz's case does not appear to be nearly as significant as that involving other Harvard Law School faculty in recent years.  Whereas other HLS faculty have acknowledged wrongdoing, however, Professor Dershowitz has steadfastly denied it.  That denial is no longer credible.

Visiting Professors from Abroad Finding it Harder to Get Into the U.S.

A distinguished academic from the U.K., who has visited a number of times at U.S. institutions, writes:

I'm thinking...of giving up longer visits to the US. Not because I don't enjoy working here. On the contrary. But for various other reasons, not least of which is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy associated with getting a visa and getting through the border and reporting every little thing one does to the feds. The whole nightmare starts with a 15-quid phone call to a rude and sullen call centre operative who handles visa appointments and slaps your wrists for asking questions. Those who live in, say, Glasgow then have to travel 500 miles to sit in the US Embassy in London incommunicado (no phones or laptops allowed, and nowhere to store them if you have the effrontery to have them with you) until someone is good and ready to take all their fingerprints and to look for trivial errors on their numerous repetitive and gratuitously intrusive forms. The cost is astronomical even without all the travel and accommodation costs. Then you never know for sure how long they will hold onto your passport: a distinguished colleague of mine recently had to cancel a long-arranged lecture in another country because the US embassy, which knew of his travel plans, kept his passport for a month AFTER confirming that his US visa had been approved! Europeans have started to refer to US travel, only half-jokingly, as 'going behind the iron curtain'. Actually, this is an insult to the Warsaw Pact countries, several of which had a much lighter touch than today's US. They're now thinking of introducing a rule that you can't buy a plane ticket to the US, even for a quick tourist visit, without advance permission from Uncle Sam! I wouldn't mind any of this if it achieved something, but we all know that it is a competition by US politicians to see who can be the biggest ultra-nationalist bully, preferably by squeezing an arbitrarily-chosen selection of non-Americans until the pips squeak.

In an era when the scholarly community in most areas of philosophy, indeed in most disciplines, is international, this is a quite pernicious development.  Have others encountered problems with getting foreign scholars into the U.S. for extended, visiting/teaching appointments?  Do others overseas share my correspondent's perceptions of the problem?  Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual, though if I can verify the identity of the commenter from the e-mail address, that will be sufficient (those addresses do not appear on the post).

The Bush Presidential Library and Institute at Southern Methodist University

The betrayal of principles of academic freedom and research makes this an embarrassment for Southern Methodist University.

The Duke Lacrosse Case: An Expose of KC Johnson

KC Johnson is the Brooklyn College history professor who became obsessed with the Duke lacrosse case and particularly obsessed with harassing and deriding Duke faculty whom he deemed to have any involvement with the case.  (Among the targets of his harassment has been the distinguished philosopher of biology Alex Rosenberg.)  A Duke professor has now penned an expose of Professor Johnson's misrepresentations.  More details and links here.

Law Professor Smears Scholars Critical of Israel for Political Reasons

Readers concerned about academic freedom (including the case of Professor Finkelstein), as well as those who enjoy case studies of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, may find this discussion of intellectual dishonesty by a law professor of interest.

Academic Freedom and Finkelstein's Tenure Case at DePaul

You can listen to talks from the recent conference at the University of Chicago here.  I have listened to bits and pieces of most of them.  The most striking, I think, is the talk by John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who makes an absolutely compelling case that Finkelstein should have been tenured on the merits of his scholarship and that the only explanation for the tenure denial was political interference.  (This is notable, in part, because Finkelstein has been a critic of Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis about the influence of the Israel Lobby.)

"David Horowitz Awareness Week"

John Protevi (Louisiana State) is running it!

Christian-Fascism Awareness Week

So the week after next, campuses across America will be treated to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, since there is not enough awareness, it turns out, about Islam and fascism.  The event is the brainchild of well-known pathological liar and enemy of academic freedom, David Horowitz.  But we shouldn't pre-judge it on that basis, even if others will.

I know this may surprise readers, but I think this event is a great idea.  And I have an even better idea, which is we follow it up with:  Christian-Fascism Awareness Week.

Now I don't want to interfere with Horowitz's effort, which is in the spirit of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan:  "fundamentalism is the enemy of all civilized humanity."  So one week devoted to Islamic fundamentalism seems right; but why not devote the next week to Christian fundamentalism?  The rise of Christian Fascism has gotten some attention lately, but not nearly enough in our "politically correct" culture.  Sure, the Christian Fascists aren't quite as scary, since they rarely commit terrorist acts (except against abortion service providers); on the other hand, they're right here in our midst (even in the White House some say), while the Islamic Bogeyman-In-Chief is in a cave somewhere in Pakistan.   Here's what one expert on Christian Fascism has to say:

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed....

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens....

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked....

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right....

The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance....

So clearly there is a lot of awareness-raising to be done during Christian-Fascism Awareness week.  But, of course, the idea would not be to target Christians in general, most of whom aren't fascists or fundamentalists or zealots or theocrats or anti-democratic.  We'd just be targetting the extremists, the kind who advise George W. Bush and threaten to run third-party candidates in Presidential elections.  So there is no reason for most Christians to take offense.  We are just trying to warn everyone else.  Just like David Horowitz.

The Latest Study of the "Political Ideology" of Academics

Details and a brief comment here.

Recent Interview with Norman Finkelstein

He makes a number of interesting points about academic freedom and the political pressures that prevent honest discussion of Israel in the United States.  He also has some funny lines about the disgraceful Alan Dershowitz.

Iowa College Instructor Fired Allegedly for Not Treating the Book of Genesis Literally

Story here; an excerpt:

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said....

The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue....

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion."

"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said. "I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney....

"I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here," he said. "From my point of view, what they're doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century."

UPDATE:  Here's how Bitterman should have approached his subject.  (Thanks to Clayton Littlejohn for the pointer.)

Campus Police Torture Student at the University of Florida for Asking Long Question

Did the campus cops at the University of Florida train at Abu Ghraib?  Don't watch this video if you're sensitive to the gratuitous infliction of pain on human beings.  The "statement" by the University President, J. Bernard Machen, that follows is disgraceful:  it's the worst possible example of administrative mealy-mouthness and lack of perspective I've seen in a very long time. 

UPDATE:  The plot thickens!  Though this hardly explains the tasering.  Paul Craig Roberts comments.  So, too, does Ruchira Paul.

AAUP Issues New Statement in Response to the Attacks on Academic Freedom...

...by the pathological liar David Horowitz (and others).  Dean Rowan has apt comments and links.  Meanwhile, the real threats to academic freedom (and honest intellectual inquiry) continue.

Finkelstein Resigns from DePaul

Norman Finkelstein has resigned from DePaul University, but DePaul has formally issued his statement about the case as well as a university statement affirming that he is a "prolific scholar" and "outstanding teacher."  This was no doubt part of a formal settlement, which presumably included a considerable cash sum for the injury the university inflicted on Professor Finkelstein.  (The NY Times reports that Professor Finkelstein "would not discuss financial terms of the resignation agreement, which he said was confidential, but noted that it does not bar him from speaking out about issues that concern him, including ''the unfairness of the tenure process.'")   Hopefully Professor Finkelstein will find academic employment in a country less subject to private censorship of controversial opinions.

Meanwhile, the shameless Alan Dershowitz, asked by The New York Times about this latest turn of events, is quoted as objecting that, "The idea of describing him as a scholar trades truth for convenience. He's a man who is a propagandist and is not a scholar.''  The irony in this bit of psychological projection is rich.  Dershowitz has been described, quite correctly, by Judge Richard Posner as "not a scholar".  A leading authority on academic freedom in the legal academy tells me that Harvard Law School could almost certainly establish a case for firing Dershowitz given the dearth of scholarly productivity (and quite independent of his unprofessional conduct in this matter).  Perhaps the NY Times might have picked someone else better situated to evaluate the distinction between scholarship and propaganda?

A Good Statement on the Finkelstein Tenure Case...

...by DePaul philosopher Bill Martin.  He is absolutely correct that DePaul's embarrassing conduct in this matter, culminating now with the inexplicable exclusion of Professor Finkelstein from the classroom, risks making the university a "laughing stock."  DePaul will, and should, pay a heavy price in terms of academic standing and its ability to hire and retain faculty for this attack on freedom of intellectual inquiry.
 

DePaul University: Serial Violator of the Academic Freedom and Contractual Rights of Faculty

Already widely criticized by the AAUP and others for the politically motivated tenure denials of two faculty last Spring, DePaul University has now taken the extraordinary step of "terminating the terminal year" of one of those faculty members, Norman Finkelstein, by denying him the right to teach his scheduled (and apparently fully subscribed) classes.  Students at DePaul continue to be at the forefront in protesting this disgraceful institutional behavior.

More Thoughts on the Churchill Case

Here.

AAUP Intervenes in Finkelstein Case at DePaul

Professor Finkelstein has posted the text of a letter from the AAUP calling on the DePaul Administration to permit, consistent with established procedures, an appeal of the adverse tenure decision.  Such an appeal has also been endorsed by the Faculty Council at DePaul.

The Report on Churchill's "Research Misconduct" (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 27, 2007, now that the University of Colorado Board of Regents has voted to fire Professor Churchill, a sanction recommended by only one of the five members of the Committee that prepared the report on Professor Churchill's research misconduct.  The punishment is so plainly disproporionate to the actual offenses that one imagines Professor Churchill's prospects in court--where he will argue that his offensive speech is the real reason the university is punishing him, in violation of the First Amendment--will be good.

======================================

The University of Colorado at Boulder's witchhunt against Ward Churchill--about which we we have written before--is apparently drawing to a close, with his firing for purported "research misconduct" apparently likely.  This article is still the most sensible item I've seen regarding the report charging Ward Churchill with "research misconduct."  The report is extremely long and detailed, but it's quite clear that most of those on the right clucking with pleasure about the destruction of the career of someone whose political views they despise have read mainly the "summary" of findings, which gives very little sense as to the particulars that underlie the apparently dramatic findings.  But the particulars are a rather different matter, and here John Wilson's comments are closer to the mark:

Churchill is guilty of occasionally shoddy scholarship and the dubious practice of ghostwriting, and perhaps even more. But we should be alarmed by the investigative committee’s report, and not merely because the committee exists only because of a concerted effort to fire Churchill for his obnoxious and idiotic comments about 9/11 victims.

By stretching the meaning of “research misconduct” far beyond its true definition, and by supporting the suspension and even dismissal of a tenured professor for his use of footnotes, the Colorado committee is opening the door to a vast new right-wing witch hunt on college campuses that conservatives could easily exploit across the country.

If you don’t like a professor’s politics, simply file a complaint of “research misconduct.” According to the Colorado committee, if you can find a factual error made by the professor with a footnote that fails to prove the contention, that scholar is guilty of “research misconduct” and can be suspended or fired.

This may soft-peddle Churchill's shoddy scholarly practices a bit, but it is far closer to the mark than the absurd contention that Churchill's "falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism...are substantial."  In fact, only one plagiarism charge was deemed substantiated in the report, with most of the best-known early allegations dissolving on examination.  And the plagiarism at issue in the Churchill case seems quite slight by comparison to some better-known cases in recent years that did not result in anyone's termination.

A statement by the Colorado/Boulder chapter of the AAUP about the investigation, its findings and recommendations, is also revealing:

The hostile climate posed serious problems for the Churchill investigation and surely contributed to the absence on the sub-committee of scholarly peers in Professor Churchill's field. For example, one faculty member was pressured to resign from the Committee on Research Misconduct because he had signed the February 2005 faculty petition supporting academic freedom in general at CU, and thus was viewed by some as supportive of Churchill himself. In addition, the two Native American historians originally asked to serve on the Investigatory Committee were so intimidated by the "toxic" atmosphere at CU and
so pressured by outsiders that both resigned almost upon appointment.
       
Some scholars argue that the standards of research misconduct used in Professor Churchill's case were elastic and that they were applied to his work with special stringency. Others consider the recommended punishment disproportionate. From a record of more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, chapters, speeches, and electronic communications, the committee investigating Churchill's work isolated six pages, in which they claimed         to find examples of plagiarism and one example of fabrication. If these charges are justified, they certainly show that Professor Churchill sometimes failed to adhere to the most rigorous standards of scholarship, but they seem relatively small in light of Churchill's vast opus. All scholars have points of view, and even distinguished scholars make occasional mistakes; however, it is highly unusual for the discovery of such errors to end in dismissal.
       
The investigation into Professor Churchill's work has been undertaken in the context of extensive well-organized and well-funded activity to discredit scholarship by faculty members perceived as liberal or left-leaning and to undermine the autonomy of institutions of higher education across the country.  The University of Colorado has been a special target of such efforts, and scholars around the country are watching carefully to see what happens here.  Insofar as the investigation inappropriately casts aspersions on Professor
Churchill's controversial conclusions regarding relationships between Native Americans and the United States, it also will weaken academic freedom across the United States. The freedom of faculty to interpret their own data, regardless of these interpretations' conformity to conventional wisdom, lies at the heart of the scholarly enterprise.
       
In these circumstances, it is vital for the University of Colorado to defend not only the integrity of scholarly research but also the interlinked principles of academic freedom for its faculty and autonomy for itself. Failure to do this will be extremely damaging to the University of Colorado. It will injure faculty morale, diminish the University's ability to recruit qualified faculty, especially in disciplines where controversies over interpretation are commonplace, impugn the University's scholarly reputation, and reduce our ability to represent the best of scholarly work in research, the classroom and the community at large.
       
For these reasons, CU-B chapter of AAUP calls on the University of Colorado's   administration to reverse the decision to dismiss Professor Churchill.  The problems that beset the Churchill inquiry, especially its highly politicized origin and context, bring into question both the objectivity of the inquiry and the proportionality of the recommended penalty. We recognize the possibility that lesser sanctions may be justified for some specific acts described in the report.

The threatened punishment is disproportional to the actual scholarly failures for reasons that are, alas, plain to all.  If, in fact, the university takes the ill-advised step of terminating Professor Churchill, one should expect this matter to end up, correctly, in court.

JULY 25 UPDATE:  John Protevi (Louisiana State) calls to my attention this critical analysis of the plagiarism charges.

ANOTHER:  Via Professor Protevi, I learn of this article quoting the one member of the Board of Regents who voted (obviously correctly, on the record) against firing Churchill:

Regent Cindy Carlisle, who cast the sole vote against termination, said Wednesday she felt the Regents should have accepted the advice of the last faculty committee to review the case, which recommended suspending Churchill for a year without pay and demoting him.

She also said the panel, the Privilege and Tenure Committee, had raised questions about three of the seven specific allegations against Churchill.

Asked whether she felt firing Churchill was unfair, she said: “I’m not going to characterize that. My vote speaks pretty strongly. I thought we should defer to the active faculty (the Privilege and Tenure Committee) for their recommendations for sanctions.”

The Finkelstein Tenure Case and the Meaning of "Ad Hominem"

On his web site, Professor Finkelstein has posted a very fine letter by a philosopher in the U.K. sent to the President of DePaul University, Dennis Holtschneider (you may e-mail President Holtschneider here regarding the tenure case).  The letter writer notes a point we have touched on in the past, namely, the misuse of the term "ad hominem" to describe certain kinds of criticism.  Our U.K. philosopher wrote, in pertinent part, as follows:

I write to you as a retired teacher of Philosophy, formerly a lecturer in the University of Wales, and a founding member of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, to express my dismay at your decision to refuse tenure to Norman Finkelstein and to dismiss him.

In defending your position, you refer more than once in your letter to him to ‘ad hominem attacks’ he has made upon other scholars, thus endorsing the complaint made publicly against him by Alan Dershowitz.

As I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you, ‘ad hominem’ refers to the fallacy of inferring the falsity of a statement from the bad character of the individual making it. But I’m not sure if you and Dershowitz understand the term in its technical sense. The implication of your use of the logician’s term of art is that Finkelstein is guilty of a scholarly offence: but I doubt that you could point to an instance of it in his writings. To the contrary, Finkelstein draws adverse conclusions about an individual’s character from the falsity of what he or she says, a perfectly reasonable procedure (where the falsity can’t be put down to innocent error). In drawing such conclusions Finkelstein is hardly guilty, as you suggest, of not being ‘objective’ in his ‘professional judgement of colleagues’, unless you think that objectivity is the same as neutrality. Nor can you think that he fails to show ‘due respect for the opinions of others’ unless you hold the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect.

No one, of course, actually holds "the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect."  But many people, unsurprisingly, hold the view that their absurd "opinions are worthy of respect," which is almost always what is at issue when careless accusations of "ad hominem" attacks are bandied about.

UPDATE:  It might be worth noting that the Illinois Chapter of the AAUP has now entered the fray, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On Friday the Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider....In the two-page letter, Leo Welch, the chapter’s president, says the decision to deny tenure to the two assistant professors violated both the association’s standards and those of DePaul’s own Faculty Handbook.

Mr. Finkelstein’s alleged lack of “collegiality” appears to have been the “sole basis” for denying him tenure, Mr. Welch writes. “It is entirely illegitimate for a university to deny tenure to a professor out of fear that his published research … might hurt a college’s reputation,” he says. The association has explicitly rejected collegiality as an appropriate criterion for evaluating faculty members, and has criticized it as “ensuring homogeneity” and undermining the leadership role of colleges and universities, according to the letter.

DePaul University's Attack on Academic Freedom: The Tenure Case of Norman Finkelstein

It would be nice to think there is a more charitable explanation than political persecution for the decision to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, the fierce critic of Israel who teaches political science at DePaul University in Chicago, but on the record that is public, I can't see one, and especially not after this contemporaneous tenure decision has come to light.  (Professor Finkelstein's website has additional information about his tenure case.)

As this observer remarks:

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from [Alan] Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

But since Professor Dershowitz's criticisms have been shown to be wholly lacking in merit, any adverse decision against Professor Finkelstein growing out of these criticisms would be inconsistent with a fair tenure process.   (Interestingly, a committee in the Political Science Department at DePaul also evaluated Dershowitz's charges of academic misconduct, and found them wholly without merit.)

There is a website in support of Professor Finkelstein with an excellent and well-crafted open letter to the DePaul President and Provost raising questions about the grounds for the tenure denial, which I would urge readers concerned with academic freedom to sign.  The letter reads in relevant part:

We have seen a memo, dated March 22, 2007, from Charles Suchar, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to the University Board on Tenure and Promotion, recommending against tenure for Dr. Finkelstein, despite favorable votes at two levels of faculty review. Dean Suchar justifies his recommendation on the ground that Dr. Finkelstein’s scholarly work, though sound in its content, is often uncivil, disrespectful, mean-spirited, inflammatory, and so on, in its tone. We object to this weighting of criteria, especially when a scholar’s polemical style is cited as evidence that he lacks “values of collegiality.” The American Association of University Professors has explicitly challenged the use of criteria such as “collegiality” in tenure and promotion evaluations, precisely because these terms are subject to a wide range of interpretations. The AAUP rightly notes that criteria of this sort are often used to mask retribution as well as disciplinary or other biases. We note that they often stand in for political disagreement. The likelihood increases, in our view, when the criteria are couched as vague institutional principles, such as “personalism” and “Vincentian values.”

The "comments" section on the website contains the names of signatories to the letter, many of whom have added interesting comments.  The European historian Tony Judt (NYU) writes:

Norman Finkelstein and I have not always seen eye to eye and he has been very critical of me in print. And yes, he isn’t always polite or ‘respectful’. But that is a scholar’s privilege and has been for a thousand years. Precisely because of the controversial and highly politicised field in which he works, it is vital that Finkelstein’s tenure process be fair, free of all outside pressure and concerned exclusively with his qualities as scholar and teacher. Anything else will bring your university in serious public disrepute.

The political theorist Bertell Ollman (NYU) comments:

How should one deal with people who deserve strong criticism in a scholarly work?  By being clear and above board and supplying a lot of good evidence for the charges made. I would have thought that this answer was self-evident and that Norman Finkelstein has provided us all with a model of how that should be done. To claim, as his Dean has, that Finkelstein’s well documented criticisms of a few people who have shown they deserve such treatment, crosses some imaginary line of academic civility is both unbelievable and unheard of.

I was also pleased to see that some philosophers had contributed comments.  Philosopher Joseph Levine (U Mass/Amherst) writes:

I have read several of Prof. Finkelstein’s books, and listened to his commentary on current events in the Mideast on several occasions, and I have never seen or heard an “uncivil” comment. On the contrary, what I’ve seen and heard are sober, intelligent, and extremely well-informed analysis of both historical and current events. The idea that such an important scholar should be denied tenure is unthinkable. The fact that this is even a question sadly indicates the power of those forces in both academia and the media who just cannot tolerate any criticism of Israeli policy or an honest look at the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Philosopher Tomis Kapitan (Northern Illinois) concurs: 

I have been studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 30 years, and have frequently lectured and written about this important topic. During the past 15 years, I have found Mr. Finkelstein’s research to be immensely useful in shedding valuable light on relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and on the American role in shaping and perpetuating this conflict. Given the consistently high calibre of his research, it is beyond belief that the scholarly credentials of Mr. Finkelstein should be in doubt. Those who oppose Mr. Finkelstein’s ideas are anxious to silence him. it would be shameful if DePaul University acquiesces in this assault upon freedom of speech.

I hope other philosophers will join me, and Professors Levine and Kapitan, in signing this letter.

UPDATE:  John Gardner, the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, has added an apt comment in signing the letter:  "To my mind this business reveals only one person who should clearly not be enjoying the privileges and immunities of tenure, and that one person is not Norman Finkelstein."

The Facts about a Call by British Academics to "Boycott" Israeli Academics

Chris Bertram (Bristol) reports what is actually going on.  For my prior comments on these proposed boycotts, see here, here and here.

Evaluating the Finkelstein/Dershowitz Dispute

Frank Menetrez, a UCLA-trained lawyer and PhD philosopher, has published a very illuminating analysis of the main charges and counter-charges in this tenure battle about which we have written previously.   Not entirely surprisingly, it turns out that the rhetorical volume of Professor Dershowitz's charges is inversely proportional to their factual and analytical credibility.

Iraqi Doctor Who Disputes US Version of Death Tolls Denied Visa for Conference at U of Washington (Leiter)

Story here; an excerpt:

An Iraqi doctor who made international headlines after stating that civilian deaths in the Iraq war far exceeded officially reported numbers is not being allowed to travel to North America to meet other academics.

Riyadh Lafta and his colleagues have been trying for months to get a U.S. travel visa so the doctor could speak at a medical conference at the University of Washington today....

As an alternative, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., invited Lafta to deliver his lecture today, which was to have been broadcast by video to the UW. But this week, the British government denied him a four-hour transit visa for a stopover between the Middle East and Canada.

Lafta, an epidemiologist, teaches at Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine in Baghdad and co-wrote an October 2006 article about Iraqi civilian deaths in The Lancet, a respected British medical journal.

The UW's School of Public Health and Community Medicine invited him to talk about that study and elevated cancer levels, particularly affecting children, in southern Iraq, said Amy Hagopian, an acting assistant professor.

Hagopian, who is conducting research with Lafta, believes the Bush administration is purposely blocking his travel to the United States. "My hypothesis is the Bush administration was extremely threatened by The Lancet study," she said....

"What we were going to hear about is a public health disaster in Iraq," said Tim Takaro, an associate professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University.

Takaro, who also conducts research with Lafta, called the 2006 study in The Lancet well-researched. He said the death estimate of nearly 655,000 Iraqi civilians is 10 times larger than other studies.

"The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people. Both the British and U.S. governments have discounted these figures," he said.

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, who visited Iraq in 2002, wants to know more about cancer rates in Iraq and what Lafta has found.

"We end up with the State Department and God knows who putting their foot on a guy from being able to attend a medical conference," he said.

The Tenure Case of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul (Leiter)

Professor Finkelstein, a fierce critic of Israeli crimes and defender of the rights of the Palestinians, is embroiled in a tenure battle at DePaul University where he teaches.  There are informative pieces on this unfolding story here and here.  Particularly notable is the way in which Alan Dershowitz--the Harvard law professor, apologist for torture, and unabashed Zionist whose positions are generally to the right of Likud--has inserted himself into the process.  Indeed, he shows up in the comments at the former link to denounce Finkelstein as an "academic fraud" and The Chronicle of Higher Education article quotes him as calling Finkelstein "a propagandist, not a scholar."  Tough words coming from someone who has been embroiled in debates about his own academic integrity and about whom Judge Richard Posner has written, "Although he is a professor at Harvard Law School, he is not a scholar."

I have not read much of Professor Finkelstein's work, though I am inclined to agree with the first commentator here who remarks that, "Defending something called 'civil discourse' is always the favorite claim of deans and administrators seeking to fire people, bust unions, and marginalize critical views."  Professor Kirstein at Saint Xavier University also has a good line:  "Tonality is usually a red herring to destroy controversial speech that elites don’t like."  (Professor Dershowitz, wisely, does not make "civility" or "tone" an issue in his own opposition to Professor Finkelstein's bid for tenure--though why Professor Dershowitz is involved at all in this tenure case is, shall we say, a bit hard to explain in a principled way.) 

David Horowitz, Enemy of Academic Freedom (Leiter)

A useful critique of the latest from Horowitz here.

Paul Campos's Problem with the First Amendment and Academic Freedom (Leiter)

Paul Campos is the University of Colorado law professor who, disgracefully, called for Ward Churchill to be fired because of his views (though he later shifted gears to focus on the latecomer charges about plagiarism [most of which were not substantiated] and shoddy footnoting--there is a useful discussion of that topic here).  Whatever the constitutional status of "academic freedom" these days (and that is increasingly fuzzy), it is clear as day that, as a First Amendment matter, the state of Colorado can not fire Professor Churchill for holding moral and political views that others (even Professor Campos) find offensive or absurd.

Professor Campos, however, is an equal opportunity proponent of violating the First Amendment rights of academics at state institutions.  His newest target is Glenn Reynolds, aka "InstaIgnorance," the University of Tennessee law professor who uses his blog to shill for war, George Bush, and reactionary economic policies.   Professor Campos makes the correct observation that Professor Reynolds's contempt for human life rivals (indeed, probably exceeds) Professor Churchill's, though Professor Reynolds is somewhat better disposed, consistent with his moral parochialism, to American lives.  As Professor Campos correctly notes:

[J]ust as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he's now dutifully repeating the administration's claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq's civil war.

But the crux of Professor Campos's criticism relates to Reynolds's call for "killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists."  Professor Campos comments:

[E]ven if Iran were at war with the United States [which it is not], the intentional killing of civilian noncombatants is a war crime, as that term is defined by international treaties America has signed. Furthermore, government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.

How does a law professor, of all people, justify advocating murder? "I think it's perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries - like Iran - that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses," Reynolds says.

Now this kind of statement involves certain time-tested rhetorical techniques. First, make a provocative claim that happens to be false. In fact, no Iranian government official has ever said Iran wants to use nuclear weapons against the U.S. Then use this claim to defend actions, such as murdering civilians, which would remain immoral and illegal even if the claim happened to be true. Finally, condemn those who object to using lies to justify murder as "idiots," who don't understand the need to take strong and ruthless action when defending the fatherland from its enemies.

The use of propaganda to help bring about the murder of people you would like to kill has been especially favored by fascists. Fascism is marked by, among other things, extreme nationalism, contempt for legal restraints on state power, and the worship of violence.

And while it would perhaps be an exaggeration to call people like Reynolds and his fellow law professor Hugh Hewitt (who defended Reynolds' comments) fascists, it isn't an exaggeration to point out that these gentlemen sound very much like fascists when they encourage the American government to murder people.

All this raises several interesting questions. For instance, does academic freedom insulate a law professor from any institutional consequences when he advocates murder? Reynolds and Hewitt, after all, certainly didn't object when University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's celebration of the murder of American civilians raised serious questions about why the university had chosen to employ and tenure such a person, and led to an investigation of Churchill's academic record.

Indeed, Hewitt and Reynolds both went out of their way to publicize the Churchill affair, as an example of left-wing extremism in our universities.

Why does right-wing extremism in our universities, as represented by such things as law professors calling on the Bush administration to commit murder, get so much less attention?

This would have been a fine place to end, though anyone familiar with Professor Campos's record on the First Amendment rights of state university professors would realize what had to be coming:

Certainly, it's worth asking Reynolds' administrative superiors at the University of Tennessee what limits, if any, the terms and conditions of Reynolds' employment put on his behavior.

But there is no "behavior" at issue here for which it would be appropriate for anyone to make any inquiries with the University of Tennessee:  all there is is "speech," speech that is plainly not illegal (it poses no imminent danger of causing illegal conduct; nor is it illegal to express views about military strategy, even views that are predicated on tissues of confusions and false factual assumptions; nor is it illegal for a law professor to express the view that certain existing laws should be violated or repealed).  The First Amendment fully protects Reynolds's right to hold morally depraved views and to be an ignorant blowhard, just as it protects Professor Campos's right to note the fascist-undercurrent to Reynolds's rhetoric--indeed, just as it protects Campos's right to be a serial advocate for violating the constitutional rights of state university professors!  And part of that protection means that if anyone were to inquire with the University of Tennessee as to what it planned to do about Professor Reynolds's speech, the answer should be, "Absolutely nothing, it is none of our business."

These are not subtle points.  Why doesn't Professor Campos seem to understand them?

Florida Academics Can Not Use State Funds to Travel to Certain Countries (Leiter)

A federal court has now upheld the constitutionality of the law...

...restricting students, faculty members, and researchers at the state's public colleges and universities from traveling to Cuba and four other countries that the U.S. government considers terrorist states....

Faculty members had asked the judge to lift the travel restrictions, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment rights and impinged on the federal government's ability to regulate foreign commerce....

The law prevents students, professors, and researchers at public universities and community colleges in Florida from using state or federal funds, or private foundation grants administered by their institutions, to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Those at private colleges in Florida are forbidden to use state funds for that purpose.

Putting aside the fact that if the Florida legislature really wanted to prevent travel to states that support terrorism, they would have had to bar all domestic travel with state funds by its professors (or at least travel to Miami, one of the major launching pads for terrorism in the Northern hemisphere--for example), this law clearly impinges the academic freedom of all those historians, sociologists, economists, archaeologists, etc. who might have sound scholarly reasons to need to visit these countries.  (That it violates the ideal of academic freedom does not, alas, mean it violates the First Amendment, especially given the increasingly cramped interpretation the courts have given to academic freedom as a constitutional right.)  It is also a pointless embarrassment for the state universities in Florida.

Philosopher Kurt Smith v. Pathological Liar David Horowitz, Round II (Leiter)

We remarked on round I here; in round II, Professor Smith calls out Mr. Horowitz on a series of lies and fabrications about events at Bloomsburg University, where Professor Smith teaches.  Professor Smith's conclusion is apt:

Horowitz would be more help to conservatives by either learning to tell the truth or shutting up. I have no doubts that conservatives are just as embarrassed as are centrists and liberals by his fabrications, misrepresentations and generally outrageous behavior.  He only serves to scare sober minds away from the conservative movement.  As we have seen in Horowitz's tirade against everyone on the Select Committee who boldly stood their ground, and who rejected his rhetoric and falsehoods, including those Republicans on the committee who voted to remove the Horowitz-Armstrong manifesto (the report's Summary), all who disagree with him are enemies--including the very conservatives he claims to represent. I think that it's time for whoever pulls his purse-strings to give the man a well-earned "time out."       

Philosopher Kurt Smith Pulverizes Pathological Liar Horowitz (Leiter)

Nice account of their recent "debate" at Bloomsburg University here:

David Horowitz, the former wacky-left editor of Ramparts magazine turned wacky right smear-monger and foundation pimp, came to Bloomsburg University in rural central Pennsylvania to pick up a $7000 check and spout lies and misinformation in a debate with local college philosophy professor Kurt Smith....

The debate was decidedly one-sided, with Horowitz offering one misstatement of fact after another, and Smith batting them down with the dispatch of a seasoned squash player.

At the start of the debate, Smith explained to the assembled audience of mostly Bloomsburg U. students that Horowitz, during the several years since the American invasion of Iraq, has been following the lead of the right-wing American Council of Trustees and Alumni, attacking academia for alleged left-wing bias, Under the leadership of disgraced Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney consort Lynn Cheney, ACTA since 9-11 has been hounding liberal academics, accusing them of being disloyal-indeed of being the only segment of American society to be "unpatriotic."

Smith explained that in Pennsylvania, where the Republican-led legislature last spring impaneled a committee to investigate alleged liberal bias on state college campuses, Horowitz had come and testified, citing alleged cases of student abuse-all of which proved to be bogus. Smith then declared that Horowitz's proposed "Academic Bill of Rights," which in some versions would give students the right to sue their professors for allegedly political grading or for speaking outside of their formal field of study, was nothing but "politics pure and simple-it's about seeking a place for right-wing propaganda" in the university.

Horowitz attempted to deny that he was seeking to punish liberal faculty, claiming his proposed bill had "no teeth." He insisted that he had "nothing against" liberal professors and in no way sought to single anyone out.

This claim, however, was belied by the table in the lobby piled high with his latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a libel-filled compendium of factual errors and innuendo (even the title is erroneous-there are only 100 dangerous professors listed!) passing itself off as scholarship....

During the debate, Horowitz attributed the failure of the Pennsylvania legislative Academic Bill of Rights committee to recommend any action (the Republican-run committee, after months of hearings, concluded that there was no evidence of a "liberal bias" problem or of professorial "indoctrination" of students on the state's campuses), to "sabotage" by the Democratic co-chair of the committee, State Assemblyman Lawrence Curry, a professor of history in Philadelphia. Curry, he charged, had repeatedly denounced the hearings as "McCarthyite." In fact, the soft-spoken Curry never made such a statement at the hearings, and only gently insisted that Horowitz and the panel's right-wing chair, Assemblyman Gibson "Gib" Armstrong, supply facts to back their fevered charges-which neither ever did....

Horowitz's real reason for singling out Rep. Curry as a villain is that Curry, during a televised hearing at Temple University last spring, exposed one of Horowitz's most outrageous "examples" of liberal professorial abuse and lack of adequate patriotism as a fabrication and a fraud, and had the right-wing propagandist reduced to an incoherent sputtering. This particular "example" of liberal indoctrination was a supposed biology professor at a Pennsylvania university who gave his class a showing of Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 911." As Curry said, it never happened.

Horowitz tried the same tactic again in the Bloomburg U. debate, this time using an already discredited "example": the alleged case of a student, Kelly Keehan, purportedly an opponent of abortion who was said to have been "forced" by a woman's studies professor at Penn State to chant "abortion, abortion, abortion!" until she was in tears. At a Pennsylvania legislative hearing, Horowitz had declined to even name the school at which this alleged incident occurred. He subsequently claimed it was at Penn State. But in last week's debate, Smith observed that no such student has ever come forward with a complaint, no such incident was ever reported as having occurred at Penn State, and that in all probability, the incident never happened....

Smith won boisterous applause for insisting that university classrooms are not public spaces where all speakers have equal rights. In the classroom, he asserted, there is a natural asymmetry, as a consequence of the professor's "experience and credentials." In a dig that caused Horowitz to visibly stiffen, Smith said, "You only have a master's degree in English, have never sat on a hiring committee, and never taught, and yet you are expressing expertise about higher education." He concluded, turning to the audience, "Mr. Horowitz should follow his own advice about professors sticking to their subject areas. Since he has no experience in higher education, he should not offer to solve higher education's problems. He's feigning to be an academic."

Horowitz pointedly refused to shake Smith's hand in the Green Room before the event began, even when invited to do so by the university president, who was moderating the event....

Kudos to Professor Smith!

Shame on BYU (Nadelhoffer)

The BYU Department of Philosophy has failed to re-hire Jeffrey Nielsen—an adjunct professor—because of an opinion piece he published in the Salt Lake Tribune concerning gay marriage.  Daniel Graham—the department chair—gave the following explanation to Professor Nielsen:

In accordance with the order of the church, we do not consider it our responsibility to correct, contradict or dismiss official pronouncements of the church. Since you have chosen to contradict and oppose the church in an area of great concern to church leaders, and to do so in a public forum, we will not rehire you after the current term is over.

In the event that you feel the need to tell BYU how disgraceful their treatment of Professor Nielsen has been, the president of the university can be reached here.

UPDATE:  For more about BYU's treatment of Nielsen, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Politicized Hiring Decisions at Yale? (Leiter)

Old news, of course, but it has an amazing ability to come in fresh versions.  A sensible set of remarks from John Wilson of College Freedom in the comments at InsideHigherEd:

Lobbying of a university not to hire a particular professor is a serious threat to academic freedom. The decision to hire or not hire should be based on merit, not politics. If Yale was influenced by this campaign (and we’d all like to know the truth), then it is a danger to academic freedom. Public (or private) campaigns to pressure universities not to hire someone because of their politics are morally wrong. Juan Cole would be the first professor on David Horowitz’s list to be so treated. Criticism of Juan Cole is perfectly acceptable. However, it should be criticism of his views, not a call for a blacklist.

Listening to the delusional moaning of right-wingers, you wouldn't realize that, as usual in the U.S., the actual victims of political persecution in the universities--folks who lose jobs--are almost all on the left.  (In this case, the damage to the target, Professor Cole, is, happily, minimal, as he remains a professor at a leading research university, and part of one of the top History Departments in the nation.)

ADDENDUM:  Given the byzantine hiring process at Yale, it's perhaps worth noting that politics might not explain the outcome (hence the question mark in the title).  Although it is true the appointment had been approved at the departmental level, it is not uncommon for those decisions to be overturned higher up.  In this case, though, given the volume of the orchestrated attacks by the right-wing on Professor Cole, it seems a plausible assumption that the political attacks were a significant factor in the decision to reverse the departmental recommendations.

A Modest Proposal: Boycott American Academics Too! (Leiter)

This NYU professor has the right idea.

Sign Petition Protesting Scurrilous Charge of "Anti-Semitism" Against Mearsheimer & Walt (Leiter)

The Mearsheimer & Walt article on "The Israel Lobby" is pretty thin analytically, for reasons noted by Chomsky, but that is independent of the merits of this petition (prepared by historian Juan Cole) which calls on leading Jewish organizations and leaders to stop smearing Mearsheimer and Walt as "anti-semites."  I encourage readers to sign--especially if you share my view that Mearsheimer & Walt's analysis isn't very plausible.  Academic freedom has to include the right to make bad arguments too without being subjected to scurrilous and baseless charges of "anti-semitism."

Pomona Prof "Visited" by FBI Because of His Views on Venezuela (Leiter)

His views don't, needless to say, mirror the pack of lies emanating from Washington.  Details here; an excerpt:

A Pomona College professor who is an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Venezuela was questioned on March 7th by two agents from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in what he calls an act of intimidation.

The detectives visited Miguel Tinker-Salas during his office hours at about 2:40 or 2:45 pm Wednesday. They questioned him for about 20 minutes in his office at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif....

According to Tinker-Salas, the agents told him they were interested in the Venezuelan community and concerned that it may be involved in terrorism. They asked him if he had relationships with the Venezuelan embassy or consulate, and if anyone in the Venezuelan government had asked him to speak out about Venezuela-related matters.

"They were fishing," says Tinker-Salas, "to intimidate and silence those who have a critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy."

After they left, several students outside Tinker-Salas' office told him the detectives had asked them about his background, his classes and his politics, and even took note of the cartoons on his door.

Tinker-Salas says the detectives told him this was part of a larger policy to interview people on various campuses....

A Latin American and Chicano histories professor, Tinker-Salas believes he was targeted as a result of his outspoken politics regarding the U.S. policy toward Venezuela and Latin America. Tinker-Salas was born in Venezuela and is a U.S. citizen, having lived in the United States since high school. A noted historian and commentator on CNN en Español, he has been open about his conditional support for the democratically elected government of President Hugo Chavez and critical of the U.S. attempt to "undermine democracy" in Latin America.

According to the ACLU of Colorado, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, which operates across the country, is violating First Amendment rights by equating nonviolent protest with domestic terrorism.

"The FBI is unjustifiably treating nonviolent public protest as though it were domestic terrorism," said Mark Silverstein, Legal Director of the Colorado ACLU, following the release of new documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Dec. 8, 2005.

Resignation of Harvard President Summers (Leiter)

Larry Summers, President of Harvard, has resigned.  (Thanks to the many readers who e-mailed me links.)  What Kieran Healy (Sociology, Arizona) says about the resignation is consistent with what I've heard from various folks, namely, that his unlovely bedside manner cost him a lot of support.  Here are my comments on the earlier brouhaha about his ignorant remarks on women in the sciences, which was only the tip of the iceberg as to why he irritated his faculty.  His departure, though, is probably a loss for Harvard:  he forced the Harvard Law School to have actual tenure standards, and he had rather sensible instincts about academic merit.  (He was also the President who oversaw a total change in tenure policies in the Harvard Philosophy Department [note:  see Update below]--something that, if it had happened 20 years ago, might have prevented Harvard's slide from the very top ranks of U.S. departments.)  Yes, he was a somewhat arrogant economist who didn't know what he didn't know.  And the first rule of university administration is:  if you are an administrator, you have no free speech rights.  The combination of the former attribute, together with his failure to honor the second rule, probably doomed his tenure.

UPDATE:  Richard Moran, Chair of the Harvard Philosophy Department, writes:  "In the...cases [of Siegel, Pryor, and Simmons, the tenure decisions during Summers's Presidency] Summers played no role until the final stage of approval, as is normal across the University. These decisions were all initiated from the Philosophy Department, and not in response to any change in policy from the President. Insofar as there is now an initiative across Harvard to make it a more realistically tenure-track place, this is an initiative from former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Bill Kirby."  The original posting wrongly implied that President Summers played a role specifically in the Philosophy Department, which was not my intent.  He certainly did trumpet publically the need to tenure from within the junior ranks at Harvard, though as Professor Moran reports, this initiative apparently came from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.  (President Summers's role in tenure cases in the Law School has been more significant, based on reports from faculty.)