Stephen Rittenberg deconstructs Professor De Genova, and shows him to be not just an odious hater of America, but a poseur, intellectually unworthy to be in the same academic department that was once the realm of Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict.

Note once again the cant, ideological, ungrammatical and meaningless phrases: “racialized and spatialized”, “reconceptualization” and my personal favorite “transnational urban conjunctural spaces”. Can anyone reading De Genova’s statements and letters seriously argue that his is a scholarly mind at work, striving for knowledge? Can anyone seriously argue that his is a mind striving towards coherence and clarity of expression? So my question for Columbia is this: do you, out of a sense of responsibility for your students, maintain a minimal standard for intelligence in your faculty? How widespread is such mindlessness among your faculty? And what happened to the moral obligation to be intelligent?