Norman Finkelstein, political scientist at DePaul and child of holocaust survivors, has been denied tenure after Alan Dershowitz's scorched-truth campaign against him. As many, if not most, at DKos are aware, Dershowitless's connection to veracity is somewhere between weak and nonexistent. His support of torture as state policy shows Dersh as one of America's monsters of modernity. DePaul apparently denied Finkelstein tenure because he hurt their fund-raising.
Academic freedom's corpse will be available for viewing later today.
I've been an admirer of Prof. Finkelstein because of his dogged advocacy of truth over elite political correctness and his willingness to gore sacred pigs like Dershowanker when they deviated from the historical record. This was especially true in cases like the one that ultimately cost him his teaching post, namely his proving in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History that Dersh plagarized much of his book The Case for Israel from the discredited Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial.
Dersh dished dirt on Prof. Finkelstein like nobody's business. AD was roundly criticized for his heavyhanded interference in DePaul's tenure process and has apparently succeeded in thoroughly politicizing it. DePaul's craven and cowardly collapse in the face of Dersh's calumny, like our unlovely Dem's moral failure on the Iraq supplemental, is yet another sign that our institutions, academic and governmental, are simply riddled with corruption and fear and fall like houses-of-cards with the first stiff breeze from a blowhard. DePaul's president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, was most disingenious about the denial:
In a statement Father Holtschneider said the outside attention paid to Mr. Finkelstein’s bid for tenure "was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case." He added: "Some will consider this decision in the context of academic freedom. In fact academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul."
Cue laugh track.
But just as Prof. Finkelstein's courage in taking on a powerful and unscrupulous so-called Harvard "academic," he's not giving up.
Mr. Finkelstein said he plans to leave Chicago for New York. "Teaching is in my bones. I love to teach," he said, but he added that as a result of this "blacklisting, I will be barred from ever entering a college classroom again."
Nonetheless, any temptation to "indulge in a bout of self-pity," he said, was halted by thinking of his parents, who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi death camps while the rest of his relatives were exterminated. "They survived," he said. "I’ll survive."
Norman Finkelstein should be an example to every Kossack and other good people in his standing up for principle in the face of domination. He joins my pantheon of heroes which includes folks like Noam Chomsky, who turned me on to Finkelstein in the first place.
Here's to you, Prof. Finkelstein. Thank you for your service to the ghost of academic freedom and the raped and murdered body of the truth.
UPDATE: DePaul's letter denying Prof. Finkelstein tenure. (pdf) HT to Adam B.
UPDATE DOS: WOW! What a fight! I've never gotten a response like this to any of my (two?) previous diaries. I've gotta get to work, now, so I gotta go. I'M NOT RUNNING AWAY, you pro-Dershowitz putzes! To quote Ahnuld, "Ahl be bock."
UPDATE TRES: H/T to chesapeake:
Supporters of Finkelstein included Raul Hilberg, the dean of Holocaust historians. Hillberg said this weekend: "I have a sinking feeling about the damage this will do to academic freedom."
More at Prof. Finkelstein's website
Also, addition of links and slight grammatical editing (an " 's " as in "Dershowitless's" for the suspicious).
UPDATE CUATRO: My bad. In my hurry to post this morning what I THOUGHT was new news, I didn't check to see if someone else had diaried this story. As a matter of fact, another American did and here is the link to his diary, with apologies. It is a very nice diary, not a mean ol' nasty rant like mine (but it sure felt good!).