Philip Weiss has a short piece in the Nation on Cole, with a terrible pun for a title, that lays out how Cole's potential appointment at Yale was scuttled. The concluding remarks by Cole, "I knew when I began to speak out that I wasn't going to be hired. I knew my academic career was over. I knew that I can be in this place, be a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan for the rest of my life. But I would never be a dean. I would never be a provost. I would never be in the Ivy League." should either be a rallying cry for us academics or a fair warning to shut the hell up until we retire.
Well, Juan, I'd rather be in your league than any Ivy league.
Incidentally, Philip Weiss has an excellent blog and he also comments on Frontline's Cheney docu The Dark Side that aired last night. As I watched it, I kept thinking how important it is to live a moral and ethical life, and of standing up for those morals. There were so many aids and analysts who rued not speaking up or pressing harder ... and look at the consequence.