Marathon Pundit: Dershowitz on Finkelstein in the Wall Street Journal

Professor Alan M. Dershowitz lends his talents to the Wall Street Journal this morning, writing an op-ed. A paid subscription is required to view the article, but a wealthier friend of the blog sent it my way.

An excerpt:

In her 1951 best seller, "The Groves of Academe," Mary McCarthy fictionalized a failed academic who, realizing he wouldn't get tenure, became a communist so that he could claim that he was being denied tenure because he was a Red rather than a lousy scholar.

A version of that ploy is being used today. Norman Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By his own account he has been fired by "every school in New York," including Brooklyn College, Hunter and NYU. His chairman at one of these colleges said that Mr. Finkelstein was fired for "incompetence," "mental instability" and "abuse" of students with politics different from his own. His prospects seemed bleak, so when radical Islamist Aminah McCloud -- a follower of Louis Farrakhan -- helped him land a job at DePaul, a school that Mr. Finkelstein describes as "a third-rate Catholic university," he accepted "exile."

(My note to Finkelstein: Is Chicago that bad?)

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His prospects did not improve when he wrote a screed against Holocaust survivors called "The Holocaust Industry." The scholar whose work on the Holocaust was the "stimulus" for this volume, University of Chicago professor Peter Novick, warned that: "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites. . . .[S]uch an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention." Nor was he helped when New York Times reviewer Prof. Omer Bartov, an authority on genocide, characterized his book as "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . [I]ndecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid."

On the other hand, Mr. Finkelstein is supported by hard-leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. They regard him as a scholar in a class with Ward Churchill (the Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns") -- a characterization with which I would not quarrel.

I've been meaning to do a post on the subject of Dershowitz' involvement in the Finkelstein case for a while. In essence, Fink's supporters are claiming the Dersh has no business getting involved.

A new contributor at Solomonia, Emmett Trueman replies, "Nonsense."

One of the more absurd claims emerging from the controversy over giving tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul is the assertion that any opinion on the fitness of a candidate for tenure coming from outside the university is a violation of faculty rights. According to Gil Gott, a professor of international studies at DePaul who is chairman of its Liberal Arts and Sciences' Faculty Governance Council, if a scholar at another university sends an unsolicited letter to a tenure committee or university president, "the sanctity of the tenure and promotion process is violated."

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The unsolicited scholarly letter addressed to a tenure committee has a long and honorable place history. Many universities specify the acceptability of unsolicited outside letters. Here is a typical passage from the UCLA personnel handbook.

"Unsolicited letters of evaluation. If an unsolicited letter of evaluation is to be included in the dossier, a letter should first be sent to the writer setting forth the Statement of Confidentiality and asking that individual to respond whether in light of this University policy the letter of evaluation should be included or returned. Please write “Unsolicited” at the top right corner of letter."

Emmett is off to a great start, his post was linked to NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog.
Oh, the picture. I saw it on Solomonia earlier this week, I thought it was staged or PhotoShopped, so I asked Sol if I could use it. He directed me to the DePaul Activist Student Union, it's their photo.

And about the woman who Dershowitz say invited Finkelstein to DePaul, Professor Aminah McCloud, like Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and Noam Chomsky, she earned a spot in David Horowitz' 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Thanks for the link: Solomonia

UPDATE 11:45 PM CDT: Assistant Professor Finkelstein has the entire article, probably posted without the permission of the Dow Jones Corporation, on his web site.

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