The Examiner, the right-tilting daily known for its dogged free delivery, has recently started running a “Georgetown University Examiner” column on its website.

Penned by Georgetown philosophy major and American Enterprise Institute intern Peter Grace (COL ‘10), the first seven installments of the GU Examiner have mostly stuck to covering some already over-exposed Georgetown institutions (the Tombs! Dumbarton Oaks!) or critiquing campus culture (the verdict: too many sweatpants, not enough Catholicism).

In one post, though, Grace uses Georgetown as a springboard for discussing some lofty political ideals, highlighting the potential arrest of a former Bush administration official who is also a “professor of government at Georgetown University” by the Spanish court for violating international law in providing the legal framework for our Guantanamo torture policy and argues that such an arrest would undermine national sovereignty.

Disagreements with his political position aside, the post gets one fairly crucial fact wrong: the “Georgetown professor” in question is Douglas Feith… who left Georgetown over a year ago.

According to an email from Grace, the column was born when he responded to an ad on the Examiner’s website soliciting writers with a draft of The sweatpants scrouge.” Covering a college campus over the summer is tough, he wrote (Vox can certainly say amen to that!), so for now he’s just hoping to draw in whatever audience he can. Come the fall, though, his columns will be directed principally at Georgetown students.

In his email, Grace wrote:

For the most part, I try to restrict the column’s ambit to matters directly related to Georgetown University. (If you’ve read any of the articles, then you’re well aware how I rarely succeed.) There’s no shortage of news related to GU, so when I come across something interesting or relevant, I often use it as a launching pad to deploy one of my lunatic dithyrambs, of which there is also no shortage. In the minority of instances, I write about an observation I made at GU and what kind of an impression it left on me.

When I’ve finished reviewing the preliminary draft to an article inspired in such a fashion, I often think I’m positively non compos mentis (see “The sweatpants scourge”), but the articles often strike me as a little funny, so I polish and post them anyways.

Listening to conservative talk radio came in handy today when I found newly-former Georgetown professor Doug Feith on the Dennis Prager Show. Apparently, Feith isn’t too happy that his contract wasn’t renewed, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

The real fun came, though, when Feith talked about a talk he had with Provost James O’Donnell around the end of his time at Georgetown. Feith told O’Donnell that he thought discussion about his renewal should consider that he was the only faculty member with his viewpoints (i.e., armed intervention in the Middle East).

Rather than mentioning this guy, or that applying Feith’s recruiting theories would mean hiring a Pastafarian to teach theology, O’Donnell instead said, “I always consider it peculiar when conservatives talk about diversity of thought.” That provost is outspoken!

Much radio harumphing ensued, including host Dennis Prager wishing he had bought an ad in The Hoya for a petition supporting Feith.

Speaking of petitions, Feith complained that New York Times never reported on a counter-petition students circulated arguing for his renewal. Considering that the petition’s signatories included such doubtlessly genuine people as Feith & Crimes Against Humanity, Fire Feith Fast (3 times), and Moqtada Al-Sadr (Hawsa wa Qum ‘11), it was probably too hot a potato for the Gray Lady to handle.

Update: Provost O’Donnell says “no comment” via email. Fee Feith fo fum.

As Doug Feith’s 2-year term at Georgetown expires, several questions remain. Was his ouster organized by liberal faculty members? What does Foreign Service Dean Galluci think of it all? Has anyone at Georgetown ever been so much a war criminal (besides Henry Kissinger, obvs.)?

For a few Georgetown students, however, one question looms above all: how can we use an online petition to save him? Save Professor Feith and the Diversity of Thought worries that Feith is the SFS’s killer app: “We do not want to lose a preeminent foreign policy scholar to another university and jeopardize our status as the nation’s preeminent government and foreign policy institution.”

The petition’s been signed 59 people. But how many who signed are really concerned with diversity of thought and not motivated by other, more sinister agendas? According to the site, notable signatories include

• Henry Kissinger (Hard Knocks 2009)
• Dorit Feith (Michigan ‘07). Daughter?
• Feith Tortures. This signature was deleted, but it speaks to the petition’s persuasiveness if it could even win over that guy.

Can the internet, the medium which heaped so much ridicule on Feith, save his academic career? Probably not!

-Will Sommer, Blog Editor