Plagiarism, Cover Up and Misrepresentations: The Case Against Alan Dershowitz
The Whole Finkelstein case is a case example of free speech being eradicated in the American society. All he did was speak out against Israel- that was his only crime: a crime that destroyed his academic career.
Plagiarism, Cover Up and Misrepresentations: The Case Against Alan Dershowitz
By FRANK J. MENETREZ
In June 2007, DePaul University denied tenure to Norman Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science. The decision ignited a firestorm of protest from DePaul students and faculty, as well as from
faculty across the country and abroad. Finkelstein’s department had voted 9-3 in favor of tenure, and a college-level committee unanimously joined that recommendation, 5-0. But the University Board on Promotion and Tenure (UBPT) voted 4-3 against tenure, and DePaul’s president claimed to “find no compelling reasons to overturn the UBPT’s decision.”
The tenure denial was a great victory for Harvard Law School’s Professor Alan Dershowitz, who had been campaigning vigorously against Finkelstein at least since the fall of 2006. The feud between Dershowitz and Finkelstein began when Finkelstein claimed that Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel (2003) was partially plagiarized and wholly false. Finkelstein eventually published his critique as part of a book of his own, entitled Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005). Dershowitz responded to Finkelstein’s charges in his book The Case for Peace (2005).
In September 2006, as Finkelstein’s tenure review got underway, Dershowitz sent a 7-page, single-spaced letter, plus 14 single-spaced pages of supporting materials, to the former chairman of Finkelstein’s
department, arguing that Finkelstein’s “purported scholarship” consists of nothing but “ugly and false assertions” and “preposterous and discredited ad hominem attack[s].” Dershowitz sent a similar but
even larger packet of materials-totaling over 60 pages-to a large but unknown number of members of DePaul’s faculty and administration, including every professor at the law school.
Those basic facts about the dispute are now fairly well known. What is not so well known is that there is compelling evidence that Dershowitz himself committed academic misconduct both before and in the course of his intervention in Finkelstein’s tenure case. I present that evidence below, along with some reflections on its ramifications for both DePaul and Harvard. In the end, this is not merely a story about two
professors who dislike each other. It is a scandal implicating the leading institution of higher learning in the United States.
Abu Zaynab
