In today’s Wall Street Journal Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz recaps his extensive criticism of Norman Finkelstein’s ignominiously flawed scholarship and once again urges DePaul University to deny him tenure on that basis.

One detail of Dershowitz’s account of Finkelstein’s career stands out: After being “fired by ‘every school in New York,’” according to Finkelstein’s own account, “radical Islamist Aminah McCloud – a follower of Louis Farrakhan – helped him land a job at DePaul.”

We know well that extremist academics have been systematically at work for decades hiring clones of themselves and replicating their ranks. But there has been little public naming and scrutiny of the backgrounds of exactly who has served on the committees responsible for the one-sided cloning and replication.

Learning more about the scholarship and activism of McCloud, for example, strikes me as a worthy enterprise. And, how about similarly checking into who exactly committed the dastardly deed of hiring the disgraced Ward Churchill?

Thank you, Professor Dershowitz, for drawing attention to an unexploited way of shedding sunlight on the corrupt and inbred hiring practices on the nation’s campuses.