Noted Things

by Cliopatria

Ann Althouse, Michael Bérubé, Brad DeLong, Daniel Drezner, Erin O'Connor, Glenn Reynolds, and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss blogging and Juan Cole's candidacy for an appointment at Yale. Juan Cole responds. (CHE, 28 July, subscription required)

Scott Jaschik,"Should the Academic Left Defend Churchill?" Inside Higher Ed, 24 July, takes note of divisions in the academic left about whether it should defend Ward Churchill's academic position. A petition condemning the procedures leading to official action against him bears the signatures of over 200 academics, including

Eric Arnold of Denver, Stanley Aronowitz of CUNY, Bill Ayers of Illinois-Chicago, Mona Baker of Manchester, Marc Becker of Truman State, Joel Beinin of Stanford, Nicholas De Genova of Columbia, Bernadine Dohrn of Northwestern, H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers, Grover Furr of Montclair State, Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge, Van Gosse of Franklin & Marshall, Yvonne Hadad of Georgetown, Caroline Higgins of Earlham, Matthew Frye Jacobson of Yale, Maulana Karenga of Cal State-Long Beach, Vinay Lal of UCLA, Mark Lause of Cincinnati, Mark LeVine of UC-Irvine, Eric Lott of Virginia, Staughton Lynd, Nancy Rabinowitz of Hamilton, Peter Rachleff of Macalester, David Roediger of Illinois, Andrew Ross of NYU, and Timothy Shortell of Brooklyn.

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Manan Ahmed - 7/24/2006

Presumably, he didn't get to be president of the Middle East Studies Association because he was writing a blog.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/24/2006

Sure he would. He's a tenured professor of middle eastern history in one of the top 10 or 15 history departments in the country, with a half dozen books to his credit, access to major venues, and is highly regarded by the other historian of the middle east at Yale. Of those things, only his access to major venues has any indebtedness to his blog.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/24/2006

Erin O'Connor is right on target as usual, in her assertion that "academic freedom is not freedom from criticism, nor is it freedom from judgment."

We've fleshed this issue out at Cliopatria before; but I'd go a step further than Erin and ask whether Cole even would have been considered by the History Department were it not for the profile generated by his blog.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/24/2006

I agree. The usual suspects are there--Shortell, Parmar, Apologetically Tenured. I can only assume that none of them actually read the report that the Univ. of Colorado put out--or that they believe that extreme critics of US foreign policy should be able to operate under different academic rules than the rest of us.

I hadn't seen the "teachers for democracy" website before; noted that Shortell also condemned NCATE's decision to drop the requirement that Ed schools individually assess students' disposition to promote social justice. It's not every day that you get someone openly saying ideological litmus tests for students are OK.

Sherman Jay Dorn - 7/24/2006

Especially embarrassing on the petition signatories list is Mona Baker, she of boycott-Israeli-academics fame. And the petition's reasoning is specious. Or maybe you and I read a report that the signatories didn't.