Finkelstein Tenure Case Exposes The Commonplace Cowardice of “Responsible” Professors
For two years I have served at the University of Texas at Austin on the faculty committee on “academic freedom and responsibility,” a pairing of concepts that is common in higher education. While there is a fairly broad consensus on what “freedom” means, competing conceptions of “responsibility” lead to two very different ideas about the appropriate role for professors in public life.
On one side is the conventional (which tends to be cowardly), and on the other is the principled (which tends to be progressive). Norman Finkelstein, the controversial DePaul University political scientist, is in trouble because he not only believes in, but puts into practice, this principled interpretation. The conventional view is that professors should be free to investigate any question and go in any direction the truth, as they see it, takes them. But in speaking and writing publicly about their conclusions, faculty should be responsible — which in practice usually means not upsetting people with real power. Faculty who pursue esoteric, self-indulgent, and/or irrelevant research generally will not be bothered (because no one really cares what they are doing), nor will those whose conclusions about relevant subjects are in line with views of the powerful (because their work helps reinforce the structures of power).
The principled view is that faculty members — who have an extraordinarily privileged position in society, being paid to learn and convey that learning to others, with considerable autonomy that is rare in this corporate-capitalist economy, at a more-than-livable wage — have a responsibility to pursue research addressing relevant questions that are meaningful in the lives of real people, especially the most vulnerable struggling for justice. That kind of research is likely to lead to trouble (because it challenges the prerogatives of the powerful to rule as they please).
In other words, academics pursuing their work in responsible fashion (in the principled sense) are the most likely to be labeled irresponsible (in the conventional sense).
Such is Finkelstein’s fate.
The controversy over Finkelstein’s tenure case at DePaul puts on public display the clash of those conflicting definitions of responsibility. He is an accomplished scholar (many who disagree with his Finkelstein’s conclusions acknowledge the quality of his research) and a superb teacher (even his detractors acknowledge his classroom skills). The political science department voted 9-3 and the college committee 5-0 in favor of tenure. But the College of Liberal Arts dean then wrote a letter undermining those endorsements, which suggests that the strong support for Finkelstein among his peers may be ignored by the university’s top administrators, who are expected to decide in June.
By the promotion standards of universities such as DePaul, Finkelstein clearly deserves the job security that comes with tenure. But we all have a stake in his fate — if we want universities to be a place where critical thinking is encouraged.
Finkelstein has been a provocative scholar since graduate school, when he dared to critique Joan Peters’ 1984 book From Time Immemorial, a fraudulent attempt to discredit Palestinian claims to their land occupied by Israel. Displaying considerable courage in the face of those happy to use Peters’ book to justify undermining the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, Finkelstein challenged the bogus factual claims of the book and embarrassed those in the political and academic establishment who had praised the book.
>From there, Finkelstein has pursued research not only about the
Israel/Palestine
conflict but the Holocaust and the politics of reparations. His recent books and public comments have only increased the numbers who would like to silence him and the intensity of those campaigns. Finkelstein’s critique of the work of Alan Dershowitz has upped the ante; the media-savvy Harvard law professor has made it a point to torpedo Finkelstein’s career.
I have never met Finkelstein, though I did once interview him over the phone for a radio program I produced about Middle East issues. I have listened to, or read transcripts of, interviews with him, and I find him contentious but consistently insightful. I have read his well-researched and well-reasoned books on the Middle East and found them helpful in my work. I’ve concluded that Finkelstein is (1) probably not temperamentally suited for the role of a facilitator or mediator, and (2) unquestionably a first-rate intellectual doing important work to bring to light sometimes harsh truths about the way power is exercised in this world.
In short, Finkelstein is using his academic freedom responsibly.
Yes, he is polemical in public, sometimes harsh toward opponents, maybe even a bit cantankerous at times, which leaves me wishing Finkelstein were a colleague at my university. If I were a student at DePaul, I would sign up for any class he was teaching. We could use more like him in academic life.
When personnel decisions at DePaul are made next month, if Finkelstein’s name is not on the list of those granted tenure it will be no doubt a difficult day for him and a tragic one for anyone who cares about free and responsible intellectual inquiry.
In the United States there are fewer and fewer spaces where truth-telling is possible. Electoral politics has become a poll-driven, sound-bite enterprise. Mass media specialize in the superficial and shallow. Universities, though dominated by corporate money and the corporate mentality, still provide one of the few remaining spaces for open and honest engagement. Protecting that space is important not only for those of us in the privileged position of faculty, but for the society more generally.
If Norman Finkelstein is denied tenure by DePaul, it won’t be because he was irresponsible but because he took his responsibility too seriously. If he is denied tenure, the loss will be not only Finkelstein’s and DePaul’s but also the larger project of real academic freedom and responsibility.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center . His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
America is a fraud. And worse, a cowardly fraud. Finkelstein’s crime is his refusal to toe the line in regards to Israel. That his colleagues would treat him in such a manner shows how strong the Israeli lobby is. Professor Jensen’s support for Finkelstein will surely lead to his denouncement by the Israeli lobby. Can’t argue fairly? The lie about them. That’s the coward’s way.
Hoa binh
I left the academy years ago when I found out that truth was not exactly a hot ticket to advancement. Joined a union and now make twice as much doing honest work.
The universities have worked overtime to make themselves useless, and hard work pays off.
The very best professors are those who courageously assert their theses and back them up with honest research. They also challenge their students to think critically and to re-examine the assumptions and ideas brought to the campus from their families and communities. Professor Finklestein is the sort of academic thinker that the Right Wing is trying to drive from the campuses by attacking the tenure system. All professors and students need to publicly denounce this movement and support those under attack!!
The sciences are full of cowardly academics.
Lets see, British Pretroleum (BP) funds global warming research. Are you going to hear any BP funded academics honestly criticize the oil companies? Your city could be half flooded and these academics would still be saying that the research is still inconclusive.
And let’s not forget the “list” of the 100 most “dangerous professors.” Rove and the right wing boys have no doubt studied the Soviet and Nazi playbooks, and absorb every strategy that brings them any inch closer to absolute power, all in the name of freedom and democracy, of course!
Chomsky was so right when he warned Finkelstein while he was still a graduate student that if he exposed the Joan Peters books as a fraud, that his career is going to be ruined.
See how much resistance Finkelstein encountered after exposing the fraud:
http://www.chomsky.info/books/power01.htm
This will explain why the attack on him goes on into today and why at 53 years old, has been called the world’s oldest assistant professor. He is literally a man who gave up his life for a cause.
I apologize to those who read all the articles on commondreams, but I want to reach as many people as I can. This information has me completely freaked out.
A Presidential Directive was signed by President Bush on May 9th giving him unconstrained powers in case of a national emergency. In the case of a national emergency (terrorist attack), I don’t want that psychopath in charge of anything. How can he get away with this? It’s terrifying!!!
worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55825
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight.
The “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive
” was
signed May 9, notes Jerome R. Corsi in a WND column
.
It was issued with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive.
The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for “National Essential Functions” of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments,
as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president’s directives in the event of a national emergency.
“Catastrophic emergency” is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage,
or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”
It says the president can assume the power to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over.
The directive says the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, currently Frances Fragos Townsend
, would be designated as the national continuity coordinator.
Corsi says the directive makes no attempt to reconcile the powers created for the national continuity coordinator with the National Emergency Act
,
which requires that such proclamation “shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.”
A Congressional Research Service study notes the National Emergency Act sets up Congress as a balance empowered to “modify, rescind, or render dormant” such emergency authority if Congress believes the president has acted
inappropriately.
But the new directive appears to supersede the National Emergency Act by creating the new position of national continuity coordinator without any specific act of Congress authorizing the position, Corsi says.
The directive also makes no reference to Congress and its language appears to negate any requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists.
It suggests instead that the powers of the directive can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke affirmed to Corsi the Homeland Security Department would implement the requirements of the order under
Townsend’s direction.
The White House declined to comment on the directive.
In Australia the universities have long been accused of being full of elites with strong leftist sympathies. Funding for public universities has been cut and funds transferred to private schools (obviously no elites in private schools). Funding is being tied to financial projects leaving ‘arts’ studies without funding and full fee paying students are given a leg up to join courses over the top of smarter poor people.
We are rapidly developing a two tiered system where public students pick up the crumbs. This is a political decision to reduce the influence of outspoken academics with no regard for educational outcomes.
The attack on the Universities in Australia (and elsewhere, I imagine) has a more subtle component. By making them driven by money, they are turned from being places of learning (in the old sense) into places where vocational training is done. The goal is to extinguish the class of educated citizenry.
Somehow, in spite of effort to the contrary I somehow learned how to think for myself. Corporate America never got it’s hands on me, but it sure did grab my country by the throat and is squeezing the life out of it.
Blow back of globalism:
http://www.feer.com/articles1/2007/0704/free/p036.html
Here is something ironic. At the university at which I taught for over thirty years, a psychologist named Kevin MacDonald has written three books using evolutionary psychology to argue that the methods of “self selection” of Jews make them pursue policies antithetical to America’s and other countries’ national interest. He confesses a dislike of Jews and writes for white supremacist publications. He testified for a British holocaust denier David Irving who ultimately was jailed for his holocaust denial activities. Despite all these things, my university supports MacDonald’s right to “academic freedom” and will not move against him. He was given tenure years ago. This is the obverse of the Finkelstein situation. It seems as if anti-establishment ideas of professors on the left are more likely to get them in trouble with administrations than even far right ideas that use “science” in ways reminiscent of Nazism. Finkelstein approaches the holocaust from the left and finds his tenure threatened. MacDonald approaches it from a clearly anti-Semitic rightist perspective and gets a pass. Obviously the popular perception that the Left runs our universities is a bit overstated.
Voltaire, I think you are wrong. As Chomsky has stated in his correspondence with Finkelstein early on, Finkelstein exposed alot of the American intellectuals as frauds. His exposé on them prevented him from graduating from Princeton or getting any meaningful teaching position because he could not get a recommendation from his professors at Princeton. His exposing of Dershowitz for who he really is (shattering the image of a Tom Friedman type liberal (not that he is a liberal)) is causing Dershowitz to hound Finkelstein wherever he goes.
What a man!
Real men fight fascists.
Good on ya, Finkelstein
Boo hisss to the jerk Alan D.
It is an unfortunate reality that progressive and liberal academics are a primary target of the right. They are spied on and recorded by right-wing students, harrassed by thier higher ups and find it hard to get tenure. Tenure itself is being undermined and attacked by “conservatives” because it gives them less control over professors. Part Robertson did away with it at his “university” a few years back spuring others to consider it. Knowledge is power and they want to contol it.
I am a left-oriented Associate Professor of Sociology at a private college in New York. Profs with similar left research agendas as public intellectuals have been held at the Assistant Professor level by hostile Deans or worse–informally driven from the school by insufferable pressure brought to bear on their daily lives in the institution. During my own tenure process some years back I was insulted, degraded, and denied promotion by a very biased faculty committee. Fortunately, I had the full support of my progressive Dean and this led the Academic Vice President to overturn the committee’s decision and grant the promotion on the merits.
I am grateful, but my career since has been plagued by often subtle but consistent marginalization relative to official insitutional recognition and rewards as my school becomes ever more corporatized.
Conservative propaganda notwithstanding, I think my experience is quite typical. There is very little left oriented influence much less power exercised in America’s universities.
When the authoritarians clammor for power, the intelligentsia is always marginalized (if not silenced or disappeared) first. Control the press, manage perception, manufacture consent and demonize independent thinkers… mostly by calling them unpatriotic, crazy or else by finding their weakness (every human has one or more). Will they burn books? Well, at least the internet makes the capacity to stamp out information far harder, thank the Great Spirit for that!
Yes, I agree jobson.
Science professors are the most cowardly.
-Tom
Douglas Feith is teaching graduate students at Georgetown. He has no academic credentials to speak of. Tommy Franks said of him, he is the “f*cking stupidest person I ever met”. No one seems to stand in the way of his drift from top notch faculty (Harvard)to top notch faculty(Georgetown). He was a major player in the deliberate falsification of WMD intelligence which propelled us into attacking Iraq, that is to say, he is a bona fide war criminal deserving of the gas chamber.
Alternatively, Norm Finkelstein is bright, dedicated, punctilious in his research, scrupulously honest, moral and decent. He is, therefore, the enemy of war criminal Feith, plagiarist and torture promoter Alan Dershowitz and their neocon cabal. Dershowitz’ tenured position at Harvard was never endangered by his extensive plagiarism, possibly because his book was strictly commercial and not serious scholarship. I guess that makes sense in some parallel universe.
Fair is foul and foul is fair.
Fr. Dennis Holtschneider[mailto:PRESIDENT@depaul.edu] decided last week to deny Dr Finkelstein’s tenure along with that of Dr. Mehrene Larudee (who happened to support Finkelstein)