Three-Toed Sloth

Chronicle on Cole

Cross-posted to Crooked Timber, hence the parting shot about comments.

Under the rubric "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?", the Chronicle of Higher Education has seven bloggers discussing Yale's decision to not hire Juan Cole as a professor of history, and the role, if any, played by his blog in that decision: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Dan Drenzer, Brad DeLong, Michael Bérubé (all: yay!), Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse (both: hiss), and Erin O'Connor (null result), with a "response" by Cole, which doesn't actually address the others' posts specifically, and reads like a separate essay on the same subject as the others. (Via De Long.)

(Some of the things which were written about Cole as part of the controversy (e.g.,) give the impression of a professor who attains incomprehensibility not through obscurity but through foaming at the mouth. As it happens, though, I sat in on his seminar on millenarian movements when I was a post-doc at Michigan, and nothing could be further from the truth. I suppose I could have missed all the sessions which degenerated into hours-long rants about Zionist Entities... Of course, I don't know why Yale didn't give him the job, but if it was because they thought he was too spittle-flecked to be presentable to parents and alumni, they were misinformed.)

The fact that this post is not filed under "Middle East Politics" isn't going to stop anyone in the comments, is it?

Learned Folly