Georgetown University denied tenure to Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics and one of five speakers the Saudis have promoted as speakers. Well, mentioning him there sufficed for me to be held accountable for Shehata's denial of tenure, writes Colleen Flaherty for InsideHigherEd at "Judged by Unfair Standards?" The relevant quote:
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Council on American-Islamic Relations each have sent a letter to Georgetown on Shehata's behalf; the former alleges that conservative political commentator Daniel Pipes; Martin Kramer, scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Shalem Center; and Charles Lipson, professor of political science at the University of Chicago "may be improperly connected to his tenure process." A public version of the letter provided by Shehata's lawyer includes redacted portions, with the lawyer saying that the redactions were made to protect the identities to Georgetown faculty affiliated with all three.
Although Pipes and Kramer have made critical references to either Shehata or the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the past—Kramer once called the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies "effectively a lobby for Arab causes in general and the Palestinian cause in particular"—they denied any knowledge of his tenure candidacy or involvement in the process. Lipson said he'd never heard of Shehata, but said that in 2004 he had raised questions about Saudi Arabian funding for U.S. academic programs after being contacted by a public relations firm hired by the Saudi Arabian government that advertised Shehata, among others, as speakers on Middle East issues. Both the government and Shehata have said he was not compensated for his time and spoke on his own behalf.
In any case, Lipson said, "To go that far back in a tenure case is grasping at straws."
In other words, Shehata's advocates, the ADC and CAIR, claim that I "may be improperly connected to his tenure process" on the basis of my mentioning him nine years ago in an article about speakers promoted by the Saudi embassy.
Comments:
(1) This effort takes the wished-for insulation of the delicate academy to new heights. Ideally, in its view, no one can ever say anything in any way critical about the esteemed professors of Middle East studies. Take me to jail, please.
(2) The ADC-CAIR claim fits into a larger pattern of universities resisting any sort of outside influence whatsoever and even threatening to appoint someone just because outsiders campaign against him, as I noted at "Redeeming the Wayward University [through Engagement by Outsiders]," concerning an academic candidate at Wayne State University in Detroit:
Frank H. Wu, law school dean at Wayne State, predicts that lobbying professors against Wadie Said's appointment could well backfire. Some faculty members, he says, "might be so turned off by the e-mail coming in that they may be persuaded to take a position that they might not have otherwise."
(3) This claim fits an even larger pattern of my being blamed for developments I have nothing at all to do with; other examples would be Tariq Ramadan pointing to me in 2004 as the reason for the revocation of his visa to work in the United States or a conspiracy theorist ascribing the 2008 Danish cartoon crisis to my handiwork. (June 14, 2013)
