Just how bad is the “scholarship” there?
Because searches are perhaps the most opaque aspect of the academic process, the only way that the public will learn the identities of the other semi-finalists and finalists for the Illinois job is if the applicants themselves reveal it publicly. (The chances of that occurring are about zero: who would want to admit they were beaten out for a job by someone like Salaita?) But defenders of academic freedom should be as critical of the Indian Studies program as they are of the Illinois chancellor.
As Glenn notes, the primary function of such departments is as sinecures for otherwise talentless leftists. It’s all part and parcel of the huge publicly financed scam that much of academia has become.
And who will they pick now? Odds are it will be someone from the short list….
It is a bit, rich watching a tenured professor at a state-owned institution stating that it’s okay to not hire somebody at another state-sponsored institution because of that person’s politics.
Way to completely miss the point.
This may seem to be terribly undemocratic, but the Left ditched the idea of genuine freedom a long time ago, so I feel relatively comfortable with what I’m about to propose.
The US government has a lot of R&D money to throw around in all kinds of real world fields like robotics, biotech, nano tech , energy, computing, basic research, and even fuzzy study areas like military history, and other areas. If we have a Republican president after 2016 the Federales should quietly sidle up to universities that house the most egregious left-wing non-academics and whisper this: “We have big chunks of cash we really, really want to hand out in the various fields of real science. If you want some of this money please find a way to get rid of these traitorous clowns. We’re sure there are more people like the plagiarist Ward Churchill. If you can’t get rid of these people outright, we’re sure you can find a way to cut the budgets of the departments where these people nest and feed on each other’s opinions. By the way, how big check do you want us to write for your brand new biotechnology institute?” To many people what I’m proposing won’t seem democratically kosher, but this really is a war, and the left will not go quietly into the night.