My first posting on this net. Hello. I am a southern Africanist. A
comment on Curtin: ghetto is of course a word originally confined in its
usage to Europe (Venice I believe) and then applied liberally to Jewish
affairs. Curtin's use of it seemed appropriate to me. The knee-jerk
reaction of calling him a racist is a technique to silence argument only;
of course, there are better arguments to be made against his position:
the entrenched role of leader-coterie studies in academe, the laudable
frankness in Duke's advert (compared to myriad other searches which did
not so inform the prospective pool). The argument that race is never
"the only criterion" is also fatuous, as who could argue to the contrary;
Bob who runs the computer lab, Jeanine the domestic worker and Phil the
PhD graduate clearly do not get put together on a shortlist for a
teaching position. More of substance later. Just to say quite clearly,
however: No one who knows his work could credibly maintain that Phil
Curtin is a racist . . .