Professor De Genova, he of a "million Mogadishus," is afraid to go to class.

His opinion is being supressed! "Paging Al Gore, Paging Al Gore!"

Words mean things.

Effect, allow me to introduce you to Cause.

Hopefully, in the spirit of doing things the Liberal way, De Genova has hidden his head up his own arse and is now rolling away toward oblivion. The chicken bastard deserves to live in hiding. This guys politics prove that freedom of speech does not give us the right to shout "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. The JERK! Hopefully he'll get to explain his arguement to some of the Marines and Soldiers when they get home. The JERK!!

No one ever said how many students were in his classes before the now infamous idiocy, but "almost two dozen supporters", seems small on a campus the size of Columbia. Not to mention the fact that in "liberal speak", almost two dozen is anything over 13. Remember the Million Man, Million Mom, Million Gay and Lesbian, Million Dogs for Peace, Million (enter your cause here) Marches. The actual sizes of those "millions" ranged anywhere from 30,000 to 200,000 of the usual camp followers in actual attendees. So almost two dozen could also really mean the 3 graduate students showed up, with clipboards and lattes in hand, to count supporters and NO ONE showed up to get counted.

Perhaps he found out about the plans of his student, Rebekah Pazmino, and didn't dare to face even a "potential" Marine.

Maybe it's time the whole idea of tenure is reexamined. It serves to perpetuate an intolerant caste of academics whose ideas were shaped in the 1960s. Their iron rule over who gets hired and promoted deserves the name regime.

Why is it that so many of those who would champion the poor choose to write in language that only elites can tolerate?

These are the last three sentences from Nicholas De Genova, ?Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago,? Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 5. (Sep., 1998), pp. 87-116:

"In an effort to disrupt the subsumption of 'the immigrant' into the conventional narratives of hegemonic sociology in the United States and to subvert the imperial-national chauvinism by which American studies presumes to know its object, I posit a Mexican Chicago as the locus for an interrogation of the space of the U.S. nation-state itself. A critical transnationalism that could render Mexican Chicago intelligible is one that can comprehend a production of differential space while never losing sight of its entanglement in a more intense production of difference, exposing the work of racialization in the subordination of labor. Inasmuch as Mexican Chicago lies beyond the reach of the territorial nationalism that has informed the historical claims of Chicano studies, I have sought to revise the anti-imperialist theorization of transnationalism that situates Mexican Chicago in Latin America, beyond the reach of the U.S. nation-state even while it is nuzzled dangerously close to its core."

We had a similar problem at our grad school during Gulf War I (an MBA program, no less!). Our finance professor cancelled class out of protest over what (at the time) he thought would be thousands of civ casualties. We showed up for class because 1) we wanted to discuss finance and 2) we were getting a professional degree and felt that it was, well, the professional thing to do. Long story short, we complained to the Dean, and since it was after all a business school, proposed that the class either be made up immediately or we would ask for a prorated refund on our tuition. The Dean agreed, the prof got chewed out by the Dean, our class was made up in 48 hours, and we got an apology from the prof.

Maybe De Genova's students that are actually at Columbia to, ahem, learn something should pursue a similar course of action. Presuming that at least a few of his anthro students want to learn and discuss anthro, they should seek compensatory economic damages for services not rendered. Even Columbia understands money.

I was a dean at 2 universities. Campus police are well equipped to handle such problems. Since Columbia is in a fairly high crime neighborhood, they probably have a hundred campus police. Assigning 4 or 5 of them (some undercover, some not) would be routine. While I wouldn't force a scared teacher to teach for a class or two, I would encourage him to do so.

Ultimately, Columbia has to provide him with a physically safe environment in which to teach and he has to teach. This is NOT optional.

I would also check to determine how true his claims of threats are. It wouldn't surprise that a coward who (from the safety of a university lecturn) would call for the mass murder of millions of Americans in the streets would stretch the truth a bit.

I'd like to wish a million fiskings on DeGenova.

And half of them from newbie bloggers from liberated Iraq.

Fred, he must be smarter than I am, because he uses a lot of big words and I don't have a clue about what that paragraph said.