News Omnibus, Part 3: Normie v. Alan, and the poor apostrophe

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the feud between Harvard's Alan Dershowitz and DePaul's Norman Finklestein -- which is apparently of such proportions that it has its own (poorly written) wiki page -- took a new and ugly turn. Seems Alan Dershowitz saw fit to write a legnthy letter to anyone who would listen at DePaul, lobbying against Finklestein being granted tenure. Needless to say, DePaul faculty did not react kindly:

According to the minutes of the session, the council voted unanimously to authorize a letter to DePaul's president, Dennis H. Holtschneider, and the university's provost, Helmut P. Epp, along with the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law school. The letter was to express "the council's dismay at Professor Dershowitz's interference in Finkelstein's tenure and promotion case" and also to explain "that the sanctity of the tenure and promotion process is violated by Professor Dershowitz's emails."

The minutes add: "A discussion followed in which members expressed their views that this was a very disturbing intrusion which attacked the sovereignty of an academic institution to govern its own affairs."

Asked whether it was unusual for a scholar to weigh in on tenure deliberations at another university, Mr. Dershowitz responded, "What's so unusual about a concerned academic's objecting to his receiving tenure?"

The faculty voted 9 to 3 to approve him for tenure, and the College Personnel Committee vote 5 to 0 to approve him, but the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recommended against granting tenure.

I know I should be angry that Dershowitz would try to publicly interfere with another university's tenure system. And I should probably be amused that these two "scholars" -- the one who uses an ellipse to cover 87 pages and has footnotes to nowhere, and the other who made a career following footnotes -- are butting heads again. But really, that is not what I find most irksome here.

Read that last paragraph of the block quote again.

Dershowitz responded, "What's so unusual about a concerned academic's objecting to his receiving tenure?"

Well, for starters it would be somewhat unusual for a verb to be possessed by a sentence's subject, since that is a role usually left to nouns.

I can only hope this was not an email interview. Somehow though I find this fitting.