Blogs > Liberty and Power > Juan Cole Denied Yale Appointment


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Irfan Khawaja - 8/4/2006

You made the assertion I challenged quite a while ago. I made my challenge shortly after you made it. You're now adducing evidence from an article published today, June 9.

How does an article published on June 9 furnish a writer evidence for claims he made prior to June 9? Unclear, unless the writer--who calls himself a "historian"--believes that time goes backwards.

You'll recall that I myself was agnostic about the causal relation between the anti-Cole pundits and Cole's denial by Yale. I said it didn't matter to me whether there was influence or not, or even whether he was a candidate or not. What I wanted to know was what evidence you had for making your claim when you made it. The answer remains: none. It is convenient that you've deleted everything I said on that score, isn't it? Neither accountability nor evidence are quite your style.

Now let's turn to the article itself and its "indications". What does the article say in support of your claim? This:

"The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown."

A fine day's work, I'd say. We know something because...the reasons are unknown. Excellent. I'm afraid that Mr. Historian is going to have to grapple with a well-known philosophical axiom: nothing comes from nothing. An evidential vaccuum leads nowhere, even when it's offered long after the assertion it was meant to support.

And that was your dialectical ace! You never cease to amaze me: the more you say, the more of a fucking moron you reveal yourself to be.

I see from recent posts at Cliopatria that your idea of a response to me is not just to delete my comments, and not just to lie about me (twice), but to question my sanity. There is no point to having any further discussions with you, not that there was all that much of one before.

But before I go, I do want to leave a little message for you, your friends at Cliopatria, and all relevant parties at HNN, whoever they may be. You people lack even the slightest shred of honesty, integrity or decency. You traffic without shame in defamation, rumors, and outright fabrication--and then claim to take the high ground by appealing to "standards" of civility selectively applied.

It's a transparent fraud, and anyone with an ounce of honesty can see through it. But carry on. What would it profit a man to aspire to win the blogosphere but shit on his own soul? I don't know; that's your quest, not mine.

I'll concede you this "victory," however: from now on, you'll have to pursue your lavatory endeavors in my absence. A concern for hygiene demands that I bid you adieu.


Irfan Khawaja - 8/4/2006

Let me enlighten your readership as to the actual facts here:

In a blog post he wrote on Cliopatria, Luker asserted a causal connection between the denial of Juan Cole's candidacy at Yale and the anti-Cole bloggers who have opposed it in various public fora. I asked Luker for evidence of this supposed causal connection. How does he know that bloggers, pundits, newspaper writers, etc. influenced Yale's decision not to hire Cole? I asked. It's a simple question to which one would naturally expect a straightforward answer.

But no. Luker not only ruled the question out of court, but (in consultation with unnamed others) deleted any and all references to it at Cliopatria. It is, evidently, the Question That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Why? Because Luker can't answer it and can't admit the fact that he can't. The question has to be anathametized--along with the questioner--to preserve the feeble illusion that Ralph Luker knows what he's talking about.

This, then, is Luker's definition of "trolling": he offers a conspiracy theory, based to all apperances on nothing but random insinuations, rumors and hearsay. Someone challenges it. The someone thereby becomes a "troll," and his challenges are deleted by an unnamed group of higher-ups in order to teach the "troll" a "lesson."

Is this a defensible or even sane conception of discourse? Or are we dealing here instead with the mentality of commissars and party hacks?

Irfan Khawaja - 8/4/2006

To Luker: What lie have I told and where? Where did I say that you did in fact have evidence to the personnel files at Yale? Or are you just making your accusation "tentatively" so that you needn't cite evidence to support it?

I never claimed to have any knowledge of the circumstances of the denial of Cole's candidacy at Yale. I even forswore knowledge that he was a candidate for the Yale position. (Alas, I made these claims in posts that Luker & Co. have conveniently deleted. Luker now conveniently fabricates claims about their contents because he knows no one can read them.)

It was Luker who made the claim about how anti-Cole pundits had "sullied" the "decision process" behind Cole's rejection, and Luker who now engages in special pleading about the evidential "limitations" under which he so mightily labored in shooting his mouth off about it. Nice try.

In fact, Luker's accusation against me is itself a lie, and it's the second lie he's told about me here at HNN. The first was his brazen fabrication in the comments of one of KC Johnson's posts to the effect that I had made "repeated requests" to join Cliopatria and L&P and had been denied for my incivility (now deleted at KC Johnson's request). Pressed privately to reveal the evidence for this outright lie, Luker had nothing to say but that his claim about me was an "inference." From what, I asked. The response to this question was a threat of legal action.

But I am gratified to see Luker now conceding his entire farcical case on the Cole matter by claiming only to be offering a "tentative" opinion about the causal relation between the anti-Cole critics and the denial of Cole's candidacy. "Tentative" is an evasive way of asserting and not asserting a claim so as to evade the responsibility of providing evidence for it.

I am also very glad to hear that my comments are causing people at Cliopatria to think twice about posting the sort of crap that Ralph Luker habitually posts--ill-conceived chit-chat consisting chiefly of defamation, insinuation, and rumor-mongering.

He can't respond to requests for evidence--repeated only because he keeps evading them--and he can't even bear to have anyone comment on his pathetic posts. His idea of dialogue is to make claims, delete challenges to them, and then backtrack on his own claims by calling them "tentative." A joke, in short.

Irfan Khawaja - 8/4/2006

Ralph Luker has recently taken to deleting all of my posts on this subject at Liberty & Power, essentially because he can't answer the simple challenge I've offered him: what is the evidence for the claim that the anti-Cole conservatives had a hand in denying Cole his appointment?

You'll notice that the comments section of the relevant post is closed. That means: no further discussion on this subject is henceforth to be permitted in the Realm of Ralph Luker.

If anyone here really wants to wring their hands about academic freedom and similar subjects, why not try clicking over to Cliopatria and seeing what your "colleagues" are up to? The brazen, cowardly authoritarianism involved here is a sight to see, and doesn't quite cohere with the crocodile tears being shed for Juan Cole's candidacy (or rather his supposed candidacy, since Luker has recently put this into doubt, describing it as a "rumor"; granted, he's deleted the claim, too...).

Irfan Khawaja - 8/4/2006

None of which you have answered, or can.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/9/2006

Wrong, but see the story at Jewish Week linked at Cliopatria for indications of the information you seek. If I lay minutes of Yale's Senior Appointments Committee before your very eyes, undoubtedly you would continue to demand more evidence: account balances and stock portfolios of Yale financial backers who lobbied the administration, copies of e-mail circulated among members of the history and sociology departments and senior administrators, etc. Go worry about philosophical issues. So far as I can tell, you haven't the slightest interest in history.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/8/2006

The usual uncivil excess and distortion.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/6/2006

Irfan has, in fact, posted a lie here. In the first place, no one, least of all me, ever claimed to have had access to the files of personnel committees at Yale University. That was granted from the beginning. It was uncontested. Yet, through lengthy comments and insistent demands, Irfan claimed that I must produce files to which neither he nor I had access. He knew that. I granted it. So what's to produce? Yet, he continued ad infinitum to demand "evidence" which neither of us had access to. That one can and should in many cases draw inferences from available public evidence -- acknowledging that it is based on limited evidence -- appears to be unknown to the Irfan Khawaja. Historians have to do that all the time. Perhaps philosophers wait until all the evidence is in before they offer tentative opinions. I doubt that. This is Irfan Khawaja's personal obsession. It threatens to become his illness. Obsessive, abusive commenting at Cliopatria now threatens all discussion of any issue there because no one wants to come near anything that Irfan Khawaja's obsession touches.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/6/2006

Aeon, a) my post didn't name Erin, b) it did name her blog. The quotation at IHE didn't even carry the reference to her blog. As for hypocrisy, my point is that she and ACTA have been carrying on a campaign for a de-politicized classroom and my sense is that you can't both do that and look with anything but horror on the organized campaign in the conservative press and net against Juan Cole. If you see nothing wrong with that campaign, then it's clear: the struggle isn't about some kind of sanitized academic neutrality. It's about replacing your lefty guys in the classroom with our righty guys -- so just cut the high sounding stuff about a depoliticized classroom. The Phi Beta Cons have been cheering both classroom neutrality and the campaign against Cole. I don't think you can do both of those things. Erin and ACTA have been silent in the face of a highly organized smear campaign against Juan Cole's appointment. Whether he was the best candidate for the position or not, I think you have to look with contempt on organized public campaigns against anybody getting an academic appointment. If all of us had to face that kind of smear and organized opposition to our employment, I dare say a lot fewer of us would have jobs of any kind. I don't think I owed Erin a change in the wording of my post. To this minute, she's remained mute about the unseemly campaign in the public press.

Aeon J. Skoble - 6/6/2006

Ralph, I note that there seems to be a history between you and Irfan -- but there is nothing like that between you and me. I was simply noting that, in your post, you mentioned Erin O'Connor as someone who was being hypocritical about Cole, and when she replied that wasn't, and hadn't even made more than one reference to Cole in the past couple years, you went into "sticking by my story" mode, when you might instead have updated the post in some way.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/5/2006

1) If Aeon Skoble read the post with any care, he'd see that there's a difference between saying that "So and so should not take heart in ..." and saying that "So and so have taken heart in ..." So, Skoble is simply incorrect.
2) Irfan Khawaja has engaged, characteristically, in long diatribes in comments at Cliopatria. They have been selectively deleted and will continue to be selectively deleted until he learns not to engage in trolling behavior -- which follows on his cyber-stalking e-mails to me. He demands evidence from personnel discussions. I've readily granted that neither he nor I have such evidence, but he continues to think that his demands preclude all other discussion based on what is known and available to him without my having to do a lazy philosopher's research for him.

Aeon J. Skoble - 6/5/2006

Very disturbing comments thread follows that post. Turns out the post is seriously misleading, and after two days no updates have appeared correcting it. Turns out only one of the three sites mentioned commit the offense claimed. I've heard the joke about how "data" is the plural of "anecdote" -- here is a case where one web site is caught in an apparent hypocrisy, yet the blogpost spins it into a trend. One website is not a trend.