DePaul denies tenure to Finkelstein

DePaul University denied tenure to Norman Finkelstein, a professor who raised hackles for saying that Jewish groups have exploited the Holocaust.Norman Finkelstein “plays fast and loose” with the facts he cited in his scholarly work, Michael Kotzin, the executive vice president of the Jewish United
Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, told JTA on Sunday, thus making the decision necessary. Kotzin said his group had been careful not to impinge on the Chicago university’s right to make its choice, emphasizing that DePaul had an “absolutely internal basis for the decision based on their standards and principles.”In his letter to Finkelstein, DePaul’s president, the Rev. Dennis
Holtschneider, cited a summary statement by the university’s board on
promotion of tenure that “expressed several concerns touching on his
scholarship, specifically what they consider the intellectual character
of his work and his persona as a public intellectual.”Among those who had vocally urged DePaul to reject tenure to Finkelstein were the pro-Israel group StandWithUs and, perhaps most visibly, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.Finkelstein, the child of Holocaust survivors, was an assistant professor in political science at DePaul. He has argued that Jewish groups “have exploited the Holocaust to enrich themselves or to justify Israeli politics.”He told the Chicago Sun-Times after the decision, “They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach. But they will never stop me from saying what I believe.”Kotzin said that in a speech Sunday to Write On for Israel, a group of pro-Israel high
school juniors, he told the students that “in a way
Finkelstein is an extreme,” but that there are many radical faculty on
American campuses.