judging profs

Submitted by Adam Margolin (United States), Apr 23, 2003 at 14:56

"Said Arjomand of the State University of New York (Stony Brook): The U.S. government's "war crime" renders it akin to the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in 1258."

Clearly, this assertion intellectually dishonest and quite incoherent. This is a false comparison between the US, who perhaps failed to prevent Baghdad's citizens from plundering their own country, and the Mongols who plundered Baghdad themselves. I do not understand how someone can find employment through such blatantly erroneous scholarship. Are there any standards by which scholars in the "soft sciences" are judged?

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