On October 3, 2006, Juan Cole, whose polemical blog propelled him to the presidency of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice protesting the State Department’s denial of a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Islamist whom the State Department said had provided material support to terrorists. Wrote Cole: “MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.” Cole’s commitment to free speech would perhaps be noble, had he not, in a February interview, lamented that government had not shut down Fox News, and earlier, in an apparent fit of jealousy, called on the FBI to investigate why MSNBC hired a rival academic as “terrorism analyst” at MSNBC.” Background here. Other MESA members have called on Middle Eastern governments to deny visas to think-tank scholars. MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom later cried wolf when it chided Yale for not hiring Cole, apparently taking at face value his assurance that he failed on political rather than academic grounds; he had not bothered to tell the committee that Duke had rejected him after discovering his research lacking and his job talk amateurish. Scholarship and expertise are important. It’s too bad that MESA has allowed itself to devolve into self-parody.