Cross-posted at www.Muzzlewatch.com
The long running feud between Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and political scientist Norman Finkelstein has taken a new turn.
In 2005, Dershowitz went on the warpath against Finkelstein's then forthcoming book, Beyond Chutzpah:On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History , even calling on California Governor Schwarzenegger to stop publication of the book. Why did the famed First Amendment advocate hate a book that hadn't even been published?
Finkelstein, a child of Holocaust survivors famous "for his contention that the Holocaust is being exploited both for personal financial gain and for pro-Israel political ends," called Dershowitz's The Case for Israel "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense." Finkelstein took some 200 pages in Beyond Chutzpah to critique Dershowitz's Israel book.
Now, more than a few eyebrows are being raised at DePaul as Dershowitz wages a full-on campaign to prevent Finkelstein from getting tenure.
Harvard Law Professor Works to Disrupt Tenure Bid of Longtime Nemesis at DePaul U.
That's the headline from the April 5 Chronicle of Higher Education.
"His scholarship is no more than ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies." No, that's not a statement about Alan Dershowitz (whose multi-part ad hominem attack on his ideological enemy Jimmy Carter is nicely dissected by Mitchell Plitnick here). That's Dershowitz on Finkelstein, explaining why he sent a "dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions" to "everybody who would read it" at DePaul University. (Dershowitz says he compiled the file at the request of some 24 people associated with DePaul.)
We wrote earlier about The Holocaust Industry author Norman Finkelstein's battle for tenure at DePaul. It should not come as a surprise that Dershowitz is back: several years ago the famed First Amendement advocate waged a scorched earth campaign, prior to publication, against Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah:On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.Finkelstein's book contained several hundred pages chronicling, to put it more charitably than Finkelstein did, errors in Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel. Needless to say, Dershowitz disagreed with Finkelstein's assessment.
In this must-read article in the Nation in 2005:
What do you do when somebody wants to publish a book that says you're completely wrong? If you're Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, you write the governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher--because the publisher is the University of California Press, which conceivably might be subject to the power of the governor.
Among other things, Dershowitz went on to contact the president of the University of California and got a law firm to send "threatening letters to the counsel to the university regents, to the university provost, to seventeen directors of the press and to nineteen members of the press's faculty editorial committee."
Now the Chronicle of Higher Education reports (from the Chronicle)that Dershowitz's involvement in Finkelstein's tenure battle at DePaul has caused more than a few heads to turn:
Given Mr. Dershowitz's history of clashes with Mr. Finkelstein, some might conclude that the matter had by now become more personal than professional. Mr. Dershowitz denied that. "For me, it's not personal. It's institutional." He said that Mr. Finkelstein sent "a message to other pro-Israel writers: If you dare write anything scholarly in favor of Israel, I will call you names, I will call you a plagiarist."
Mr. Dershowitz's involvement has stirred serious concern among the DePaul faculty.
Gil Gott, a professor of international studies at DePaul who is chairman of its Liberal Arts and Sciences' Faculty Governance Council, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday that the council had taken up the matter at its November 17, 2006, meeting. (Mr. Gott was not then chair of the council.)
According to the minutes of the session, the council voted unanimously to authorize a letter to DePaul's president, Dennis H. Holtschneider, and the university's provost, Helmut P. Epp, along with the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law school. The letter was to express "the council's dismay at Professor Dershowitz's interference in Finkelstein's tenure and promotion case" and also to explain "that the sanctity of the tenure and promotion process is violated by Professor Dershowitz's emails."
The minutes say: "A discussion followed in which members expressed their views that this was a very disturbing intrusion which attacked the sovereignty of an academic institution to govern its own affairs."
Finkelstein says that his department looked at Dershowitz's claims and "concluded that none of the scholarly allegations that Dershowitz leveled against me had any merit."
There's plenty of evidence so far to back up Finkelstein's claim. His department voted 9-3, in favor of granting tenure and a collegewide faculty panel voted unanimously to support him(5-0). His Dean did come out against granting tenure, but concerns raised about Finkelstein seem largely to focus on the tone of his writing and "frequent personal attacks."