As for Attorney Dershowitz, anyone who takes Joan Peters and Mark Twain to be scholars should be at Slippery Rock, at best, rather than Harvard.

If being Jewish requires a whimpering, nose-to-the-ground obedience to all that AIPAC pushes about Washington and all that Zionists distort in promoting Israel, then justice in the Middle East, and peace, are impossible.

A jury of true scholars on this issue would not be wimps equal to the LA prosecutors who did not know that unused leather gloves shrink and that men who eat lots of salt on large quantities of food end up weighing more, with thicker fingers.

the guy has solid publications, and is acknowledged to be a good teacher. At any Canadian university, that is enough to get you tenure. It’s much harder to actually get a tenure-track position in many fields than it is to reach the tenure stage!

They also criticized him for “Advocacy”. I thought that was unbelievable. In my field many profs are clear advocates for social change, so I’m not sure what the point is on that account. I guess when your enemy is “big business” you can attack all you want. But if it’s a hot, multi-sided debate like this, it’s dangerous to be an advocate. Noam Chomsky would have been denied tenure years ago if this was the case.

This just shows that anyone doing a PhD should not delve into controversial topics. Do something nice and uncontroversial, then get tenure, and then do the controversial work that you really want to do.

I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that Finkelstein has gone from almost-tenured to being fired. When you’re on the tenure-track, you really only have two ways to go: get tenured or go somewhere else. Tenure-track appointments are time-limited. So, if you don’t get tenure, your appointment will end and you will have to go somewhere else. That’s why tenure’s such a huge deal to academics: if you don’t get it, you’re pretty close to being out of a job. There’s no middle-ground, whereby you can stick around and try again in a year or two.

“Anti-Semitism” is the new McCarthyism, make no mistake. Finkelstein is only the latest casualty, as the thought police continue to comb through American universities to root out anyone suspected of harbouring anti-Israel sympathies. One simply has to remind oneself of Daniel Pipes’ execrable promotion of campus snitching on his sick-making “Campus Watch” website. And here is the ADL, that redoubtable bastion of freedom of speech, on the Finkelstein decision:

To the extent that DePaul’s decision to deny tenure to Prof. Finkelstein is intended as a repudiation of his hateful and bigoted ideas, we applaud the University for its actions in standing up for its principles.

Only pro-Israel ideas, it appears, will be permitted in universities in the land of the free.

Tenure is a promise of lifetime employment, and for this reason it is routinely denied to middling applicants.

Collegiality isn’t the only qualification, but it matters more than many people, including many academics, know. Every story I’ve ever heard around my department re: someone not getting tenured boils down to an inability to play the political game. So, teaching, etc. are necessary conditions but, unfortunately, not always sufficient.