Juan Cole done out of Yale appointment

Note to the neoconservative zeolots who screwed professor Juan Cole out of a job at Yale: If you don't want people to think that you're a shadowy cabal that mercilessly quashes dissent, then don't act like one.

Comments

[greensmile]

Juan has one of the most valuable sites, and insights on the web...but we already knew Yale as a place for rich dunces. Yale's loss. It would be delightful if Juan got a position at Harvard: then I could sneak into his lectures.

[mudkitty]

Droped out, or was chased out?

[gordo]

Well, it's Yale's loss. As the poverty of intellect among the neocons becomes more evident, the demand for professors like Cole will increase.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

How on earth is it that these neocons still wield any power or have any credibility?

[The Phantom]

Yeah. Like Yale and Harvard faculties aren't tilted totally and completely to the left. Do you know how stupid your argument sounds?

[mds]

I agree with The Phantom here. Well, mostly. Just let me deploy my trusty, somewhat dusty, electronic light-pen input high-tech expensive device:

"Yeah. Like Yale and Harvard administrators and trustees are tilted totally and completely to the left. Do you know how stupid my argument sounds?"

Much better.

This situation might actually provoke some modifications to the complicated review / tenure process here at Yale. The case of Professor Graeber's termination for his anarchist beliefs was somewhat more ambiguous. But having the tenure committee override the faculty of two departments at the behest of wealthy alumni pretty much gives the laugh to academic freedom. Not that Straussians care much for academic freedom, the rule of law, etc. But they sure do use their Horowitz sock puppet to shriek and shriek about how conservatives are being oppressed in academia due to their political beliefs.

[John Emerson]

The end of the article was a tasty bit of bureaucratic CYA self-justification:

"First, according to the source, most of Cole’s scholarship pertains to the Baha’i faith and is limited to the 18th and 19th centuries, a liability for a professor charged with teaching about the contemporary Middle East.

Second, the source continued, Cole appears to lack in collegiality, as his penchant for combative blog entries and personal spats with detractors might make him an unnerving fixture on Yale.

Finally, Cole’s politics may have played a role, though a less important one than the other two factors, said the source."

It was those Baha'i! Nothing to do with Jews. We just don't need a Baha'i scholar.

[mds]

Hmm, so according to the article CYA, the decision involved questions about Professor Cole's actual expertise in subjects he presumes to expound upon, a supposed lack of collegiality, and his political views.

Remind me, then, why David Gelernter is still on the Yale faculty? I mean, the guy brags in his official bio about having "foreseen" the World Wide Web...in 1991! For an encore, soon he'll be predicting space travel.

(I don't completely begrudge Gelernter his faculty position, no matter how inflated his accomplishments. The point is, those objections raised about Cole would clear out a whole bunch of faculty here, if they were honestly applied.)

[Raincitygirl]

Michigan's history department is extremely well-regarded. The only thing it lacks next to Yale is Ivy League snob appeal. Cole's current grad students will presumably be relieved, and he and his family won't have to relocate. I'm told by people who've lived there that Ann Arbor is a lovely town. Still sucks that he may have been denied the job for political rather than scholarly reasons, but it's not like he was coming from Podunk Community College to Yale.

BTW, my Jewish godmother reads Cole's blog at least twice a week, and has been known to email me links to his posts. But she's not a big fan of Likud policies in Israel either. You don't have to be anti-Semitic to have a problem with a political party and its adherents. And her mother's entire extended family died in the Holocaust (except for my godmother's cousin, just an infant at the time. Her uncle was in the Resistance in Amsterdam, and was picked up by the Gestapo in 1942. His Resistance cell immediately sent his wife and baby underground and eventually they got to England, because the Gestapo were known to pick up the loved ones of the suspects they were questioning, reasoning that watching your spouse or child be tortured could cause someone to talk in a way that just torturing them wouldn't accomplish. He didn't talk, presumably, since the rest of his cell was never picked up. But he was executed, and a few years later most of his family died in the camps).

I'm not sure why I should have to point out my godmother's credentials as someone who lost family in the Holocaust, but given that she has talked about the losses in her family as a reason why she is troubled by the political situation in the Middle East, perhaps it's relevant. Yes, there are neo-conservative Jewish intellectuals who support Likud policies in a way many other Jewish people and many Israeli voters don't. But the neo-cons are in bed with fundamentalist Christianist fanatics and corrupt war profiteers. We can judge them by the company they keep and the policies they espouse, not their religion.

[M.]

Juan's web site is a famous Geheimtip for all people who care here in Europe and since I did not check his academic background I even thought that he does not have any "strong" one. As one post up below says this is not even true. Yes, "Yale's loss" but reading his blog and then comparing it to what comes out of the "top" US universities in terms of political commentary I think we are all (Juan included) better of this way.

M.

[agm]

Haha, hilarious. Because this isn't the way that all tenure decisions go? The ability to play the academic political game is what lets one move from school to school. The article's last paragraph indicates that one side's members were better at playing said game than the other for a controversial decision. If you think this is at all unusual, you simply haven't been around a university hiring process very often.

[mds]

If you think this is at all unusual, you simply haven't been around a university hiring process very often.

Bzzzt. Oh, I'm sorry, your answer is incorrect. Here at Yale it is extremely unusual for the faculty of a department, let alone two departments, to be overridden by the tenure committee on a hiring decision. Especially at the behest of wealthy alumni who were lobbied by outside groups. If you are actually asserting that departmental hiring decisions are usually handled this way, you're either ignorant or a barefaced liar. Note that these are not mutually exclusive.

[Linnaeus]

Michigan's history department is extremely well-regarded. The only thing it lacks next to Yale is Ivy League snob appeal. Cole's current grad students will presumably be relieved, and he and his family won't have to relocate. I'm told by people who've lived there that Ann Arbor is a lovely town. Still sucks that he may have been denied the job for political rather than scholarly reasons, but it's not like he was coming from Podunk Community College to Yale.

Full disclosure: I'm a U-M alum, so feel free to take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

With all due respect, I think this pretty much nails it . Cole doesn't really lose much, if anything, by not going to Yale.

I have to say that having seen several faculty members at the colleges I've attended get cherry-picked by more "elite" private colleges, I'm kinda chalking up this one to a win for the state schools.

[Craig]

Juan Cole should be pumping gas for a living. Or flipping burgers. My dog knows more about any given subject tha Juan Cole does. Of course, my dog doesn't have that adorable dorkishly arrogant sex appeal that Juan Cole does. If his ability ever cathes up with his ego, he'll be a force to be reckoned with. In the meantime, I guess he can keep huffing glue and collecting checks from whatever babysitting service he works for.

[cole_the_mole]

the terrorist apologist mr.cole is regarded as a paid agent of Iran by those that carefully analyse his one sided dribble.

[Paul]

To characterize a statement as anti-semitic when it clearly is does nothing to quash debate. Hopefully, it will elucidate things for people who think it's acceptable to make vague references to the actions of "merciless cabals."

This quote: "if you don't want people to think you're a shadowy cabal that mercilessly quashes dissent, then don't act like one" is perhaps a little bit too vague for me to characterize without further inspection. The link is to Jewish Week and the implication is that the charge that Jews behave like a "shadowy cabal" is an accurate one.

If the purpose of my post is to stimulate debate rather than quash it, can someone explain to me how that statement isn't anti-semitic? How are the Jewish people responsible for Mr. Cole's rejection from Yale? Even if a false accusation of anti-semitism were responsible for his failure to obtain a position there, and I, a representative of the shadowy cabal will never admit this (even after vigorous pogrom), why imply collective guilt?

[greykangaroo]

I'd like to drop in at this late stage and comment that the more I read of the egregious professor-blogger, the more he appears to be a manipulative prick with the truth. But hey I just live in Australia, what would I know about Yale and their appalling taste in pseudo-academics? At a pinch this institution, so much more leafy than mine, would presumably consider Ward Churchill too.