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.
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