Rockefeller Chapel was filled to capacity as around 1,500 gathered for the much-anticipated convening of several prominent scholars whose views on politics and American policy have propelled them to the forefront of a recent debate about freedom and censorship in the academic world.
By Kimberly Sutton
Tariq Ali, editor of New Left Review and Verso Books, moderated the conference at which Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Norman http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1661, and several others delivered addresses decrying recent developments that have, in the speakers’ views, imperiled the freedom of academics to produce candid scholarship free from the pressures of external interests.
The most prominent of these interests confronted during Friday’s panel presentations was the Israel lobby, which several of the speakers criticized for having an alleged chilling effect on academic discourse over its influence on American foreign policy.
“This is where we stand, and this is what we are going to defend,” Ali said in his opening remarks, responding to the recent tenure denials of DePaul University professors Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee. Nearly all of the speakers Friday made at least passing mention of the controversy that embroiled Finkelstein earlier this year.
Finkelstein, whose work criticizes the United States’s relationship with the Israel lobby, was thrust into the national spotlight this June when DePaul denied him tenure. He mounted a vocal campaign against the university’s administration, vowing to go on a hunger strike to bring attention to the situation. The ordeal ended after Finkelstein resigned and negotiated an undisclosed settlement. Some observers have said that Larudee, a major Finkelstein supporter, was denied tenure because of her association with him.In his speech, John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the U of C, attempted to dismantle DePaul’s case against Finkelstein. Mearsheimer came out as an ardent supporter of Finkelstein’s tenure bid during the proceedings earlier this year and recently co-authored a controversial book examining the Israel lobby.
He also addressed the politics of Finkelstein’s denial, painting academia as the only space where Israel is “treated as a normal country, where past and present actions are critically assessed,” and the place where public opinion on the matter is most accurately reflected.
In Mearsheimer’s speech, as well as in panel responses to audience questions, the U of C was held up as an example of an institution that embraced the flourishing of unrestricted discourse.