It is not surprising that Frisch would write a stupid and morally confused defense of Prof. Fake Indian in CounterPunch. Churchill and Frisch both take juvenile and narcissistic delight in provocation and share the same stale faux-revolutionary cliches.

Cole has more gravitas than both of them, with a track record of scholarship, but he lost his chance at a tenured position at Yale partly because he didn't think he had to be rigorous about facts, or refrain from gratuitous insults, on a mere blog. But people noticed. And Cole cared. Neither Frisch nor Churchill would want to cramp their style by adhering to a standard of behavior which would signal that they should be taken seriously.

But Andrew Wilkie is much more dignified, professionally competent, and conventional than Cole, Churchill or Frisch. A scientist running a lab at the most prestigious university in the world, Wilkie does not make a career of (pseudo) intellectual provocation. One would not expect this response, in 2003, to an application from an Israeli grad student:

Dear Amit Duvshani,

Thank you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians) wish to live in their own country.

I am sure that you are perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another suitable lab if you look around.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Wilkie

Nuffield Professor of Pathology,
Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine,
The John Radcliffe,
Headington, Oxford OX3 9DS, UK.

You know, I was surprised not to see the typical anti-Israel cliches on Frisch's blog. Everything else was pretty standard. Well, never fear, my co-blogger found them. Her "current status in academia (migrant professor) is analogous to being a Palestinian in Israel." This makes no sense at all (except as one more way to justify her stances) but it checks off the last empty box on her list of politically correct positions. You must make a pro forma expression of solidarity with Palestinians, if only by uncritically reciting talking points. (The proof that she is uncritical is that the analogy to herself is absurd.)

The Pavlovian nature of this response is clear in Wilkie's letter, since his response has absolutely nothing to do with graduate studies in pathology, or with the individual human being at the other end. He knows what he is supposed to think about this issue (having been drilled by BBC videos of "atrocities," visiting lecturers, email lists, and the like), and seeing the trigger word "Israel," he knows what to do. If he had thought through his own position on the conflict - whatever it might be - he would know not to apply it to an interaction where it is not appropriate.

Your average front-line manager in the private sector knows what you can say or not say in a job interview, or a performance evaluation, or an exit interview, or a press conference, and HR staff would swarm like a herd of angry bees around any employee creating this kind of liability. The bees certainly swarmed around Wilkie, and he made a decent apology and was sent to Diversity Training. But he was not in his first job out of college, he was senior faculty running a lab. He knew better. Cole ought to know better, and I believe that his confusion about where his blog ends and his intellectual reputation begins contributed to Yale's decision not to hire him.

No one expects people like Churchill and Frisch to know better; fortunately they repel many more people than they attract, so they demonstrate what not to do if you want to win friends and influence people. They also serve a function of showing us where the edge is, so we can stay farther away from it if we don't want to live dangerously. But they're painful to watch.