Juan Cole's supporters have taken to portraying the antiwar University of Michigan history professor as a victim of a neoconservative cabal that deep-sixed his job application at Yale. There's only one problem with that conspiracy theory: It's not true.

At the same time when Cole's pursuit of a job at New Haven was gaining so much attention, it turns out he was also applying for a job at Duke and getting passed over there, too. Since no one outside the halls of Duke knew about Cole's interest ? this is the first time it has been reported ? there was no" concerted press campaign by neoconservatives" such as had plagued his application at Yale; he was evidently passed up for the job on the merits.

In November 2005, Duke announced the creation of an Islamic Studies Center complete with a chaired professorship in Islamic studies, with religious-studies professor Bruce Lawrence as the Center's inaugural director. Shortly afterward, Duke began its search for a professor of modern Islamic studies, and Cole was selected as one of the four finalists. The search stretched across disciplines, and the four finalists consisted of two historians and two political scientists. Members of both departments at the university were encouraged to attend the job presentations of the finalists.

As the first finalist to visit, according to school officials, Cole's presentation was well attended. Most professors had high hopes for the lecture, which focused on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Shiite democratic tradition. After all, as Malachi Hacohen, an associate professor of history, religion, and political science at Duke who attended Cole's lecture, explained,"Cole's earlier work was solid."

But according to several professors familiar with the proceedings, Cole's presentation was unimpressive. According to Hacohen,"It was one of the worst job talks I have heard in my life,""[it was] logically faulty," and"the talk seemed as if it were directed more to CNN viewers than to an academic audience." Michael Munger, chair of Duke's department of political science, explained that Cole's lecture"was just not at a level we were expecting?it was more like an undergraduate lecture."

Whereas several observers of the Yale incident cite faculty division as the principal reason for Cole's rejection (in Yale's history department, only 13 of 23 professors agreed to Cole's appointment), he eventually sank at Duke because his limited interest in academic life was so blatant. As Munger explained,"We wanted someone who had a clear commitment to internal institution building. We wanted someone who was going to build the Islamic Studies Center. And?he was honest that he wasn't that interested in that."

According to others, even Cole's supporters were eventually put off by this ambition. He was forthright about wanting to come to Duke because it's closer to Washington than is Ann Arbor, an attitude that led many of Cole's proponents to believe they were being used. As a former Duke professor of public policy explained,"The question was whether or not his commitment to being a public intellectual overrode his commitment to scholarship." At its best, after all, Duke is in the business of cultivating scholars, not television stars.

When news of Yale's rejection broke, anti-Israeli blogs erupted. Frequent Daily Kos blogger Grand Moff Texan blamed"a bunch of Israel-first, rightwing flacks [who] went and scared Yale's Jewish donors, and they in turn scared administrators at Yale. That's three groups of people right there who need to reconsider what country they live in." At TPMCafe, Richard Silverstein blamed Cole's troubles on a" concerted campaign against him from Yale Jewish donors and other Jewish neocons." And in the pages of The Nation, Philip Weiss blamed Yale's rejection on a"neocon uprising." But since"Jewish neocons" were unaware of Cole's trips to Durham, they couldn't have possibly influenced Duke's proceedings.

Making matters worse for Cole's defenders, Duke's search was chaired by Bruce Lawrence, who, like many on Duke's faculty, is known for his progressive politics. Notwithstanding the political sympathies he certainly elicited, it appears Cole's academic credentials simply did not withstand the test. And so Cole remains in Ann Arbor, and his critics await their apology.

? David White is a writer in Washington. This article was written with support from Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

The biographer and historian William H. Harbaugh, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia who died in the spring of '05, was a great friend and mentor to me. His Power & Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (FS&G, 1961) remains the very best single-volume biography of TR ever published. Meanwhile, his biography of John W. Davis - Lawyer's Lawyer (Oxford University Press, 1973) - was a finalist for the National Book Award and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Bill was a dear, generous and brilliant man - one who will always be much missed. He was also a highly decorated veteran of the Second World War.

What makes me think of him is that I've just been rereading a speech he gave in the Rotunda of the University of Virginia on May 6, 1970, during an action protesting both the invasion of Cambodia and the state-sanctioned murder of students, just two days before, at Kent State University. Bill's words from 1970, regarding Vietnam and Cambodia, trigger no small amount of dejavu given our contemporary situation in Iraq. I quote only portions. The entirety of Bill's remarks can be found here.

Members of the Committee, students, tourists, faculty, Billy and Rickey [his sons] and guests from the Charlottesville chapter of the FBI:

We meet in a time of despair. We have witnessed worse tragedies than the one at Kent State University Monday. We see them on TV every night - the wanton destruction by our troops and by our allies of the moment, the South Vietnamese, of the innocent peasant men, women and children of Vietnam and now Cambodia. But not until we saw on TV Monday the slaying of four of our kind did many among us finally perceive the real nature of the violence to which this nation has been committed in South East Asia for a decade and against which some among us have been protesting ever since the first teach-ins five years ago ...

... We meet at what may well be the most critical juncture in the history of the United State, and, indeed, of mankind. The crisis which prompted the designer of this architectural complex - this testament to that which is sensitive, beautiful, and creative in man and which makes the struggle to live worth sustaining - the crisis, I repeat, which prompted him to write the Declaration of Independence was nothing as compared to the one that now confronts us. Nor was the Civil War, nor World Wars I or II of comparable magnitude to the one that confronts us now. For not until our times has man possessed bacteriological and nuclear weaponry in sufficient capacity to destroy mankind.

One would think that harsh truth would have long ago inspired a reordering of the assumptions on which our foreign policy is based. But it has not. For ten years now policy scientists in the Rand Corporation and the highest councils of government have grounded their tragic advice to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon on assumptions that are rooted in the misuse, rather the understanding, of history.

They have transformed the Munich analogy, the domino thesis, and the idea - not of national interest - but of national prestige into a kind of Holy Trinity of foreign policy making. They have not told us that for every Munich there were nine rational compromises which averted war. They have not told us that it was the failure to compromise that precipitated World War I. They have not told us that the chip-on-the-shoulder diplomacy of Cordell Hull destroyed the viability of the peace party in Japan prior to Pearl Harbor.  (Nor, parenthetically, have they told us - presumably because they have not bothered to reflect on the matter - that the Asia we went to war to protect in 1941 was not even an Asia ruled by Asians. It was an Asia owned or dominated by Europeans - by Britons, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen - and run by them in the interests of their fellow Europeans. It was, moreover, an Asia which was not then, and is not now, within either the vital or the legitimate sphere of influence of the United States.) ...