(yup, you can get annoyed by Wilders and Ramadan at the same time, in fact it’s a more natural position as they basically give the some story with other main characters)

I don’t think independent-mindedness would fit very well with being an employee of the international propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Of course, I would absolutely agree that if people tell significant lies when they are hired, that’s a good enough reason to fire them on the spot. But that argument has not been made by anyone in this case, as far as I know.

I’m sorry to say that the whole line of ‘prosecuting independent-minded muslims’ has a distinct Wildersian touch to it.

And as to the technicality being used to end a marriage – where a partner was presented in a light perhaps a tad different from the reality presented after the vows – there are to him abundant possibilities of courts where to put his challenge.

In fact, the issue of not declaring that he worked for Press TV has been addressed in another interview published by NOVA href=”http://www.novatv.nl/page/detail/uitzendingen/7182/Tariq+Ramadan+verbolgen+over+ontslag#” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.novatv.nl/page/detail/uitzendingen/7182/Tariq+Ramadan+verbolgen+over+ontslag# boradcasted on August 18th – very well worth looking at if you’re intersted in this affair (the first 2:30 minutes are in Dutch, but then there is the interview with Ramadan in English – thank Goodness we don’t dub in this country! ;-)

Exactly.

The firing of Ramadan by the City Council is a different matter than the firing of Ramadan by the University, and I want to focus here on the latter. As far as I am concerned, the firing by the University is an independent matter. The university authorities could have kept him even if the City council fired him. But they decided not to do so.

From my U.S., non-academic perspective, this is a scrupulously honest and probably theoretically correct way to frame the argument, but practically speaking, so unrealistic as to be almost impossible to believe.

A political appointee gets fired with a great deal of fanfare over a topic that (for better or worse) is currently occasioning a lot of handwringing* in public discussion. Why would he not also get fired from his tenuously-attached university job?

It seems trivially obvious—at least in my experience of universities’ fear of controversy—that they would fire somebody who was involved in this flavor of controversy and who doesn’t have any kind of protected status, and doesn’t seem to be solidly established (big research lab, lots of grants, long history of popularity among students and colleagues, whatever). At least in my observation in the US, universities are immensely more comfortable with certain kinds of controversies than with others. Picking a giant public fight with your country’s governing politicians about an international flashpoint—not the kind of controversy they want to stir up.

I apologize if this is derailing the post; I actually do think that the logic of your arguments makes sense. If I believed that the university’s two public justifications (as recounted in your post) were the reasons, I’d agree with your assessment. But I don’t believe that the p.r. spin from the university is true—not even if they have convinced themselves that it is.

*I am not meaning to for a second trivialize the situation in Iran; I’m just noting that the US media and public opinion have strong, if underinformed opinions about Iran in a way that they emphatically don’t about a host of other international conflicts.

I know that I mentioned, when I started working at the EUR, that I blog at CT :-) (which, I’m happy to say, was (so far!!) not disapproved).

The typical things that one would have to disclose are consultancy jobs, political mandates, active membership of lobby or pressure grops, writing on a regular and paid basis for a magazine or newspaper, etc. One does not have to disclose everything that falls into the category of ‘hobbies’. The deans are responsible for deciding on borderline cases.