|
|
home / subscribe / donate / tower / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events / faq
|
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair dissect HRC in her White House years and conclude their series on the woman who may be the next president. PLUS Eva Liddell on the man who really set the course of the Bush presidency PLUS Andy Worthington on the battle for the rights of the Guantanamo detainees PLUS Debbie Nathan on what the border crackdown has done to the women crossing the Rio Grande. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now
|
|
How the Press Led the USA Into the Iraq War  Buy End Times Now! Today's Stories September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn September 7, 2007 Robert
Fantina John
Ross James
Brooks Russell
Mokhiber Joshua
Frank John
Walsh Mark
Brenner Mike
Ferner Website
of the Day
September 6, 2007 Kathleen
and Bill Christison Allan
J. Lichtman Norman
Solomon Yifat
Susskind Catherine
Fenton Laura
Santina Farzana
Versey Yves
Engler Kelly
Overton Michael
Simmons Website
of the Day
September 5, 2007 Stan
Goff Michael
Dickinson Matthew
Abraham Patrick
Cockburn Dave
Lindorff Paul
Craig Roberts Clifton
Ross Elizabeth
Schulte Joseph
Grosso Ben
Terrall Website
of the Day
September 4, 2007 Jean
Bricmont Patrick
Cockburn Ron
Jacobs Tom
Kerr Gary
Leupp Sonja
Karkar Heather
Gray Fidel
Castro Jackie
Corr Sunsara
Taylor Website
of the Day
September 3, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Eamon
McCann Joshua
Frank Chris
Floyd Marjorie
Cohn Walter
Brasch Matt
Reichel Website
of the Day
September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Andy
Worthington Saul
Landau David
Keen Patrick
Cockburn Diana
Johnstone George
Longstreth, MD Linda
M. Woolf Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Ben
Tripp David
Michael Green Missy
Comley Beattie Michael
Dickinson Paul
Krassner Ron
Jacobs Poets'
Basement
August 31, 2007 Jeff
Gibbs Paul
Craig Roberts Ray
McGovern Robert
Weissman Matt
Vidal Robin
Mittenthal Chris
Kutalik Richard
Forno Binoy
Kampmark Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
August 30, 2007 Gary
Leupp John
Ross Anthony
DiMaggio Jordan
Flaherty Michael
Donnelly Russell
Mokhiber Dennis
Brutus William
S. Lind Martha
Rosenberg Jeff
Leys / Brian Terrell Website
of the Day
Patrick
Cockburn Winslow
T. Wheeler David
Rosen Dave
Zirin Paul
Craig Roberts Diane
Farsetta Ben
Davis Alan
Farago Jenna
Orkin Don
Monkerud Richard
Nasser Website
of the Day
August 28, 2007 Uri
Avnery Bill
Quigley Joshua
Frank China
Hand Firmin
DeBrabander Charles
Peña Andy
Worthington Ramzy
Baroud Anthony
Papa Ashley
Smith Website
of the Day
Jorge
Mariscal Bill
Christison Manuel
Garcia, Jr. Anthony
DiMaggio Bruce
A. Roth John
Walsh Dave
Lindorff Ron
Jacobs Binoy
Kampmark Russell
D. Hoffman Website
of the Day
Subscribe Online
|
Weekend
Edition Finkelstein's Legacy at DePaulClimbing Jacob's Ladder, One Rung at a TimeBy MATTHEW ABRAHAM
When Norman Finkelstein announced last Wednesday that he and DePaul University had reached a negotiated settlement, ending his nearly year-long battle to gain tenure in the face of the highly unusual set of circumstances created by the extramural campaign of hate and intimidation launched by Alan Dershowitz, the Israel Lobby, and its numerous affiliates, one could have almost have felt as if the whole controversy had come to an anti-climactic end. It was a sad moment for many who had defended Finkelstein throughout the year, in the hope the administration could be brought to its senses about the deadly blow that had been delivered against academic freedom and this world-class intellectual, who brought a determination to his work few will be able to match. In exchange for his immediate resignation from DePaul's faculty, DePaul would essentially admit that Finkelstein had met the University's tenure and promotion requirements ("Professor Finkelstein is a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher"), while also providing Finkelstein with an undisclosed amount of money, along with a backhanded acknowledgment of the public outrage that had been generated in response to the tenure denial ("We understand that Professor Finkelstein and his supporters disagree with the University Board on Promotion and Tenure's conclusion that he did not meet the requirements for tenure.") Well, the obvious reason Finkelstein and many of his supporters disagreed with the University Board on Promotion and Tenure's conclusions is because Finkelstein consistently earned among the highest, if not the highest, teaching evaluations in the political science department for six years in a row. Coupled that with the five books which he has published to international acclaim, the most recent being his Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History with the University of California Press, which Dershowitz's campaign of abuse and vilification could not censor, one might naturally understand why Finkelstein and his supporters have drawn the logical inference that something else-other than the usual DePaul standards-might have been in play. Given that the University has now settled with Finkelstein under confidential terms, the logical inference, that outside political interference was the real reason Finkelstein was denied tenure, is most certainly correct. The administration's repeated rejoinder that Finkelstein just did not measure up to the institution's standards is clearly absurd. To recap: The tenure members of Finkelstein's own department voted 9-3 supporting his tenure bid; The five members of the Liberal Arts and Science's College Personnel Committee voted 5-0 to support Finkelstein's tenure and promotion to full professor; two outside reviewers, of international acclaim, enthusiastically endorsed Finkelstein's application. In late March, an administrative intervention, in the form of Dean Chuck Suchar, took place because the faculty, if left to its own devices, was going to give Finkelstein tenure. Suchar alleged that he could not support Finkelstein's tenure bid because his scholarship was at odds with DePaul's institutional mission, which apparently requires DePaul professors to respect the God-given dignity of political opponents such as Alan Dershowitz. In brief, according to Suchar, tenuring Finkelstein would be problematic since the latter engages in ad hominem and reputation-demeaning attacks. In my opinion, all of this discussion about whether or not Finkelstein engages in ad hominem attacks, and whether or not his doing so should be legitimate grounds for denying him tenure, seems to completely miss the larger point: Finkelstein's colleagues within his department and College overwhelmingly supported his tenure bid. The tenured members of his department, the people who worked with him on a daily basis, voted to support his tenure and promotion to associate professor. The three members of the department who voted against him filed a minority report, arguing that Finkelstein was uncollegial to them personally. The College Personnel Committee voted unanimously to support the Department's majority recommendation. Surely, no one is going to claim that the nine people who voted for Finkelstein in his own department, and the five people who supported him on the College Personnel Committee, did so because they are anti-Semites or self-hating Jews, right? Realizing that faculty support for Finkelstein would pose a huge problem for the administration's long-ago hatched plan to deny him tenure, the Dean intervened and claimed that Finkelstein's scholarship--which has been published to international acclaim and praised by the likes of the leading experts on the Israel Palestine conflict (Avi Shlaim (Oxford), Sara Roy (Harvard), the late Barcuh Kimmerling (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), William Quandt, and Beshara Doumani (Berkeley) and the Nazi Holocaust (the late Raul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust Studies who was actually doing serious work on the Holocaust long before it became politically convenient and ideologically serviceable to do so, Joachim Fest, Arno Mayer, Christopher Browning, and Ian Kershaw)--just did not comport with what it means to embody Vincentian personalism.. Finkelstein's five books have undergone forty-six different translations-more than the entire faculty within DePaul's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences combined. That doesn't sound very controversial to me. In his report, the Dean bases his argument that Finkelstein's scholarship doesn't meet DePaul's standards on a single chapter from The Holocaust Industry. As it turns out, the Dean, in the course of advancing his argument, reveals he hasn't read any of Finkelstein's books, much less the one he is referencing. Suchar got so confused in his borrowings from another text, which was perhaps provided to him by Dershowitz or some other third party, that he misspelled the word "huckster" as "huxter"-just as Dershowitz misspelled it in his propaganda package, [see p. 5 of 21], which he sent Finkelstein's former department chair. In addition, note that Suchar places the Israeli historian Benny Morris in the same company as Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, and Daniel Goldhagen. As anyone who has read Finkelstein's work surely knows, Morris is someone Finkelstein holds in high regard and is not someone he would mention in the same breath as Dershowitz, Wiesel, and Goldhagen-- all of whom he has referrred to as "hoaxers" and "hucksters"; not, as Suchar (and Dershowitz) would have it, "hoaxters and huxters". After Suchar's memo withholding support for Finkelstein's tenure came out in late March, fourteen members of the political science department, including all the junior faculty members, refuted what was alleged about Finkelstein's supposed incivility, stating they found him to be a great colleague who made a tremendous contribution to the department. The University Board, which voted 4-3 against tenure, embraced the minority report written by the three people in Finkelstein's department who voted against him, none of whom are experts on the Middle East or the Nazi Holocaust, while ignoring the majority vote from Finkelstein's department, the unanimous vote of the College Personnel Committee, and the enthusiastic endorsements of two distinguished outside reviewers, whose views and opinions about Finkelstein's record were solicited by DePaul's political science department. This year's university committee consisted of faculty members from Psychology, Law, Theatre Arts, Management, Mathematics, Communications, and Education. Is one to understand that these faculty members were in a better position to judge Finkelstein's record than his own department, his College, and the distinguished reviewers? Note that President Holtscheider, in summarizing the University Board's reasoning, doesn't even offer one example of the ad hominem attacks in Finkelstein's work, which apparently necessitated the tenure denial. In examining the evidence at
hand, it's fairly clear that Finkelstein was not denied tenure
because of his supposed ad hominem attacks or his lack
of collegiality. He was denied tenure at DePaul because tremendous
outside pressure was placed on the university to remove an effective
critic of U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East from its
precincts. I wish the administration would stop repeating the
bald-face lie that Finkelstein's scholarship did not meet DePaul's
tenure and promotion standards. It's embarrassing and an insult
to the intelligence. Apparently, Rubinstein and Associates, the
PR firm DePaul hired to help it with its public relations image,
thought the repeated invocation of this lie would pass muster;
it clearly did not. In October of 2004, I had the distinct honor of interviewing Professor Finkelstein for an online discussion of his books. Although he became impatient with the participant's seemingly, complete lack of comprehension of his work, which were supposed to be the basis of participant questions, he tried to provide some comic relief. His dismissal of Derrida and his work, the day after Derrida's passing, was in meant to force discussion participants to think about why Derrida's thinking had come to dominate so much contemporary discussion within the humanities; that's what iconoclasts are supposed to do. They force us to question why we embrace certain figures, theories, and approaches, attacking them when they become all too sacred. Below, I've pasted in Finkelstein's final post to the discussion list, which struck me as ironic and insightful. I'd prefer tenure to be an honor we bestow upon people who are saying provocative and timely things about the important issues of the day, rather than an accolade with which we buy people's silence and good behavior. All too often that's unfortunately how tenure operates. Robert Jensen wrote a powerful essay about this problem a few months ago, considering what it would mean for the U.S. academy if Finkelstein were denied tenure. I'm afraid Jensen's words were prescient. If there are those in the public sphere who have actually read Finkelstein's books and grappled with his arguments who wish to offer up some examples of Finkelstein's supposed ad hominem attacks, I'm sure they could be analyzed and discussed. For example, are Finklestein's charts documenting Dershowitz's reliance upon Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial in his The Case for Israel ad hominem? For someone to state that they've heard that Finkelstein is a nasty piece of work, a self-hating Jew, and an anti-Semite based on third parties, who have a vested interest in silencing him, seems inconsistent with what responsible public intellectualism is all about. Let's not forget that Finkelstein is Jewish, the son of Holocaust survivors, and had much of his family exterminated during the holocaust. The dedication of his Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict reads as follows:
Thanks, Norm, for all you have done for your colleagues and students at DePaul. In the end, you proved to have had far more integrity, intelligence, determination than those who were in a position to judge you. As you helped humanity climb Jacob's ladder, one rung at a time, you have inspired all of us to make this world a better and more humane place.
Matthew Abraham is an Assistant Professor of Writing,
Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University. He was the 2005
Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing award winner.
He can be reached at matthew.mabraha2@gmail.com.
|
CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! Click Here for Dates & Venues Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz  Click Here to Buy! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order! How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn    Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed       Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
