SHORT ANSWER: The problem with Prof. Juan Cole’s blog is that he’s battening on his academic reputation. People who don’t know better– ie, nearly everyone who’s not an arab studies expert– come to his blog, see his credentials as the Head of the Middle East Studies Ass’n, and think: Here’s an expert on Iraq.

In point of fact, as Martin Kramer has noted, Cole has no expertise on Iraq. He has done no original research whatsoever on modern Iraq and is no better informed on the subject than an intelligent amateur who’s read a few books. Also, according to Fouad Ajami, Cole has not even been to Iraq. Finally, as the viewers of Al Jazeera now are aware, Cole doesn’t even speak enough arabic to be able to address them in their native tongue!

LONG ANSWER: In essence, Cole’s trading on his professional reputation in one field– 18c Persian intellectual history– to bolster his amateur opinions in an entirely separate field, the political history and contemporary landscape of modern Iraq. The underlying theme of this bait-and-switch is an unrelenting, at times hysterical, campaign against Cole’s imagined enemies, Ariel Sharon and the nefarious DC Likudnik Cabal. It’s a fraudulent use of the man’s academic standing, one that serves a rather shabby and disreputable agenda of 1) bashing anyone Cole dislikes; and 2) vaulting Cole into prominence as an MSM darling.

Why should the Univ of Michigan care?

Consider an analogy: say you’re a technology pro who works for IBM. You’re a consultant with deep expertise in, oh, let’s say, supply chain management processes and software. Let’s say that you also have a deep loathing for Microsoft– their product, their execs, and what (in your mind) they represent. So you set up your own personal blog that is separate from your corporate consulting practice but which prominently displays your association with IBM and your status as a famous expert in not supply chain management but information technology generally.

On your blog, you relate your daily musings on open source software (Good, Hooray!) and the Wintel oligopoly (Evil, Hiss!). You find the evil influence of Microsoft everywhere, and weave this theme into as many as half of your posts. You also go out of your way to attack three young startup company programmers as “Microsoft stooges” and “hacks” and “spies,” with lurid details of these programmers’ alleged connections to Redmond.

These opinions gain wide currency in the MSM, gaining you a spot on stories about Linux and MSFT on the NcNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, CNBC, etc which represent you as a renowned technology expert from IBM. However, nowhere is it made clear to the public that you are not an expert on operating systems or open source– the subject of 80% of your blog postings– and that your opinions on same don’t in any way derive from your professional work for IBM in the supply chain field.

Wouldn’t IBM ask you, at a minimum, to cease and desist mingling your status as an IBM supply chain expert with your personal views on Microsoft and open source? After all, you’re misrepresenting the very credentials and expertise that IBM relies on to market your services and win business.

U-Michigan’s also engaged in a marketplace, one of ideas, in which reputation based on expertise is everything. Why does the University of Michigan hold its own standard-bearing employees to a lower standard than the corporate sector does?

Out here in Lalaland, the best we can hope for are the likes of “Make my day!” or “He’s looking at you, kid…”

Peter Robinson ’79

P.S. That qualification? It’s not just that Roger L. Simon slings marvelous prose, it’s that he writes marvelous *fiction.* Every time I’ve tried fiction myself, I’ve flopped. I’m green–Dartmouth green, natch–with envy.

We’ll be watching.

I never received a ballot, and had to call the college at least 3 times & exchange several emails to be allowed to vote online.

I only realized my ballot was missing when I read Roger’s earlier post saying that he had just finished voting. If I hadn’t read the blog, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Apparently quite a few other people didn’t receive ballots, because they extended the deadline.

I don’t know (and I mean that literally; I’m far from sure that you’re wrong). I can agree wholeheartedly that public blog content should be treated the same as speech made in other public forum. There does, however, seem to me to be a difference between what goes on in a classroom and what a professor states in a newspaper column, at a conference, in an interview, etc. I’m very reluctant to curtail freedom of speech, even in situations in which a private university is doing the curtailing, which, I think, the Constitution permits.