Academic freedom

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2007

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor, is attempting to disrupt the tenure proceedings of his longtime nemesis, Norman Finkelstein, of DePaul University. When Finkelstein came up for tenure last fall, Dershowitz sent DePaul a letter denouncing Finkelstein's scholarship. Although Finkelstein's Political Science Department supports his bid for tenure, the dean of his college does not. Faculty around the country have been appalled by this controversy and 637 signatures have been sent to DePaul's

President and Provost in protest. On May 9, 2007, Democracy Now interviewed Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim, two world-renowned scholars in the fields of the Holocaust and Israeli policy, also Finkelstein's areas of expertise, who praised Finkelstein for his "learned and careful" scholarship and "acuity and analytical power." For additional information, see www.insidehighered.com, April 3, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 2007, and www.counterpunch.org, April 30, 2007.

The Board of Trustees of The City University of New York has established a new policy to handle student complaints against faculty conduct both in the classroom and in other university settings. These new procedures were denounced as eroding academic freedom by the University Faculty Senate and the Professional Staff Congress union (The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 1, 2007).

"No Longer Free to Choose" (www. insidehighered.com, February 2, 2007) analyzes another attack on academic freedom--the right to choose textbooks.