What is the stated reason for the cancellation of Finkelstein’s courses, both of which are filled to capacity? Professor Finkelstein, it seems, in the judgment of DePaul’s administration, constitutes a security threat to DePaul faculty and staff. In a previous article, I documented that Finkelstein simply confronted Dean “Chuck” Suchar outside of 990 Fullerton on June 14th after the special LA&S emergency meeting devoted to discussing the procedural and academic freedom violations in the Finkelstein and Larudee cases. It’s reported that Suchar did, in fact, maintain that the real reasons for Finkelstein’s tenure denial were confidential. Finkelstein was informed by faculty who attended the meeting that Suchar reported that he had secret information on the controversial political science professor. Suchar apparently alleged that he felt harassed by Finkelstein, calling for the administration to issue a restraining order against his colleague.

In an irony sure not to escape Dissident Voice readers, Finkelstein is being barred from teaching courses devoted to examining “Freedom and Empowerment” and “Justice and Social Equality”. In addition, Finkelstein is being thrown out of his office and might not even have access to office space this coming academic year at DePaul. Naturally, DePaul students are outraged and are demanding a serious explanation from Dean Suchar and other DePaul administrative officers. Not expecting a serious answer from the administration, while anticipating wider assaults against critical thinking and dissent, the students are planning an academic freedom conference at the University of Chicago for October 12th. The conference’s keynote speakers are Noam Chomsky (MIT), John Mearsheimer (Univ. of Chicago), Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Neve Gordon (Ben-Gurion University, Israel), and Tariq Ali (Verso Books). See here.

The security threat that Norman Finkelstein represents is clear: He opens his students’ minds to the dangers of the propaganda system, as it churns out lies that sustain U.S. support for Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian population, which is living under the most oppressive conditions in Gaza and the West Bank.

That DePaul’s administration was bought off and bullied by the Israel Lobby, subjected to intimidation and threats of political embarrassment if it tenured Finkelstein, is abundantly clear. The only question is: When will President Dennis Holtschneider admit that the DePaul’s Board of Trustees and Rubenstein and Associates made a major miscalculation? When will he and they realize that the hundreds of millions of dollars that will pour in to DePaul’s coffers over the next several years will never make up for the gravity of the injustice that has taken place on his watch?

Norman Finklestein is too strong an intellect, too strong a personality, and too strong a mensch to allow DePaul’s faculty and administrators to prevent him from doing what he does best: exposing spurious scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict, while driving U.S. supporters of Israel into utter despair. Norman Finkelstein poses an immense threat to the sense of security and privilege shared by the majority of DePaul professors who wrap themselves in cocoons of irrelevance, while hoping the real world will just disappear so they can go back to reading and theorizing about ‘Vincentian personalism’ and social justice. A security threat, indeed!”

The stated reason for Larudee’s denial was because of “teaching evaluations, sometimes below the departmental mean, thin record of scholarship.” Someone might have told Dennis that it might be good idea to proofread a tenure-denial letter before sending it out to the recipient. In this case, Dennis might have been wise to place an “and” before “thin record of scholarship.” If the main sentence, explaining the tenure denial, doesn’t even scan grammatically, one is left to wonder how much thought Holtschneider put into the denial itself. Larudee’s letter was less than one page. Marty Pertez, the New Republic Editor, couldn’t have come up with better sentences explaining these bad-faith denials. I’m sure the ADL office in Boston and the AIPAC office in Washington got a hearty chuckle from these sentences’ generality, as well as their “fuck you” quality.

DePaul’s heroic students have dedicated their summer to pulling together the resources and the people to hold an academic freedom conference in Chicago in October. Their bravery and persistence should be praised by the American public. DePaul’s administration, while perhaps hoping the outrage will die down over the summer, fears the convening of such a conference, much less the mere mention of “academic freedom at DePaul.” The Faculty Governance Council has posted a letter, calling for an investigation of the Finkelstein and Larudee tenure denials, as well as of the denial of promotion to full professor for all five of the LA&S associate professors who applied for promotion this year. These types of tenure and promotion denials are unprecedented in DePaul’s history. To date, only forty-four out of two hundred and fifty tenured faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have signed the letter. According to one Associate Dean in LA&S, who opposed the circulation of the letter, those who have expressed concern about this year’s denials have done so because they are “invested in the Finkelstein and Larudee cases.” Oh for sure. I guess we know what it takes to become an Associate Dean at DePaul these days.

One of the four associate professors denied tenure was one Alex Papadapulus who is on the Faculty Governance Counsel. Papadapulus, it is reported, signed the letter that DePaul’s Faculty Governance Council wrote last fall to Harvard’s administration, which requested that Harvard’s leadership intervene to prevent Alan Dershowitz from continuing to interfere in Finkelstein’s tenure case. One can’t help but think that Dershowitz saw that letter, noted Papadapulus’s name and sought a little payback against someone with whom he had no public dispute. In addition, all four of these associate professors had received Suchar’s enthusiastic promotion to full professor. I suspect, in the future, DePaul faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences will be a little circumspect the next time Suchar tells them “Everything is in order.” Was DePaul’s Board of Trustees, through Dershowitz, trying to send the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences a message? Oh for sure…

Oh, for sure…. DePaul University’s administration is now alleging that Norman Finkelstein poses an imminent danger to faculty and administrators on the Lincoln Park campus in Chicago. What is Finkelstein’s “crime” according to DePaul’s commissars? Well, he sought to confront the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, one “Chuck” Suchar, and a couple of the authors of the minority report, senior men in DePaul’s political science department, who alleged that Finkelstein is more a brawler than a scholar, engages in highly personalized attacks against political opponents, and could — if tenured — pose a threat to any DePaul faculty member or administrator who says “no” to him. This is the first time that I have ever heard of someone’s possible post-tenure behavior being scrutinized. “Let me tell you what Norman Finkelstein might be capable of doing if he gets tenure.” Some much for Vincentian personalism. Oh for sure….

This minority report, as many who have read Kim Petersen’s excellent analysis will remember, laid the ground for Finkelstein’s tenure denial by DePaul’s University Promotion and Tenure Board and President Dennis Holtschneider. Well, it appears that Finkelstein had a téte â téte of sorts with Dean Suchar outside of 990 West Fullerton on June 14 th after a College-wide discussion of the Finkelstein and Larudee cases, where Suchar purportedly claimed that he could not reveal the real reasons as to why he ignored a 9-3 political science department vote and a unanimous College personnel committee vote in Finkelstein’s favor, choosing instead to come up with an unprecedented reason for the denial: Finkelstein’s scholarship did not demonstrate appropriate respect for the dignity of political opponents. Who were these opponents? Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Goldhagen, Jerzy Kozinski, and Elie Wiesel. Indeed, it’s reported that the real reason as to Finkelstein’s tenure denial has to remain confidential. I believe that’s called invoking the “secret evidence” clause, which is something we might expect from the Bush administration, but certainly not from a Dean who trumpeted on and on about Vincentian personalism in his March 22nd memo.

As it turns out, 990 West Fullerton (just off of Sheffield and Fullerton for those of you who know the Lincoln Park areas) is where the Dean of Liberal Arts has his office on the fourth floor. I’m told that the political science and international studies departments are all housed within relatively close proximity to the Dean’s Office in this building — something I’m sure “Chuck” Suchar is quite happy about these days.

After the shocking June 8th tenure denials came down, many faculty at DePaul were outraged that the “voice” of the faculty had been ignored, which led to a couple of emergency meetings the following week where administrators who took part in the Finkelstein and Larudee cases could field questions and attempt to address inconsistencies and discrepancies, of which there were apparently plenty.

Well, if you look at the pictures of Suchar and Finkelstein going at it inside 990 West Fullerton, you can’t help but notice that Suchar is a large man who hasn’t missed many meals in recent years. Finkelstein, on the other hand, is quite trim and has just been fired from his job, largely because of Suchar’s memo, undoubtedly conditioned by Alan Dershowit’s blitzkrieg against Finkeltstein getting tenure throughout this past year at DePaul. Given all this, one might be prone to giving Finkelstein a little room to express his anger toward this Dean, who apparently has yet to show any indication that he has actually read any of Finkelstein’s work.

After all, who puts the Israeli New Historian, Benny Morris, is the same company as Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kozinski, and Daniel Goldhagen? Morris is a serious historian. Wiesel, Kozinski, and Goldhagen are huckster and hoaxers, not as Suchar would have it, “huxters and hoaxters”.

It’s a wonder Suchar didn’t throw NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne in for good measure, as Neuborne is one of Finkelstein’s favorite Holocaust hucksters. Readers of Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering will remember that Neuborne charged over 4 million dollars for his “legal services” in the double-shakedown of the Swiss in 1996-2000. Strangely, Dershowitz alleged that Finkelstein tried to get Neuborne disbarred from the NY state bar, a charge that was disproven by Frank Menetrez in his “Dershowitz versus Finkelstein: Who’s Right, Who’s Wrong.” Who could have known that Norm Finkelstein had this kind of political clout? Disbarring Holocaust hucksters in New York? Oh for sure….

Well, it’s been quite an interesting few years for Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University. In the span of just the last two years, he has exposed a senior Harvard Law Professor as a hideous fraud on the Israel-Palestine conflict, drove three senior professors in his own department to the brink of desperation in their attempts to derail his tenure case, threw the DePaul General Counsel’s Office into a tizzy as it strategized on how to subvert academic freedom “within the law,” and confronted a cowardly Dean outside of the office for his role in Finkelstein’s firing. Oh for sure… Norm’s a real menace to society because of these “antics”?

How could anyone at DePaul, or elsewhere, not want Norm Finkelstein as a colleague — and a tenured one at that?

One can’t help but think that DePaul’s untenured faculty are freaking out these days. After all, what is a poor assistant professor to think after seeing an internationally acclaimed scholar like Norman Finkelstein, who has five books to his credit, taken out by DePaul’s administration after — and one must really chortle when reading this sentence — “The U[niversity] B[oard] [on] P[romotion] [and] T[enure] [has] determined that [Finkelstein’s] scholarship does not meet DePaul’s tenure standards”—a clear indication that AIPAC’s main academic howler, Alan Dershowitz, made sufficient noise about “Finkelstein’s one-sided agitprop” to scare the living daylights out of every Vincentian in Chicago.

Most assistant professors are lucky to have one book accompanying their dossiers when they go up for tenure. Finkelstein put five books, which have been translated into forty-six different languages, more than the entire faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences at DePaul combined, on the table last year when he began the tenure and promotion process. It would be interesting to check up on how many of DePaul’s St. Vincent DePaul Professors can brag of such an enviable publication record. Let’s not forget that Finkelstein publishes serious books, which have provoked international discussions about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the misuse of the Holocaust, not the usual academic snoozers — written to help make a tenure case for some third-rate intellectual who needs an academic sinecure — that go out of a print a year or two after they are published.

As Robert Jensen argued in his “Exposing the Commonplace Cowardice of ‘Responsible’ Professors”, Finkelstein may have taken his intellectual responsibility too seriously, or at least too seriously for most middle-brow intellectuals working at universities such as Depaul, where staying out of the way and towing the line of the powerful is considered to be indicative of “prudent judgment” and “responsible behavior.”

So, as junior faculty at DePaul contemplate their future at the largest Catholic University in the United States, and wonder if they are making sufficient progress toward tenure at this institution where “Vincentian personalism” is taken so seriously, they should consider giving good old Al Dershowitz a call or dropping the Felix Frankfurter of Law at Harvard an email, asking “Am I doing a sufficient job worshipping the Holy State and its patron? Is there more I can do to silence all discussion of U.S. and Israeli war crimes against Palestinians on this campus?”

I’m sure Al would be delighted to hear/see that he can give any junior faculty member at DePaul, who asks for a quick run down on his or her tenure prospects, an honest and full assessment. I can hear the conversations now — “You’re doing a great job. Keep it up. Just keep arguing that Palestinians have never existed and that Israel does not violate the rights of any human being,” or “You need to demonstrate more taste in your selection of topics for scholarly publication. No one really cares if the World Jewish Congress and the World Restitution Organization conducted a ‘double shakedown’ against the Swiss, the Germans, and the Poles in the late nineties in the name of needy Holocaust survivors. That’s in the past, along with everything the IDF had done in Jenin, Ramallah, and Hebron for the last five years.”

As these wannabe tenured professors will soon learn, it’s not solid teaching, scholarship, or service that will secure them a permanent place at the university founded by the Vincentian order in the USA in 1898, but a commitment to playing the game of the perpetual academic toady. Soon DePaul’s untenured faculty will learn that “huckster” is spelled “huxter”.

Shall we toady? Really.

Alan Dershowitz: “Is this Finkelstein tenure denial really going to go down without a hitch? There’s a lot riding on this.”

John Simon: “We’ll take care of it Alan. No need to worry. The players are in place. It’s a lock. You have my personal assurance.”

Alan Dershowitz: “Thanks, John.”

In May 2004, a mere one month before fifty Jenner and Block attorneys attended a Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago Lawyer’s Division dinner in Chicago, where Alan Dershowitz delivered the keynote address on “The Case for Israel,” John Simon, a Jenner and Block partner, was elected Chair of DePaul’s Board of Trustees. In October 2004, he assumed the position of chair of the Board of Trustees after having served as a Trustee since 1990.

You read that correctly: one month before Dershowitz made the case for Israel in front of the Chicago JUF and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago Lawyer’s Division, with fifty Jenner and Block attorneys in attendance, John Simon became chair of DePaul’s Board of Trustees. Three months after Dershowitz makes the case for Israel before fifty Jenner and Block attorneys and 2500 die-hard supporters of Israel at a JUF fundraiser, John Simon officially began his stint as chair of DePaul’s Board of Trustees. (See p. 28 and this video). Simon received the ORT Jurisprudence Award in 1999. A little digging allowed me to learn that:

ORT (was created in 1880 by Russian Jews who established new colonies and agricultural schools and model farms to help newly displaced Russian Jews adapt to an agricultural existence.) Known as the ‘Obschestvo Remeslenovo i. Zemledelcheskovo Trouda,’ which translates into the ‘Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor,’ ORT has developed into an international non-governmental educator that has had schools and programs in 88 countries throughout the world and that helps to educate 300,000 students each year. Today, ORT is a world leader in technological and general education, teaching the skills necessary for success in today’s world. (See press release)

Was John Simon in attendance at Dershowitz’s talk before the Jewish United Fund and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago Lawyer’s Division? Are Simon and Dershowitz acquaintances? Friends? Was John Simon elected chair of DePaul’s Board of Trustees to take care of Norman Finkelstein’s tenure case, as a favor to Alan Dershowitz? Who knows? The answers to these questions are merely speculative at this point, but they are certainly worth asking. You can email John Simon at jsimon@jenner.com and ask him for some answers to these questions.

“All of this is merely a coincidence,” you say, “Don’t be paranoid!” We all know an upstanding professional such as Alan Dershowitz would not try to tamper with Norman Finkelstein’s tenure case through DePaul’s Board of Trustees nearly two years before his good friend “Norm” was supposed to go up for tenure, right? Or would he?

Readers will remember that Finkelstein gave Dershowitz the drubbing of his life in September 24th, 2003 on Democracy Now!, where Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of concocting a hoax plagiarized from another hoax, a reference to the fact that Dershowitz, in writing his The Case for Israel, “borrowed” — perhaps illegitimately — secondary material from Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

We all know the dangers of positing conspiracy theories, but this one is really too good to pass up:

On the Jenner and Block website advertising Dershowitz’s June 2004 speech before the Chicago JUF, you’ll notice that the JUF/JF board of directors is headed by Chairman Lester J. Rosenberg and President Steven B. Nasatir. Well, the name Nasatir leapt out at me. As it turns out, one Lonnie Nasatir delivered the joyous news on 6/11/07 from the ADL office about the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Greater Chicago/Upper Midwest Regional Office’s stance on Finkelstein’s tenure denial. Are Lonnie and Steve Nasatir related? I’m thinking they might be.

Speaking on behalf of the Chicago ADL Office, Lonnie Nasatir insisted that one Claudette Marie Muhmammad, who had been appointed to Rod Blagojevich’s Task Force on Hate Crimes, be removed after it was revealed that Muhammad had connections to the Nation of Islam. Imagine what might have happened had a woman with the last name of “Epstein” been removed from Blagojevich’s task force for sending money to the Israeli Settler Movement or for proven connections to the Israeli Likud Party. The Heavens would surely have darkened. Add to all this that the Anti-Defamation League actually specializes in defaming U.S. critics of Israel, it’s a wonder that Nasatir wasn’t rung up on charges of “gross hypocrisy”.

Another internal player at DePaul, who undoubtedly watched the Finkelstein tenure proceeding with keen interest, is J.D. Bindenagel, Vice President for DePaul’s Community, Government, and International Affairs. Bindenagel was a Holocaust Compensation official in the State Department appointed in 1999 by President Clinton as U.S. Ambassador and Special Envoy for Holocaust issues, reaching “agreements on World War II-era forced labor, insurance, art, property restitution, and Holocaust education, research and remembrance.” In his The Holocaust Industry: On the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering Finkelstein deals critically with the likes of Bindenagel and Stuart Eizenstat, the author of Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II and a key player in the Holocaust Industry racket. Here’s what Finkelstein had to say on Bindenagel:

Even Holocaust survivor organizations decry that the Holocaust industry inflated the number of survivors during negotiations only to deflate the number once it had the compensation monies earmarked for Holocaust survivors at hand: “Why during the negotiations were the numbers of actual Shoah survivors so vastly exaggerated and why were the negotiators so fearful that the press and the German and Swiss opponents might challenge their proclaimed survivors statistics?” The inflation now exceeds that of the Weimar years with the US State Department’s Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, J.D. Bindenagel, proclaiming that “in the postwar years many millions of Holocaust victims were caught behind the Iron Curtain.” (The Holocaust Industry, p. 238-39).

To see Bindenagel’s contributions to the Proceedings of the Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, go here. I’m sure this Vice President at DePaul would have loved to have had Finkelstein on the faculty permanently. I’m sure Finkelstein could have reminded Bindenagel on a regular basis of the full dimensions of the Holocaust Industry’s “Double Shakedown” of Europe. “Hey Norm, let’s get a martini at 5 so we can recap the Holocaust Industry’s shakedown of Germany and a good bit of Eastern Europe.” Probably not — wasn’t going to happen.

Assuming DePaul’s administration made a commitment nearly three years ago to make sure that Finkelstein would be denied tenure, wouldn’t it have just been more honest and efficient for President Dennis Holtscheider to have sent Finkelstein a short note along these lines:

We don’t like the conclusions of your scholarship, which are supported by the leading scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Nazi Holocaust, because they aren’t conducive to perpetuating the propaganda system that DePaul University is dedicated to upholding under the banner of ‘Vincentian Personalism,’ so we’ll accuse you of advocacy, which suffuses all social-science scholarship.

This is truly defamation, Zionist-style. To hide behind the obvious bad-faith language of the tenure denial letter itself, which is effectively disposed of by Kim Petersen in his three-part essay on Bathos at DePaul/Academe, really requires chutzpah. But when it comes to justifying the unjustifiable and explaining the unexplainable, chutzpah is all you’ve got to lean on.

If there’s no place for Norman G. Finkelstein in American Academe, what does that mean? I’m afraid it means that American Academe isn’t ready for serious scholarship, especially when it impedes U.S. and Israeli war aims in the Middle East.

Most likely, what went through Holtschneider’s head was that, at least in Finkelstein’s case, DePaul University could avoid twenty years of continual controversy if it denied this world renowned public intellectual lifetime employment. After all, who wants to receive weekly or even daily missives from the Anti-Defamation League or Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, who led the year-long campaign against Finkelstein’s tenure, intervening through the former head of DePaul’s political science department, and just a year before attempting to intimidate the University of California Press into dropping the publication of Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History? Where the U. California Press stood firm, DePaul faltered.

Of course, DePaul maintains that Dershowitz’s “interference” had absolutely no effect on its tenure and promotion processes. Along similar lines, DePaul probably wagered that it could deal with the outrage of angry students and faculty and progressive fellow travelers, but could not withstand the financial and political backlash of the pro-Israel right and the Israel Lobby if it tenured Finkelstein. But DePaul University is dependent upon student tuition dollars, not the growth of a large endowment, right? Will DePaul’s administration make available for public scrutiny the university’s endowment figures for the next five years, even though it is a private university? Probably not, but these figures are worth asking for.

Surely, neither the UBPT or Holtschneider actually believed Alan Dershowitz’s argument that Finkelstein has no scholarship and only churns out one-sided agit prop. There are clearly no sound academic arguments that were offered either by Holtscheider or the UBPT that help any of us make sense of the “decision.” This was one of my favorite sentences in Finkelstein’s denial letter: “In [being mindful of how important it is to follow the policies in the faculty handbook] the [UPBT] was reminded of broader expectations and professional standards by which faculty are DePaul are obliged to comport themselves as members of the academic profession and as members of the DePaul intellectual community.” Who reminded the UBTP of these broader expectations? Alan Dershowitz? Although the external reviews written by two distinguished political scientists were solidly behind Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion, the Dean of Arts and Sciences framed his rationale for withholding Finkelstein’s tenure application around the political science department’s minority report, which was authored by three individuals who are not experts on the Middle East or the Holocaust.

Holtschneider also mentions in his letter that he could not in good conscience view Finkelstein as actually promoting a scholarly debate but instead simplifying and polarizing discussions that require layered and subtle consideration [“In the opinion of those opposing tenure, your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from the consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration.”] [“I cannot in good faith conclude that you honor the obligations to ‘respect and defend the free inquiry of associates,’ ‘show due respect for the opinion of others,’ and ‘strive to be objective in their professional judgment of colleagues’.”]

Well, all of this is very funny since DePaul hired Finkelstein into a tenure-track position with four of the five books, which he put up with his tenure dossier, already out in the public sphere. The one book that Finkelstein published since he started at DePaul is Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Univ. of California), which of course, is critical of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel and its various misrepresentations of diplomatic, legal, and historical aspects of the conflict. So, if one wades through the various ins and outs of Holtschneider’s prose, one can conclude that Finkelstein’s real “mistake” was to have gone after a big-shot like Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein’s four other books, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (Minnesota), Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso), A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (Holt Books), and The Holocaust Industry: The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso), were all published before Finkelstein started his tenure-track odyssey at DePaul.

Is one to understand that before he was hired, neither his colleagues in the political science department nor DePaul’s administration knew about the contents of these books or that Finkelstein wrote about highly charged topics with clarity and conviction? And that it was only through the publication of Beyond Chutzpah, the exigency of Finkelstein’s tenure proceedings, and Dershowitz’s outside interference, that his critical and polemical edge came to light? Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History could hardly have been a surprise as the latest addition in the Finkelstein corpus, since it’s a natural extension of Finkelstein’s other work — exposing spurious scholarship on the U.S.-Israel-Palestine conflict, which receives widespread praise within an intellectual culture that is eager to lend itself to upholding central tenets of the propaganda system, while denouncing those who pose a threat to it.

In his three-part essay, “Bathos at DePaul,” Kim Petersen effectively and completely deconstructs Holtschneider’s, the UBPT’s, and by implication, DePaul University’s General Counsel’s logic, demonstrating that beyond obfuscation there’s simply no substance behind the reasons offered for the denial. It’s not even clear that Holtscheider understands the portions of the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics that he cites. This statement, as AAUP-Illinois Council President Leo Welch recently made clear in his letter to Holtscheider, is not to be used for tenure evaluations. Beyond this, the AAUP’s statement on collegiality makes clear that:

The current tendency to isolate collegiality as a distinct dimension of evaluation, [however], poses several dangers. Historically, “collegiality” has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the bases of their difference from a perceived norm. The invocation of “collegiality” may also threaten academic freedom. In the heat of important decisions regarding promotion or tenure, as well as other matters involving such traditional areas of faculty responsibility as curriculum or academic hiring, collegiality may be confused with the expectation that a faculty member display “enthusiasm” or “dedication,” evince “a constructive attitude” that will “foster harmony” or display excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion. Such expectations are flatly contrary to elementary principles of academic freedom, which protect a faculty member’s right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators.

The administration needed another denial out of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to make the Finkelstein denial appear legitimate — Larudee provided the perfect target. Although she had received unanimous support from her department, the College Personnel Committee, and the support of Dean Charles Suchar, she could also be made an example of for resisting the administrative line on Finkelstein. After Suchar’s March 22 memorandum became public, Larudee joined a small faculty committee that met regularly to strategize about how the administration might try to undermine Finkelstein’s candidacy. Beyond this, her brother is one of the most active members of the International Solidarity Movement, which defends Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza from demolition. Rachel Corrie was a member of the organization when she died in Rafah, Gaza on March 16th, 2003. Was Larudee simply a convenient political target? There were only two denials out of the College of Arts and Sciences — Finkelstein and Larudee.

Academic freedom and tenure, if they are to have any meaning, must protect dissenting intellectuals like Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee from the political forces that have conspired within and without DePaul University. If nothing else, the Finkelstein and Larudee tenure denials have proven that academic freedom apparently was never meant to be extended to critics of U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East. Isn’t that the real message of the last few months at DePaul University, the largest Catholic University in the United States? Dershowitz and a number of other U.S. supporters of Israel have made the answer crystal clear.