Scary Cary

Mark Bousquet at The Chronicle Review quotes an AP profile of Cary Nelson, the Ward Churchill-defending "tenured radical" and president of the American Association of University Professors, an organization apparently mired in malaise:

The AAUP’s core issues are front and center these days. Colleges are increasingly relying on part-time faculty, who have less job security and protection if they speak out on controversial subjects. But at such a critical time, the AAUP has been hobbled by declining membership, staff turmoil and
financial dysfunction. . . .

Membership, which hit 100,000 in 1970, bottomed out at 39,000 in 1989 (it’s currently about 47,000). Nelson says the group didn’t even have e-mail addresses to tell current and prospective members about its work. There were 170 different classes of membership — and predictable bookkeeping foul-ups, infuriating to members, about who had paid dues.

Bousquet also mentions a forthcoming book from AK Press:

Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex, forthcoming this Fall 2008 by AK Press, edited by Peter McLaren and Steve Best. Featured writers include Cary Nelson, Doug Kellner, Michael Parenti, Joy James, Ali Zaidi, Henry Giroux, Robert Jensen, Dana Cloud, Ward Churchill, and Michael Berube.

From the only description of the book I could find:

The extreme repressive attacks on Churchill, Finklstein [sic], Fontan, Best, Massad, the “Dirty Thirty” [who dey?] and many others represented in this book demonstrate the repressive logic of “US democracy,” whereby political elites, the mass media, and the education system establish and police the parameters of acceptable discourse. Churchill became America’s own Salman Rushdie terrorized by the fatwa of the right.

These people are insane.