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.)
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