Can Academic Freedom and “At-Will” Employment Co-Exist?

Inside Higher Education

April 13, 2007

Bastyr University violated the academic freedom of three faculty members when their contracts were not renewed, by failing to have adequate grievance procedures, and by failing to provide tenure or any meaningful job security, according to an investigation by the American Association of University Professors.

The three faculty members had taught at the university, at which faculty members are “at will” employees, for 12, 9 and 4 years. In one case, the professor who was not renewed had been given a negative performance review, largely over issues of whether she intimidated people with her strong positions, but in all three cases, the final decision was abrupt — and similar to a dismissal in that they immediately lost computer access and had to clear out their offices. Bastyr, located outside Seattle, describes itself as focusing on “natural health sciences,” and is known for combining some Eastern traditions of medicine with Western scientific traditions.

In all three professors’ cases, university officials said that the institution’s evolving needs meant that the professors were no longer needed. But the AAUP noted that all three had been involved in disputes with their superiors over university policies, and that many faculty members backed all three professors.

“In each of the three cases discussed in this report, there is credible evidence that a major motivating factor for the dismissals was the faculty member’s expression of views on teaching methods, program design, and institutional policies in areas such as faculty compensation and governance,” the AAUP report on its investigation said.

The university said that because the three were not fired, but were just told that their contracts were not being renewed, they had no grievance rights. The AAUP said that faculty members who have worked longer than normal tenure review periods should be treated as if they did have job protections. And in all cases, the AAUP said, some grievance procedure is needed. While the AAUP did not say definitively that the three lost their positions for dissent, the association said that a faculty review committee could have made such a determination.

The case, the AAUP said, illustrates the failings of “at will” employment for faculty members. The report cited a previous association study of the issue, which found the following: “Employment-at-will contracts are by definition inimical to academic freedom and academic due process, because their contractual provisions permit infringements on what academic freedom is designed to protect. Since faculty members under at-will contracts serve at the administration’s pleasure, their services can be terminated at any point because an administrator objects to any aspect of their academic performance, communications as a citizen, or positions on academic governance — or simply to their personalities. Should this happen, these faculty members have no recourse, since the conditions of their appointment leave them without the procedural safeguards of academic due process.”

Bastyr officials did not respond to e-mail or phone messages.

But the AAUP report included the university’s response to a draft of the association’s findings. The university stressed in the response that, while the AAUP may not like “at will” employment, Bastyr is open about its use, and the professors whose contracts were not renewed should have known that was a possibility.

“Bastyr administrators stated that all faculty at Bastyr University not only sign contracts presented to them with the language of potential non-renewal intact, but they also sign a form upon hire that indicates that they have read the faculty handbook and agree to abide by its contents,” the AAUP report said, in quoting the university. “All faculty members who sign contracts as well as the abovementioned form are highly educated adult professionals acting under no coercion whatsoever. While the AAUP is critical of its procedures, Bastyr University did follow them and the written agreements entered into with each of these individuals.”

— Scott Jaschik

Robert Jensen to speak at DePaul

Professor Robert Jensen Professor of Journalist and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will be speaking in DePaul’s Lincoln Park Student Center (Room 314 A/B) next Thursday (May 3rd) at 7 p.m. Jensen’s talk is entitled “Defending Academic Freedom in Reactionary Times: Assessing to the Threat, Responding to the Challenge.”

Jensen is a First Amendment scholar who specializes in exposing media censorship, frequently focusing on how market constraints often condition journalists to avoid difficult stories that are of public interest. In addition, he has written extensively on race, pornography, and sexual violence. Some of his recent books include Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Reclaiming Our Humanity and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting, Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005). His forthcoming book is entitled Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End, 2007).

I hope you will consider attending Jensen’s lecture next Thursday evening.

The Finkelstein Affair

The Finkelstein Affair

By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 23, 2007

Academic hiring and promotion processes are mysterious procedures poorly understood by the public. While supposedly designed to ensure quality control and the maintenance of standards of scholarship, in fact they are all too often subordinated to intentional subversion, including when this is done out of political ideology.

The most notorious example in recent days of corruption of the promotion process has been the attempt by radical leftist faculty members at DePaul University to obtain tenure for the pseudo-scholar and Holocaust trivializer Norman Finkelstein. The Finkelstein affair is unusual in that the politicization has been exposed so thoroughly in the media and is now so obvious and explicit. In part, this has been thanks to the fact that Finkelstein himself, or his close followers, have published the supposedly classified secret documents related to his promotion on the web. How can it be that someone like Finkelstein was hired in the first place, especially by an institution with ties to the church and committed to Catholic ethical standards? Ironically, the answer was provided inadvertently by Finkelstein and his followers when they publicized (probably illegally) these key documents related to his tenure bid. These documents show how easy it is for extremists with no scholarly credentials to recruit on their behalf respected academics who share their political agenda.

Finkelstein, the assistant professor in political science at DePaul University best known for his cheerleading the Hizbollah and his endless smearing of Holocaust survivors, has a completely empty record of academic publication. He has never produced a single paper published in a refereed scholarly journal. Instead, he turns out one anti-Semitic book after another, as well as hate screeds for propaganda magazines and web sites. His “books” are published by firms making editorial decisions based on commercial considerations rather than the quality of their scholarship.

Finkelstein’s long history of Jew-baiting is by now well known, as is his history of vulgarity and juvenile smear mongering. Finkelstein has proclaimed Holocaust denier David Irving (who insists there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz) a great historian. Finkelstein’s personal web site is a collection of bigotries, including death threats and pornographic cartoons, as well as countless smug smears against all Holocaust survivors. Finkelstein’s “books” have been dismissed as pseudo-scholarship by nearly every serious historian to review them. He has used his position at DePaul University in Chicago to promote his open celebration of Middle East terrorism. He maintains the most intimate ties with Holocaust Deniers and he is himself considered by the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and many others to be a Holocaust Denier.

It would be hard to find a more illuminating lesson about the dark side of campus hiring and promotion than the Finkelstein affair. From the classified documents that Finkelstein himself has illicitly (and probably illegally) published about his promotion, anyone can see the obvious political forces at work. Finkelstein was hired in the first place because his crude anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism endeared him to academic radicals generally and to those who dominate the political science department at DePaul in particular. Despite the fact that Finkelstein’s antics have served to make DePaul into something of an international laughingstock of higher education, the political science department recommended granting Finkelstein tenure by a vote of 9 to 3. Were Finkelstein pro-Israel, he would not have stood a chance of getting tenure with his existing “academic record.”

The syllabi of Finkelstein’s courses have appeared on the web and they consist of nothing more than one-sided political indoctrination. Naturally, his courses are popular among his students, who just happen to be the radical and jihadi DePaul students, not driven away by his in-classroom harangues. The politically conscripted tenure committee at DePaul lauded his “teaching popularity” on such a basis. Even more amazingly, it cited Finkelstein’s frequent anti-Semitic speeches and racist public incitements, including his famous collaborations with the Hizbollah and with neo-Nazi organizations, as valuable “service to the university.”

To achieve their goal, his political science comrades saw to it that only two outside “experts” wrote letters of evaluation for Finkelstein’s tenure consideration. These two happen to share Finkelstein’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agendas. The first was John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, whose tract written with Stephen Walt maintaining that the American media and America’s foreign policy is controlled by a Jewish cabal has made him infamous. His assault on Israel and American Jews has made him a propaganda favorite of radical Islamic groups like CAIR, and he makes no secret either of his antipathy for Israel nor his desire to see America weakened and “deterred.”

The second academic reference for Finkelstein was provided by Professor Ian Lustick, of the University of Pennsylvania, who has hosted Finkelstein several times at Penn, is a far leftist, anti-America and unabashedly anti-Israel. He earned some notoriety for his expressing regret that America did not lose more soldiers in the campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lustick likes to describe America’s foreign policy as being under the control of a “cabal” (his word); writing in the anti-American, anti-Israel magazine, The Nation, a magazine hostile to America and Israel and sympathetic to radical Islamicists, wrote:

“This campaign for an invasion of Iraq is thus aptly understood as a supply-side war because it is not driven by a particular threat, a particularly accentuated threat or a “demand” for war associated with the struggle against Al Qaeda, but because of the combination of an enormous supply of military power and political capital and the proximity to the highest echelons of the American government of a small cabal long ago committed to just this sort of war.”

His deconstruction of terrorism runs like this:

“Lustick dismisses the concept of terrorism as a valid conceptual term. Instead, he embraces what he terms an ‘extensive’, as opposed to an ‘intensive’, definition of terrorism that is not bound by any limiting ‘conditions’. This, he claims, enables one to classify activities as ‘terrorist’ if they encompass any violent ‘actions and threats’ by governmental militaries and even ‘tax collectors’, as well as insurgents.”

Lustick was an instrumental player in getting a pro-Israel professor at Penn, Francisco Gil-White, fired. Gil-White did not benefit from the same mass political conscription on his behalf that Finkelstein enjoys. Lustick is an advocate on behalf of, and evidently sees himself a member of, the “New Historian” group of pseudo-academics who rewrite Middle East history from the Arab point of view. He has close ties the with Michael Lerner, editor of the radical magazine Tikkun, and is active in several anti-Israel leftist groups.

DePaul’s recruitment of Lustick and Mearsheimer to “evaluate” Finkelstein’s “scholarship” is a bit like asking Hezbollah imam, Hassan Nasrallah, to evaluate Noam Chomsky’s service to America.

But Lustick and Mearsheimer have not been the only professors to supply academic support services on behalf of Norman Finkelstein. The moment news came out that the Dean at DePaul was seeking to deny Finkelstein tenure, an outpouring of support for Finkelstein’s “scholarship” took place from tenured radicals and academic jihadi. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) which is boycotting a scholarship program designed to train American students in Arabic to help their country’s defense publicly endorsed Finkelstein’s tenure bid. Legions of other political extremists, from DePaul’s Palestinian radicals to Professor Peter N. Kirstein who regards America as a terrorist state, to journalist Robert Fisk (who holds identical views), joined in support of Finkelstein’s tenure.

In the midst of the Ward Churchill affair a couple of years back, one of the key questions the media failed to raise was how a charlatan like Churchill could have been hired and promoted at a major university in the first place. After all, his “academic record” was little more than a joke, a collection of shallow anti-American hate propaganda tracts. He was a notorious liar, faking his Indian ethnicity, and had been involved in academic fraud. So how on earth could a serious university have hired him?

These mysteries are explainable only by understanding how academic hiring and promotion take place, and how that process may be subverted and corrupted. This process is largely unknown to the general public and even to students and alumni. In far too many schools, the process is easily subordinated to political agendas. In all cases, the outward appearance of the de jure hiring and promotion procedures work pretty much in a similar manner. The academic records of faculty members are reviewed, evaluations from outside experts are solicited. The publication and teaching records of the candidate are critically examined. Campus promotion committees and other university officials form an opinion and make recommendations.

All very nice, on paper.

The problem is that the system lends itself to easy manipulation, especially by those operating on behalf of a political agenda. Every stage of the faculty evaluation process can be twisted and perverted by those seeking to hire or promote someone out of a sense of personal or political solidarity. This subversion may be the greatest open secret in all of academia. My guess is that in any honest survey of professors, nearly every one could attest to knowing of such cases. The result of this subversion of academic hiring and promotion is that hundreds, and probably thousands, of faculty members with ludicrous and embarrassingly insipid academic records have been hired and tenured by the university system as acts of political and personal solidarity.

Occasionally, university insiders rebel against the attempt to impose upon them politicized hiring decisions, sometimes with the help of outraged alumni. The prospective hiring last year of Juan Cole by Yale University was regarded by many as a done deal until pressures forced the university to take a clear and unbiased look at his real academic record. At the University of Colorado, Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano recently issued a notice of intent to dismiss Churchill from his faculty position there, defying the massive leftist public campaign on Churchill’s behalf. Some other less-publicized rebellions have similarly blocked attempts at politicized hiring and promotion.

Two things are certain. Not a single one of the academics raving about Finkelstein’s remarkable “scholarship” would be supporting him if it were not for his hatred of Israel and America — in short his political credentials as a member in good standing of the academic left.

Elliot Abrams on Noam Chomsky

PDF original of Elliot Abrams’ Letter on State Department letterhead

From: Noam Chomsky
To: Pretext Listserv
Sent: 9/15/2004 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: ma>nc: index on censorship

The story is in fact more interesting and complex.  Some of it is mentioned in chapter 4, and considerably more in the article by Alexander Cockburn cited in the footnote, based on material leaked to journalists in England.  There’s more, in fact, not uninteresting. Perhaps it will be told one day.

On the significance of the letter itself, my own view is as expressed in the chapter: “What the letter reveals is the deep totalitarian streak in the mentality of leading figures in the Reagan administration: not even the tiniest opening must be allowed to unacceptable thought.” And as I
go on to say, they are not alone, though they were at an extreme end of the spectrum, and their current inheritors are clustered even more at that extreme.  We can add more about the significance today: Abrams was appointed by Bush II to the top position on Middle East Policy in the National Security Council.

Turning to your question — “What does the controversy that ensued, when
the article was published, tells us about the intellectual communities within which we all travel” — I think it might be rephrased: “What does the lack of controversy that ensued tell us about the intellectual communities within which we all travel.”  In England, the tremendous and unprecedented attack on the journal and its editor for daring to step
out of line did elicit some controversy, mostly denials from thosen implicated.  In the US, I don’t recall anything beyond the Cockburn article.   I don’t recall anything in print about the Abrams letter. Perhaps — probably — I’ve forgotten some reactions, but I’m pretty sure they were slight at most.  That presumably means that the events are considered quite normal and appropriate within the dominant intellectual culture.

Turning to your analogy, the reaction would no doubt have been dramatically different.  Which also tells us something, perhaps.

Noam Chomsky

From: MAbra68114[at]aol.com
To: PRETEXT Listserv
Sent: 9/14/2004 7:08 PM
Subject: QUESTION FOR NOAM CHOMSKY (INDEX ON CENSORSHIP)

Dear Noam:

Although the letter below (at the very end of the message) appears at the beginning of chapter 4 of your Pirates and Emperors Old and New, I think it has some relevance for discussions about H & S and some of the questions that have arisen over the last week about intellectual intervention and affairs of state. Elliot Abrams, now head of Middle East Affairs for the National Security Council, wrote this letter in 1986 (when he was head of Central American affairs at the State Dept.) to the editor of The Index on Censorship, a journal devoted to exposing censorship throughout the world. Abrams was indicted for lying to Congress in 1986, but was pardoned by Bush I. What’s remarkable about the letter is that it was written on State Dept. letterhead, suggesting that the Index on Censorship had not done an effective enough job in censoring your views on the Middle East and that Abrams was, in fact, speaking as a U.S. government official. Abrams wrote his letter in response to your “American Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East,” an article that questioned the very vocabulary framing discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In this article, you
discussed in detail how the phrase “peace process”– through a form of Newspeak–has been completely evacuated of meaning. Within the Newspeak lexicon, the whole world waits for the Palestinians to climb aboard the peace process. It’s not necessary, of course, to ask whether U.S. or Israel are aboard because the peace will be fashioned on their terms.

You suggest that there is a doctrinally enforced unwillingness among the American intelligentsia to critically probe some of the propositions that govern the U.S.-Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. This Newspeak: 1)leaves out mention of the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population (can’t be mentioned); 2) can’t articulate, much less fathom, that the U.S. and Israel have been actually blocking a comprehensive diplomatic settlement in the region for over thirty years (bombing of Lebanon occurred in 1982 because of the prospect of peace); 3)won’t recognize the racist assumptions that govern the “rejectionist” stance, (Palestinians are portrayed as rejecting the territorial rights
of Israel, but the converse can’t be articulated) which if stated openly, would not be tolerated by the American general public, e.g., that Arabs are somehow civilizationally deficient; and 4) assures that the “security threats” will be those that Israel faces; no one ever asks whether or not Israel and the U.S. pose a security threat to the Palestinians. As a thought experiment, notice how when a “six-week cessation in violence” or a “new outbreak of violence” is reported by the U.S. press, it’s when Palestinians commit violence. However, when Palestinians are murdered it’s not considered murder or violence. All in all, your article highlighted the degree of discipline and level of commitment that can be maintained within a well-functioning propaganda system. Why do you cherish Abrams’ letter so much and what does it mean that your article caught the attention of a state department official?
For a state department official to write to an English journal, devoted to examining censorship, is perhaps comparable to a Soviet commisar writing to _In These Times_ here in the U.S. because it published the views of a Soviet dissident. What does the controversy that ensued, when the article was published, tells us about the intellectual communities
within which we all travel?

Thanks, Matthew Abraham

*************************************

United States Department of State
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs
Washington, D.C. 20520

July 29, 1986

Mr. Dan Jacobson
36 Cranbourne Gardens
London NW 11 OHP
England

Dear Dan:
Forgive me for writing to you again in your capacity as a Director and
Member of the Editorial Board of Index on Censorship, but I can’t
resist. In the latest issue which I have, July/August 1986, there
appears a truly astonishing article, beginning on p. 2 and continuing at
great length. This article is an attack on the United States, the United
States government, and the United States Press by Noam Chomsky.

You probably know about Chomsky: he is a fanatical defender of the
PLO who has set new standards for intellectual dishonesty and personal
vindictiveness in his writings about the Middle East. There really isn’t
anyone left in the U.S.–without regard to politics– who takes Chomsky
seriously in view of his astonishing record. I therefore find it
inexplicable that he is given fully three pages to go on with his attack
on one of the freest presses in the world. Clearly giving him this much
space lends a certain respectability to his disreputable efforts. Can
it be that your editors simply do not know who Chomsky is and are
unfamiliar with his record? Can it be, fully familiar with him, they
nevertheless decided to give him this platform?

Sincerely,

Elliot Abrams

Webmistrix’s note: See also Index on Censorship Affair for context.

Noam Chomsky on Suppression of Clinton’s helicopter sale to Israel

From: Noam Chomsky
Date: Apr 20, 2007 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: D.
To: Matthew Abraham

In fact, I do have direct evidence of the suppression. I joined a group of a few people who spent several hours with Globe editors in mid-October discussing their coverage of the Israel-Arab conflict. I kept insistently bringing up the question why they were not publishing the story about the Clinton sale of military helicopters — the biggest in a decade — right at the time that these helicopters were being used to attack civilian complexes. I know some of them personally. There were polite nods, etc., but it was clear that they were not going to publish such material about the Clinton administration, that they knew I knew that they wouldn’t, and that they (and I knew that they would get away with it easily in the reigning intellectual culture. I wrote about it several times, but the editors understand that dissident material, no matter how well documented, doesn’t exist. I wouldn’t expect Klein to know it, but Weiler is a serious commentator, and he’s never seen it either, though it is in easily accessible books and articles.

But my personal experience is not really relevant. What is readily available in print provides more than sufficient evidence. And of course this is only one example of a mountain of similar material, in print and ignored, supporting the same conclusions.

Noam

Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors

Dershowitz and Chomsky on US Aid to Israel

Attorneys Hear Dershowitz Make Compelling “Case for Israel” at JUF Annual Lawyers Division Dinner

Webmistrix’s note: On June 3, 2004, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz shored up the faith among supporters of Israel at the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago’s annual Lawyers Division dinner at the downtown Chicago Hyatt Regency. Before the audience of approximately 2,500, which included 50 Jenner and Block attorneys, Dershowitz made “The Case for Israel,” the title of Dershowitz’s 2003 book (See: Alan Dershowitz Exposed: What if a Harvard Student Did This?). In 2004, Jenner and Block partner, John Simon, became chair of DePaul University’s Board of Trustees. At this time, it is unknown what connections–if any–exist between Professor Dershowitz and Mr. Simon. Perhaps it’s all merely a coincidence.

Attorneys Hear Dershowitz Make Compelling “Case for Israel” at JUF Annual Lawyers Division Dinner

6/7/2004

Nearly 50 Jenner & Block attorneys and summer associates on June 3 attended the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago’s annual Lawyers Division dinner at downtown’s Hyatt Regency. The keynote address for the JUF’s popular fundraising event was delivered by Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who argued the “Case for Israel,” also the name of a recently-published book, and received a standing ovation from the 2,500 attendees upon concluding his remarks.

Jenner & Block’s support of the JUF was again spearheaded by Partner Debbie L. Berman, who recently joined the JUF/JF board of directors headed by Chairman Lester J. Rosenberg and President Steven B. Nasatir. Historically this appointed post is awarded to some of the most prominent people in the Chicagoland Business Community.

Last year, the Jewish Federation raised and allocated nearly $44 million to local agencies and charities of all faiths and another $52 million was devoted to overseas needs across the globe.

Up for tenure and under fire

Up for tenure and under fire

By Michael Scharff
Princetonian Staff Writer

In a heated back-and-forth between two high-profile scholars, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz has in recent months campaigned for the denial of Norman Finkelstein GS ’88’s bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.

Dershowitz’s objections have focused on numerous articles authored by Finkelstein, who is Jewish, which contend that Jews in Israel and America have conspired to use the Holocaust to oppress Palestinians and extract compensation money from Europe.

On April 13, Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science, went before a review committee for the third and final step in his tenure bid. Finkelstein’s department has backed his bid, but some administrators have refused to support him. DePaul will not disclose the results of the meeting until next month.

“My thoughts have been the same all along,” Finkelstein said in an interview. “Had the case not been politicized and had external pressures not been brought to bear on the university, I am confident based on the record that I would have sailed through the tenure process.”

Dershowitz contends that his opposition to Finkelstein’s tenure is not motivated by any personal animosity toward Finkelstein — who accused Dershowitz of plagiarism on a 2003 radio program — but rather by a sense of responsibility to inform the academic community of the dangers that would come with extending tenure to Finkelstein.

“He has no basis for getting tenure, [since] he writes these outrageous things,” Dershowitz said, referring to Finkelstein’s arguments regarding Israel and the Holocaust. “It would be an absolute scandal … should he even be considered for tenure.”

Dershowitz added that he weighed in on Finkelstein’s tenure bid only after the former chairman of the school’s political science department reached out to him and invited him to assess Finkelstein’s scholarship.

After researching Finkelstein’s published scholarship, Dershowitz concluded that Finkelstein simply has not done work worthy of tenure. “His tenure should not be denied on the basis of ideology,” he said, “but his tenure should be denied because his scholarship is nothing but ideology … there is simply no scholarship.

DePaul spokeswoman Denise Mattson declined to comment on the issue, saying that the tenure process is confidential while discussions are ongoing.

Finkelstein’s writings have been called hostile to the global Jewish community and to the families of Holocaust victims. But, despite the increasing scrutiny of his work, Finkelstein — who earned his Ph.D. in politics and wrote his dissertation on the theory of Zionism — said he won’t back down.

“[The Holocaust has] been used primarily as a weapon to immunize Israel from criticisms,” he said, “so that whenever Israel is accused of committing human rights violations we are told to remember the Nazi Holocaust as if it grants specific immunization.” His parents are Holocaust survivors.

The quarrel between the two professors dates back to 2003, when both men appeared on the radio program “Democracy Now.” Dershowitz had expected to debate MIT linguist and noted left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky, but Chomsky cancelled and Finkelstein filled in.

During the program, Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of plagarizing when writing his then-recently published book, “The Case for Israel.”

Finkelstein said that after subjecting Dershowitz’s book to a “line-byline examination,” he found that “the results were very revealing and not very flattering,” adding that he found evidence of “massive fabrication and falsification of sources” in Dershowitz’s work. “In my opinion,” Finkelstein said, “Professor Dershowitz did not write large parts of the book.”

Finkelstein later included his criticisms of Dershowitz, including the accusations of plagiarism, in his 2005 book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.”

Dershowitz denied the charges of plagiarism. “I write every word of every book,” he said in an interview.

But Finkelstein said he suspects the current spat is about personal grievances, not academic work.

“I do not think it’s pure vindictiveness,” Finkelstein said of Dershowitz’s opposition to his tenure bid. “I think Professor Dershowitz suffered a real blow to his reputation on account of my book, and since then, he has been desperately trying to discredit me.”

Despite its heated rhetoric, the DePaul controversy is not unique in academia. At many schools, administrators and senior faculty have difficulty in deciding whether to draw a line between scholarship and political views when evaluating candidates for tenure.

Princeton does not take professors’ political views into account while making its tenure decisions, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an e-mail.

Neither Finkelstein nor Dershowitz could say with certainty what they think the outcome of the current controversy will be.

Dershowitz said the lesson from this battle is simple: “If you’re going to be turned down for tenure because of your lack of scholarship, become a radicalist,” he said, “because then you might get tenure.”

Editor’s note
The original version of this article quoted an e-mail from Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin saying that the University takes professors’ political views into account during the tenure process. Dobkin actually meant to write that the University does not consider political views.

Dershowitz, Finkelstein and a bitter tenure battle

Dershowitz, Finkelstein and a bitter tenure battle

04.19.2007 | The Jerusalem Post
By Michal Lando, THE JERUSALEM POST

The public debate over whether Norman G. Finkelstein, controversial for his virulent criticism of Israel, should get tenure at DePaul University, where he is a professor of political science, is the latest episode in what the author describes as the “difficult journey” of his academic career.

But the journey – which has intimately involved his long-time critic, Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz (read his Jpost Blog) – may be cut short if the Catholic university decides against giving Finkelstein tenure sometime in June, when a final decision is expected.

“I have evoked the wrath of Dershowitz, and he is tenacious,” said Finkelstein.

Ideological opponents, the two have been at each other’s throats for the last few years.

Dershowitz told The Jerusalem Post he opposed tenure for Finkelstein because of his lack of scholarship. “He would be the first person in modern history to get tenure based on admittedly fraudulent scholarship. This is about a man about to get tenure, not because of scholarship, but because of ideological ad hominem attacks,” Dershowitz charged.

Speaking from his office in Chicago, Finkelstein spoke of his career as an academic with noticeable weariness, a far cry from the vociferous spirit that characterizes much of his work and for which he is currently being judged.

“At this point I am too weary to worry,” Finkelstein told the Post. “I have had my share of battles at DePaul over the years. Nothing comes easy when you are on the wrong side of power. This is one battle too many for me.”

His role as a public persona has made his career as an academic tougher than most, Finkelstein maintained. “I am considered a more threatening personality than those who operate narrowly within academic life. I am 53 years old, I am struggling for a simple tenure track position at a relatively modest university. The difficulties I face are of a higher order.”

In 2000, Finkelstein, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, in which he argued that Jews in Israel and America exploited the Holocaust for profit and have often used it to silence criticism of Israel. His latest book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, is no less controversial. It systematically attacks Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Published by the University of California Press, the book originally included a statement by Finkelstein that accused Dershowitz of plagiarism and of not having written The Case for Israel. Dershowitz threatened to take legal action if the statement was not removed. It eventually was.

Although faculty in his department voted in favor of granting Finkelstein tenure, 9-3, and a college-level faculty committee unanimously supported that vote, Charles Suchar, dean of DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recommended against tenure in a memo to the University Board on Tenure and Promotion, arguing that “the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s books border on character assassination.”

Suchar’s memo also claimed that his own estimation of “the tone and substance of his scholarship is that a considerable amount of it is inconsistent with DePaul’s Vincentian values.”

But according to Finkelstein, Suchar’s recommendation against his tenure has everything to do with outside pressures on the university, especially from Dershowitz.

When Finkelstein came up for tenure in 2005, Patrick Callahan, previous chairman of DePaul’s political science department, emailed Dershowitz requesting documentation of his opposition to Finkelstein, according to Dershowitz. Dershowitz responded with a lengthy document, which he also sent to many of DePaul’s faculty, which elaborates on his criticism.

In the email, dated Sept. 18, 2006, Dershowitz writes: “I would like to point out from the outset that the ugly and false assertions that I will discuss below are not incidental to Finkelstein’s purported scholarship; they are his purported scholarship. Finkelstein’s entire literary catalogue is one preposterous and discredited ad hominem attack after another.”

The attacks are nothing new. For the last few years the two professors have been pointing fingers and throwing accusations at each other that include charges of plagiarism and polemicism.

The Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Governance Council sent a letter to the president of DePaul University, the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law School, expressing dismay at Dershowitz’s involvement in the tenure issue.

“The faculty council sent a letter to Harvard saying that Dershowitz’s intrusions were corrupting the process,” said Finkelstein.

Dershowitz said he simply “provided them with documentation. He’s claiming I’m intruding. [But] he organized outside people to write petitions.”

Asked whether his attacks are based on ideological differences, Dershowitz said: “I would never oppose someone for tenure because of ideology.” Dershowitz said he would support tenure for Tony Judt and Noam Chomsky despite their ideological differences. “The reason he (Finkelstein) shouldn’t get tenure is because he just isn’t a scholar. I’ve written 28 books, some scholarly, some advocacy. All he writes is agitprop, no scholarship, nothing that purports to be scholarship.”

According to an article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Finkelstein contacted the Chronicle to discuss his concerns about the status of his case. “I was determined from the beginning to go by the process, and was confident based on my academic record that I would sail through,” he said.

For its part, DePaul insists that the tenure process will be fair. “Tenure is an internal university process that is not influenced by outsiders,” said university spokeswoman, Denise Mattson. “We are confident in the procedures we have followed and that all candidates had the same rights and protections set out in the handbook.”

Dershowitz v. Finkelstein:Harvard Law Professor Works to Disrupt Tenure Bid of Longtime Nemesis at DePaul U.

Dershowitz v. Finkelstein:Harvard Law Professor Works to Disrupt Tenure Bid of Longtime Nemesis at DePaul U.

Posted by Cecilie Surasky

That’s the headline from the April 5 Chronicle of Higher Education.

“His scholarship is no more than ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies.” No, that’s not a statement about Alan Dershowitz (whose multi-part ad hominem attack on his ideological enemy Jimmy Carter is nicely dissected by Mitchell Plitnick here). That’s Dershowitz on Finkelstein, explaining why he sent a “dossier of Norman Finkelstein’s most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions” to “everybody who would read it ” at DePaul University. (Dershowitz says he compiled the file at the request of some 24 people associated with DePaul.)
We wrote earlier about The Holocaust Industry author Norman Finkelstein’s battle for tenure at DePaul. It should not come as a surprise that Dershowitz is back: several years ago the famed First Amendement advocate waged a scorched earth campaign, prior to publication, against Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah:On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, which contained several hundred pages chronicling, to put it more charitably than Finkelstein did, errors in Dershowitz’s book, The Case for Israel.

In this must-read article in the Nation in 2005:

What do you do when somebody wants to publish a book that says you’re completely wrong? If you’re Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, you write the governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher–because the publisher is the University of California Press, which conceivably might be subject to the power of the governor.

Payback looks an awful lot like this (from the Chronicle):

The 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.

Howard continues:

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.”

There’s plenty of evidence so far to back up Finkelstein’s claim. His department voted 9-3, in favor of granting tenure and a collegewide faculty panel voted unanimously to support hime (5-0). Concerns raised about Finkelstein seem largely to focus on the tone of his writing and “frequent personal attacks.”

The Scholar And The Shill

The Scholar And The Shill

Posted by Mitchell Plitnick

The academic world can be a brutal place. Academics in many fields attack each others’ work all the time. But the case of Norman Finkelstein and his tenure bid at DePaul University stands out as being very unusual. It’s been reported on at our sister blog, Muzzlewatch.
What makes it unusual is that the process seems to have been influenced by a scholar who has no expertise in the field in which Finkelstein works. Alan Dershowitz and Finkelstein have had a running feud for years, each viciously attacking the other’s integrity. But in fact, Dershowitz is no more than an interested lay-person on the Middle East.He is a professor of law, and criminal law, not international law, at that.web-0418feud550.jpg

This does not, of course, mean Dershowitz is not entitled to voice his opinion, nor that his views are not substantial. One can only judge his writing on the matter of the Middle East by reading that work. Having done so, I am comfortable saying that Dershowitz has an awful lot of study to do before he has any standing to criticize scholars in the field.

In over 25 years of studying the history and politics of the Middle East in general and Israel in particular, I have come to be very critical of most scholarship on the subject. There is much excellent work out there, there is some flawed material, and there is also some shoddy work, and I have not found that the views or conclusions of the researchers have anything to do with the quality of the work.

Finkelstein’s most controversial work, The Holocaust Industry, was a disappointment to me. I found that while many of his conclusions were supported, some were premature based on the evidence presented. But this is not unusual for scholarly works. While I have found some of Finkelstein’s expressions of his conclusions to be vitriolic and harsh, and even disagreed with many, his work on Israel and Palestine has generally been excellent from the point of view of research and scholarship. His books Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah are important, well-researched works that should be read by everyone whether they agree with him or not. His work with Ruth Bettina Birn in the book A Nation On Trial is a crucial rejoinder to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s effort to roll back Holocaust studies to a far more simplistic era.

The quality of one’s scholarship cannot be judged unless one divorces oneself from whether or not one agrees with the scholar’s views. I have found myself in disagreement with Finkelstein as often as I have found myself in agreement with his conclusions on the whole, but I cannot see anyone claiming his work does not pass intellectual rigor. For a counter-example, I have almost never agreed wit the King’s College of London historian Efraim Karsh, but I do not question his academic bona fides.

No serious person could possibly read Finkelstein’s work and accuse him of failing academic standards. Two academic committees at DePaul agreed and recommended tenure.

The point here is that Dershowitz has no place in this issue. His accusation that Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier is demonstrably false simply by reading Finkelstein’s books. Dershowitz claims that Finkelstein’s work is “one-sided agitprop.” Does he honestly believe that a board of scholars who are experts in Finkelstein’s field, need Dershowitz to provide them with such clues? If Finkelstein’s work was as worthless as Dershowitz claims, Finkelstein’s own colleagues are in a much better position than Dershowitz to figure that out.

Nor is it at all likely that they have missed the ongoing verbal shootout between Finkelstein and Dershowitz. Dershowitz, in fact, insults the integrity of the academic boards at DePaul by positing that they need his input, a man who only has a personal and ideological stake in this question and no standing as a scholar of the issue.

In June, we will find out if Finkelstein gets tenure. If he does not, every academic, regardless of what they think of Finkelstein’s views, should be up in arms.