At about 10:30 this morning, my professor, Norman Finkelstein, announced that he had reached a settlement with DePaul University and, as part of that settlement, had agreed to resign, effective immediately. I had a feeling ever since his initial tenure denial in June that he would end up having to leave, but now that it’s officially over, it fucking sucks.

Granted, the settlement included public acknowledgment of his excellent teaching and his prolific career as a scholar, which undoes some of the shameless slander and defamation perpetrated by certain people at DePaul. However, the settlement leaves two vast injustices unchecked. These are: the way in which DePaul went about removing Finkelstein (He said that if they had simply and reasonably asked him to leave, he would have gone.) and the absolutely unforgivable denial of Professor Mehrene Larudee’s tenure, which, as near as anyone can tell, was solely do to her support of Professor Finkelstein.

I was involved with the student movement that supported Professor Finkelstein’s tenure bid since it first started in March. Our activities ranged from getting a petition signed to give to the President of the University before he made his decision, to occupying a room in the President’s office for three days after the initial denial, to marching on campus and rallying in front of the Political Science building. Although we failed in our ultimate goal, reversal of the Finkelstein and Larudee decisions and a formal apology from the school (and the resignations of basically everyone responsible for those decisions), our activism did allow for a wave of awareness among DePaul students of the importance of academic freedom, which is certainly a silver lining. For example, there is going to be an event on October 12 at the University of Chicago with Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Tony Judt, Neve Gordon, and Akeel Bilgrami, hosted by Tarip Ali, entitled “In Defense of Academic Freedom”, which DePaul students (not me) are involved in organizing. Also, the forming of the DePaul Academic Freedom Committee, which is the group that formed out of the initial Finkelstein support group after the tenure denials.

So, there are some pictures from the protest today that I’ll post later. You can also check out the Chicago Tribune’s website which has a story about the settlement, if you want to waste your time registering with them. They have a picture with me in it, but I’m only sorta visible.

By the way, today was also the first day of class.