Dershowitz Acts to Cost Finkelstein His Job
The NY Times reports,
If the longstanding fight between two professors, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, was under the jurisdiction of family court, a judge could issue restraining orders and forbid inflammatory statements. But, alas, this nasty and zealously pursued feud is taking place in scholarly precincts, so each protagonist is continuing his campaign, unhampered, to destroy the other’s professional reputation and career.
Skip to next paragraph
In this corner: Alan Dershowitz, left, and Norman Finkelstein.
In the latest round, first reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard and a prominent defender of Israel, is trying to derail Mr. Finkelstein’s bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago. He has sent a blast of e-mail messages to faculty and administrators there accusing Mr. Finkelstein of shoddy scholarship, lying and anti-Semitism.
A more appropriate headline for this story: Dershowitz Fights Notorious Antisemite’s Move For Tenure
The question is whether Finkelstein deserves his job in the first place. A full-time tenure position is an honor, not a right. It should be fair game to judge a candidate by his entire body of work, which includes “popular” books as well as the academic scholarship. Academic freedom is a critical value to preserve, but it gets abused by proffesors who play by the rules of academic scholarship in one media, and then produce propaganda tracts in another.
man it’s a shame to see Dershowitz and this assclown Finkelstein constantly mentioned in the same breath. they’re “debating” as if the latter is even on the same level as the former.
publicity hound that he is, Dershowitz was/(is) an important human rights attorney who has made a serious impact on our nation’s legal culture. Finkelstein is a 2nd-rate polemicist with a Shoah fetish.
shame that Dershowitz couldn’t resist getting pulled into a rivalry with this fool.
PS Mobius that headline is indeed very misleading. NOBODY’s talmbout Finkelstein losing his job. the issue is weather dude deserves permanent job security for life, thus enabling him to write ever more extreme and hateful propoganda with NO accountability to his employers, students, or fellow faculty members. tenure is a privelege to be earned, not a right. shit, at the end of the day this guy doesn’t even have a right to a job at all. he’s lucky he has one. and dePaul is crazy for giving him one.