[Marxism] Fwd: [radcaucus] Will America's Largest Catholic University Give Tenure to a Fan of the Hezbollah?

[gregory meyerson <gmeyerson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> This is just amazing.  avoid food intake when you read this.






> http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27731
>
> Will America's Largest Catholic University Give Tenure to a Fan of the
> Hezbollah?
> By Steven Plaut
> FrontPageMagazine.com | April 5, 2007
>
> The timing could not have been better. Just as the Jewish holiday of
> liberation, Passover, was about to begin, the news was spreading
> throughout the blogosphere that one of America's most openly anti-
> Semitic and anti-American pseudo-academics was about to be "passed
> over" for tenure.  That tentative decision is now being attacked by
> the Left as supposed suppression of academic freedom, although in fact
> it is merely the introduction at long last of some semblance of
> academic quality control into a university that has been under attack
> for lacking such.
>
> Norman Finkelstein is a 53-year-old untenured assistant professor of
> political science at DePaul University, no doubt one of the oldest
> assistant professors in America. Before coming to DePaul in 2003, he
> had been fired by several schools in the New York area for being a
> pseudo-scholar and for his hatemongering activities. Finkelstein is
> regarded by the anti-Defamation League and by the Simon Wiesenthal
> Center as a Holocaust Denier and is similarly defined by Martin Peretz
> from the New Republic and by others. Finkelstein is an open fan and
> endorser of Holocaust Denier David Irving.
>
>
>
> Born Jewish but having no affiliations with the Jewish community or
> institutions, Finkelstein has made a career out of turning out hate
> literature attacking Jews and Israel, the most famous of which is his
> scurrilous "The Holocaust Industry."  He is celebrated by every Neo-
> Nazi organization and web site on earth, which delight at the irony of
> being able to feature a nominal Jew who endorses their political
> agenda.  Finkelstein also appears regularly on Counterpunch.
> Finkelstein is the Hezbollah's favorite American "academic" PR chief
> and has publicly embraced Hezbollah and Hamas terror for many years.
> In the middle of the barrage by Hezbollah against Israeli civilians
> last summer, Finkelstein declared that his "chief regret is that I
> wasn't even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah against
> terrorist intimidation and attack."  He added: "I say this without
> fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity - We are all
> Hezbollah now."
>
>
>
> Finkelstein has been dismissed as a charlatan by nearly every serious
> academic who has reviewed his writings.  In the New York Times,
> Professor Omer Bartov (Brown University historian) described
> Finkelstein's book on the Holocaust as a "novel variation of the
> Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the fraudulent essay concocted in
> the late nineteenth century popular with German Nazis.  Leon
> Wieseltier from the New Republic wrote that Finkelstein is "poison, a
> disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock," while
> Gabriel Schonfeld, the editor of Commentary Magazine, has written
> (Commentary, January 2001) that Finkelstein's writings are "crackpot
> ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out
> by Neo-Nazis around the world."   Enrst Zundel, the Canadian Neo-Nazi
> deported to Germany where he is now in prison, proudly proclaimed
> Finkelstein the "Jewish David Irving."   He meant that as a
> compliment.  Finkelstein has long written vulgar smears against
> Holocaust survivors, and in particular against Nobel Prize winner Elie
> Wiesel.  Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has written quite a few
> articles exposing Finkelstein and his fraudulent pseudo-scholarship.
>
>
>
> DePaul officials are reportedly blocking Finkelstein's prospects of
> getting tenure in spite of sycophantic endorsement of his case by most
> of his colleagues there in the Department of Political Science.  The
> DePaul officials are to be heartily congratulated for taking such a
> courageous stand against charlatanism and fraud!
>
>
>
> No less impressive is the fact that the efforts to force the political
> science department at DePaul to adhere to real academic standards -
> against the will of nine twelfths of the department's members - are
> reportedly in large part those of Professor Chuck Suchar, Dean of
> Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Suchar, a sociologist, is hardly a vintage
> member of the vast rightwing conspiracy.  He is a leftist who in the
> past sponsored and defended a series of events and lectures at DePaul
> attacking "American imperialism".   But Suchar seems to have drawn the
> line in the sand when it comes to naked attempts by the political
> science department at DePaul to award tenure to someone whose record
> is devoid of any scholarly achievement or academic publications.  And
> if Suchar displays the courage of his convictions and sticks to his
> guns, he will emerge as the hero of this entire sad episode at
> DePaul.  If you would like to send Suchar a cyber-pat on the back, he
> can be reached at csuchar@xxxxxxxxxx and also
> csuchar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
> DePaul is a Catholic school associated with the "Vincentians."  Among
> Suchar's grounds for vetoing the political science department's
> skullduggery was his belief that keeping a buffoon of hate like
> Finkelstein on the faculty would violate the ethical standards of the
> Vincentians.  How seldom we hear about real commitment to ethical
> behavior on campus these days!
>
>
>
> In recent years Finkelstein has turned his personal web page into a
> sewer of vulgarity, obscenity, and defamatory personal smears against
> anyone who has ever dared to criticize him or defend Israel.  There he
> has also published death threats, including one against Irshad Manji,
> who runs Muslim Refusenik, a web site for dissident Muslims who reject
> Islamofascism and terrorism, and another against Dershowitz.
> Finkelstein has allied himself closely with a Brazilian-Arab Neo-Nazi
> cartoonist named "Latuff", best known for winning the second prize in
> the Iranian Holocaust Denial cartoon contest.  Finkelstein not only
> runs Latuff's vile "cartoons" on his web site, but commissioned Latuff
> to draw an obscene cartoon of Professor Alan Dershowitz masturbating,
> after Dershowitz had denounced some of Finkelstein's own antics.
> Finkelstein falsely accused Dershowitz of having engaged in
> plagiarism, and unfortunately Dershowitz never filed suit against him
> for it.
>
>
>
> While some in the media are spinning the DePaul decision to block
> Finkelstein's tenure as cowardice because of supposed nervousness
> about Finkelstein's "controversial writings," the truth is far
> simpler.  Finkelstein is simply not an academic at all, but rather a
> fulltime scribbler of hate and vulgarity.   Indeed, the only reason he
> was ever hired by DePaul in the first place is that the political
> science department there was seeking someone born Jewish to
> indoctrinate students into far-leftist jihadi hatred of Israel (and
> also hatred of America).  Finkelstein's courses were always one-sided
> exercises in political indoctrination, which no doubt explains why
> they were popular among the anarchist-Maoist wing of DePaul student
> radicals who signed up for them.
>
>
>
> As noted, Finkelstein has no publications at all in academic journals,
> the first and main requirement for granting tenure at any serious
> institution of higher learning in the world.  Instead, Finkelstein
> turns out one anti-Israel propaganda diatribe after another.  Getting
> Bash-Israel books published is not particularly difficult these days,
> given the commercial appetite of publishers for such material, but it
> hardly earns Finkelstein any serious academic laurels.  Finkelstein is
> quite simply a pseudo-scholar and a charlatan who spends most of his
> time collaborating with Neo-Nazis, Holocaust Deniers and Islamofascist
> terrorists.  DePaul seems to have made up its mind that the time has
> come at last to maintain and enforce real academic standards.  DePaul,
> long the worst bastion of anti-American campus indoctrination in the
> greater Chicago area, has decided that actual scholarship is to be
> required of its faculty members.  And a growing number of people at
> DePaul have simply had enough of Finkelstein's infantile antics.
>
>
>
> The same far Left that had absolutely nothing to say against DePaul
> when it fired Professor Thomas Klocek because he had dared to express
> a pro-Israel opinion outside the classroom is suddenly all up in arms
> over what appears to be a decision to deny Finkelstein tenure.
> Finkelstein himself seems to be blaming Dershowitz and his followers
> for "sabotaging" things for him at DePaul.
>
>
>
> Finkelstein's tenure proceedings also shed light into the dark secret
> corners of academia, and especially into the mysterious processes
> through which universities hire and promote.  Most non-academics have
> no idea how such things work.
>
>
>
> Professors at serious universities are recruited, promoted and granted
> tenure primarily on the basis of their scholarly research and only
> secondarily on the basis of the quality of their teaching (measured -
> somewhat foolishly - by student evaluations of professor popularity).
> In the social sciences, research performance is measured mainly by
> articles in refereed international academic journals.  To the surprise
> of most non-academics, publishing books does not "count" for much in
> academia, mainly because book publication does not undergo the same
> peer review as do journal article publications.  Finkelstein has
> published nothing at all in international refereed academic journals,
> although he does have a few screeds in Marxist and Palestinian
> propaganda journals.  Finkelstein's "academic record" consists
> entirely of his hateful "books".
>
>
>
> While the details vary from department to department and from
> university to university, in general a non-tenured faculty member gets
> tenure in the following way: if his department recommends that he get
> tenure, a "professional committee" is set up to review his
> publications and to solicit outside letters of evaluation from experts
> from around the world.  It then makes recommendations that must be
> approved by a campus-wide promotions committee and by higher officials
> (Deans, Rectors, Presidents), all of whom are supposed to oversee the
> honesty and professionalism of promotion procedures and decisions.
>
>
>
> The problem with all this is that it is very easy to manipulate and
> neutralize the quality control procedures at many universities.  This
> is especially true when it comes to political extremists among the
> faculty up for tenure.  A non-objective professional committee can be
> easily compiled and recruited from among faculty members friendly to
> the candidate or sharing his radical political views.  These can then
> purposely solicit letters of evaluation from other political
> extremists who glowingly endorse the "academic qualifications" of the
> candidate out of political solidarity.  Hence even a buffoon like
> Finkelstein with no scholarly achievements may have enough political
> "friends" capable of manufacturing on his behalf raving sycophantic
> letters of evaluation, sometimes even written by academics at
> distinguished universities.
>
>
>
> In the case of Finkelstein, his department reportedly voted 9 against
> 3 to recommend him for tenure, despite Finkelstein's embarrassing lack
> of scholarly publications.  Those three dissidents who were opposed
> submitted a minority report, and their valiant behavior proves that
> courage and intellect are not dead at DePaul.  The other members of
> the political science department at DePaul are by and large the same
> leftists who hired Finkelstein in the first place.  They did not hire
> him for his scholarship but for his politics of hate.
>
>
>
> The DePaul "professional committee" for Finkelstein then made a
> unanimous five-vote recommendation to grant him tenure, but that was
> reportedly because a sixth committee member who opposed the tenure was
> denied the possibility of casting a vote.  This "unanimous"
> recommendation says little about Finkelstein's credentials, but serves
> as a mountain of proof about how easy it is to manipulate academic
> tenure proceedings and short-circuit all quality control in
> universities!   The naked manipulation by Finkelstein's political
> science collaborators at DePaul and the fact that the "professional
> committee" behaved with such unprofessional partisanship were what
> triggered the veto by Dean Suchar and perhaps also further opposition
> from other DePaul senior officials against Finkelstein!
>
>
>
> So will Finkelstein now be goosestepping his way to the unemployment
> office in his jackboots?  He and his followers are still trying to
> browbeat the DePaul officials into changing their minds about his
> tenure, and there are panicky calls coming from far-leftists all about
> to rush to Finkelstein's aid.  Naturally, they are all blaming
> "rightwingers" (and especially Alan Dershowitz) for poor Norman's
> academic demise.  The Marathon Pundit blog describes where things now
> stand:
>
>
>
> 'Finkelstein's fate may end up in the hands of Father Dennis
> Holtschneider, DePaul's president, whose arrival in Chicago came after
> Finkelstein's hiring. Holtschneider's first crisis was the Klocek
> affair. A youngish-president, he appears to be about my age, forty-
> five, and he let his inexperience show as he mishandled the Klocek
> incident and its aftermath. Other flare-ups during "Holt's" reign
> include the Ward Churchill fiasco and the school's Chicken Little
> reaction to the DePaul Conservative Alliance's attempt to hold an
> "affirmative action bake sale."'
>
>
>
> So where does all that leave America's leading cheerleader for the
> Hezbollah?  The same Finkelstein who may have attended the Holocaust
> Denial conference last year?  Will DePaul's odium at last be removed?
> Well, it looks like his job prospects are not that bad.  Perhaps
> DePaul's loss will be the University of Tehran's gain.
>
>
>
> [If you would like to tell DePaul's President Holtschneider what YOU
> think of all this, his email address is president@xxxxxxxxxx . The
> names and emails of the other officials are here.]
>
>
>
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>
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