We are in the Reality-Based community here, and one part of that is not accepting Right Wing propaganda at face value, even in the very rare cases where the propanganda feeds into a story line that we like. In the case of academic blogger Juan Cole, Right Wingers are claiming credit for his Yale job offer being turned down by an upper-level university committee. I have inside knowledge of what happened at Yale, and it is not as simple as folks would like to think. If you want something much closer to the real story, follow me to the extended section.
Right Wing bloggers love to tell the story of how they killed off Juan Cole's chance of a job at Yale. The same story line also "pleases" many on the left, because it is yet another example of big institutions in league with Rignt Wingers. But life in academia is rarely so simple.
The fact is that Cole was turned down by a faculty committee, not by (as suggested in a recent "recommended" diary) the "Yale administration". Yale faculty members are overwhelmingly [1] liberal and [2] extremely resentful of outside pressure. So why would they turn down Cole? I wasn't there, but I have talked to folks who were.
The important point is that there was a serious academic, non-political debate about Cole at Yale. Cole is an historian, as I understand it, primarily studying 18th-19th century Iran, including the study of the Bahai religion. He is well respected in this field. However, many folks believed that the cross-displinary Professorship under discussion should go to a scholar of the Contemporary Middle East, not to a scholar of the past. There was also some debate over whether Cole was the very best Middle East historian, or only a very good one. These debates split the history department even before the vote in the Senior Appointments Committee. That committee, by the way, approves most offers made by departments but is quite likely to turn down appointments where the academic department is itself quite split.
Well that is a boring story, I know. Weren't any juicy politics involved? Well, there are hints of two. First, some folks may adopted the petty and unconvincing position that one just probably can't be both a great blogger and a great academic. Much more seriously, discussion of Israel often creates heated debates among campus liberals. I don't know if Cole's comments about Israel hurt him among pro-Israel faculty, but I can't rule it out. No one would be so crude as to bring an argument like that into a serious academic debate, but it might guide someone's private vote; I just don't know.
The bottom line, though, is that the Right Wing story about how they gloriously killed off Cole's Yale appointment is pure BS. It is presented by them without evidence. The real story is of inside academic debate. You are still free to disagree with the outcome, but there you have it.