Tenure denied for ripping Israeli policies

Headline in the New York Times: “Outspoken Political Scientist Denied Tenure at DePaul.” His name: Norman Finkelstein.

He met the publishing standards of academia. His political science department at the Catholic college in Chicago endorsed him. The DePaul president called him an excellent teacher. He pointed out that Finkelstein was a nationally recognized public intellectual.

But a DePaul committee rejected his tenure bid, 4-3. Why? Finkelstein made the “mistake” of writing and speaking vigorously against Israel for oppressing the Palestinians.

The Jewish lobby smeared him, conducting a hysterical nationwide campaign even though it was an internal DePaul matter and none of the lobby’s business. The hysteria was led by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, the arch-Zionist and ultra-defender of Israel,

It was an egregious violation of academic standards, a blacklisting worthy of Joe McCarthy. Finkelstein noted the irony: his parents were yanked from the Warsaw ghetto and sent to Nazi death camps. They survived but the rest of his relatives were slaughtered.

The DePaul tenure committee doubtless never heard of Richard Ely, economics professor at Wisconsin. He was denounced in 1894 as a socialist, agitator, heretic and labor sympathizer. So Ely was haled before the board of regents for an examination of his opinions.

After a “trial” in which Ely’s book on socialism and proposed social changes was the “star witness,” Ely was not just “acquitted.” The regents issued an opinion that Ely called the Magna Carta of U.S. higher education.

It said: “We could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher…Such a course would be equivalent to saying that no professor should teach anything which is not accepted by everybody as true…In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead.”

Word abortion banned

The word abortion has been banished from Hollywood films. Following the retrograde line of President Bush, scriptwriters no longer use the word.

A new release, “Knocked Up,” cries out for at least the suggestion that abortion is the way out of an unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. But, no, the word is unmentionable.

Robert Thompson, who directs the popular cultural center at Syracuse University, notes sadly: “It has been the one controversial subject matter that has not only not progressed but has totally retreated from popular culture.”

‘Just’ school books

Jonathan Cummins, a former student of mine now living in California, sent me an email saying that he was in a Barnes & Noble recently when he overheard some girls passing by a table displaying “The Great Gatsby,” “The Old Man and the Sea” and “Of Mice and Men.”

“These are school books,” one girl said with a sneer.

Cummins commented: “What a shame that for these youths literature was a source of suffering through their school years.”

Self-taught is poorly taught

Recently I had an epiphany: the limitations of being an autodidact. I was a poor tennis player and golfer because I was self-taught--and hence badly taught. (Aside from the fact that I had no athletic talent.)

Similarly, I educated myself as most people do with an intellectual bent. I would look up the meaning of “chimera” but I never paid attention to how it was pronounced. (Not pronounced CHIM-era but KI-mira.) Ditto with “egregious.” I mispronounced it for years as EGREG instead of the correct EGREE.)

SHORT TAKES: All hail San Francisco. It is the first major city in America to start banning plastic bags…The French government spends $3.8 billion a year on the arts, 30 times more than the U.S. budget for the National Endowment for the Arts…

All hail Deidre Pike, columnist for the Reno News & Review, for writing the line: “We are what we read”…British General Montgomery in World War II said his first rule of warfare was: “Don’t march on Moscow.” It was a lesson Hitler never learned from Napoleon’s débâcle…

The late Kurt Vonnegut: “I know of only one nation that has dropped nuclear bombs on innocent people”…A deputy assistant secretary of state said he was shocked that major law firms would represent terrorism suspects. He should be compelled to read “One Man’s Freedom” by Edward Bennett Williams. One man’s freedom is everybody’s freedom.