Norman Finkelstein, DePaul University professor and author of The Holocaust Industry, may be denied tenure for his controversial writings. He has criticized leaders in the Jewish community for “exploiting the Holocaust for profit and [using] it to silence critics of Israel.” In another book he challenged Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel, a widely read defense of the Jewish state.

His work is now prompting the dean of DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to recommend against tenure for Finkelstein, despite a faculty vote in favor of tenure.

Charles Suchar, dean of DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has recommended against tenure, reportedly explaining in a memo that he found “the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s books to border on character assassination.”

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, Suchar went on to say that Finkelstein’s tone and approach threaten “some basic tenets of discourse within an academic community.”

Although the faculty in his department voted 9-3 in favor of granting him tenure, and a college-level faculty committee supported that recommendation with a unanimous 5-0 vote, another vote will be held this week by the university faculty. The matter will then be sent to the university president, Father Dennis Holtschneider. DePaul, located in Chicago, is the largest Catholic university in the United States with 23,000 students.

Denise Mattson, a university spokeswoman, said Suchar had only rendered a “supplemental opinion.” She said he would not discuss his opinion and that “the president makes the final decision; we expect that to happen sometime in June.”

But Finkelstein told The Jewish Week that he believes the president has already decided to deny him tenure.

“Since the speculation is that it was the president who ordered or urged the dean to deny me tenure, it means it’s a done deal,” he said.

But Finkelstein said he is “not resigned to defeat” and that “legal action will come if they send me a note saying you’re rejected [for tenure].”

Were he to lose, Finkelstein said: “It’s likely, without being too dramatic, that I will never be able to teach in a college classroom again. The odor of this defeat will follow me, and my academic career will be effectively terminated.”

“I don’t want to be too dramatic,” he added. “I have to remember that my parents went through Majdanek [the Nazi death camp in Poland] and Auschwitz and that I will survive. It is not the worst injustice, but an injustice. And it will be a setback for those who want to show courage.”

Finkelstein alleges also that pressure from outside the university, and from Alan Dershowitz in particular, are to blame for his possible denial of tenure. Finkelstein has dealt with pressure from Dershowitz in the past. When the DePaul professor’s book Beyond Chutzpah was published by the University of California Press, the Harvard Law professor tried to have the book scrapped. Dershowitz even went so far as to petition the governor of California to intervene.

The outside pressure to deny him tenure, Finkelstein said, was orchestrated by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University law professor, who in the fall “sent a 50-page, single-space” letter to DePaul faculty members in which he reprinted “mostly everything he has written about me in different venues.”

Finkelstein said Dershowitz titled one section of the letter, “The nuttiest things the nutty professor has said.”

“It was a very high level of academic interchange coming from the senior most professor at Harvard Law School,” he said sarcastically. “It’s hard to imagine something so juvenile even in fifth grade.”

He said his department “exhaustively examined all of the claims against me and every claim, they concluded, had no merit.”

Asked why Dershowitz would do this, Finkelstein said it was in reprisal for his “comprehensive examination” of Dershowitz’s writings.

“I think I have caused him a lot of damage,” he said. “I was the first one to sit down and examine what he has been saying over many years, and the only conclusions I could reach … is that he is a serial fabricator. If he could get me denied tenure, he could go around and say I couldn’t get tenure at a third-rate Catholic university. In his mind, that would restore some of his reputation. So I don’t believe this is pure vindictiveness. This is a man desperate to restore the damage that was done.”

Dershowitz said the letter he wrote was “seven pages instead of 50” and that it was written at the request of the former chairman of the political science department.

“He is not worth 50 pages,” Dershowitz snapped. “All I do is read his own words back to him. By quoting his own words, I am engaged in character assassination? The problem is, he is the assassin.”

He said he had quoted Holocaust scholar Michael Novick of the University of Chicago who had written that Finkelstein made up quotes and citations.

“You can’t believe anything he says,” Dershowitz said.