Juan Cole

According to this Jewish Week story, Juan Cole was denied an appointment at Yale after a concerted campaign by Neocons and others.
A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.

The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also known as the tenure committee, a group consisting of about a half-dozen professors from various disciplines across the university.

Last week, however, in what is shaping up as the latest in a series of heated battles over the political affiliations of Middle Eastern studies professors, the tenure committee voted down Cole’s nomination. Several Yale faculty members described the decision to overrule the votes of the individual departments as “highly unusual.”

The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown; several calls to a Yale spokeswoman went unreturned.
Cole has been a frequent critic of the Iraq war, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and certain Likud politicians. He refused to comment on the decision but did say of the campaign against him, which included editorials or op-eds in Slate, Yale publications, and the Washington Times:
“These articles,” said Cole, “attempted to make my critiques of the Likud, on both sides of the Atlantic, look like an attack on American Jewry in general, which is manifestly not the case. For these people, Likud equals Israel equals Jews, so all criticism of revisionist Zionism and Greater Israel expansionism is anti-Semitic.”

Yale would not comment officially, but one anonymous source claimed that:
...Cole appears to lack in collegiality, as his penchant for combative blog entries and personal spats with detractors might make him an unnerving fixture on Yale.

Yale certainly couldn't afford that. I wonder if the collegiality bit applies in physics. How about at Harvard? Juan is pretty much St. Francis of Assisi by comparison with someone who will go unnamed here.

via Josh Marshall

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