Juan Cole: Denied Yale appointment?

Conservative siteson the net are enthusiastically reporting that Juan Cole of Informed Comment and the University of Michigan has been denied an appointment at Yale. The appointment would have been to Yale's Center for International and Area Studies, with affiliations in history and sociology. There are reports that, in early May, the University's history department voted 13 to 7, with 3 abstentions, in favor of the affiliation with it, but that more recently the University's Senior Appointments Committee voted against the appointment by a substantial majority. This comes after a widespread campaign in the conservative press (New York Sun and Washington Times, for example) and internet sites (Campus Watch, Front Page Rag, and Powerline, for example) against the appointment.

At some level, of course, academic appointments are always political. Qualified human beings making decisions is the essence of politics. Yet, partisans both left and right ought to shun making or denying academic appointments on merely ideological grounds. If a distinguished conservative scholar were denied an appointment at Yale because of her or his conservatism, partisans on the right would be, er, rightly outraged. Academic conservatives at ACTA, Critical Mass, and Phi Beta Cons can't both take heart from the denial of Juan Cole's appointment and continue their campaign for a"depoliticized classroom." However ideological Juan Cole may be, he is no Ward Churchill and conservative ideologues sullied the decision-making process by their ideologically-motivated public campaign against Cole's appointment at Yale. Meanwhile, the University is still without a distinguished scholar of the post-Caliphate Middle East.* In the current world, that seems like a yawning gap in scholarship.
*NB: I stand corrected on that. Abbas Amanat is a Professor of History and of International and Area Studies at Yale.