This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
"I am so sad and angry the US and world generally appear to be turning against Israel. G---"
My response: " When the weak become strong interest and support dies because the world is full of liberal and Hollywood hypocrites who believe they need to feel compassionate even if for terrorists. Me"
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I was thinking to myself that when there is one abuse of a black person by the police money flows from corporations, riots and looting begins, fires burn down commercial areas, BLM and other fascist organizations scream, Congress, particularly hypocrite Democrats and Holly woods types, make speeches and the mass media cries out for defunding the police. It only takes one incident.
When anti-Semitic episode occurs none of the above happens. Strange.
The world is full of double standards and therein lies a major problem. I am not excusing mistreatment of blacks or anyone. I am simply pointing out what should be the obvious.
Then I came across this video so no need for me to say anything else. The video speaks for itself.
MICHAEL FENENBOCK
Biden’s Middle East policy has enabled current violence - opinion
Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It
March 2021 • Volume 50, Number 3 • Christopher F. Rufo
Christopher F. Rufo
Founder and Director, Battlefront
Christopher F. Rufo is founder and director of Battlefront, a public policy research center. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and a former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. As executive director at the Documentary Foundation, he has directed four films for PBS, including most recently America Lost, which explores life in Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where he covers topics including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, and crime.
- The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 30, 2021.
Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.
In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.
During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.
But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.
Fortunately, the early proponents of this revolutionary coalition in the U.S. lost out in the 1960s to the civil rights movement, which sought instead the fulfillment of the American promise of freedom and equality under the law. Americans preferred the idea of improving their country to that of overthrowing it. The vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson’s pursuit of the Great Society, and the restoration of law and order promised by President Nixon in his 1968 campaign defined the post-1960s American political consensus.
But the radical Left has proved resilient and enduring—which is where critical race theory comes in.
WHAT IT IS
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.
There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
HOW IT WORKS
What does critical race theory look like in practice? Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.
This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.” In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”
I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration—from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.
This is a revolutionary change. When originally established, these government institutions were presented as neutral, technocratic, and oriented towards broadly-held perceptions of the public good. Today, under the increasing sway of critical race theory and related ideologies, they are being turned against the American people. This isn’t limited to the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., but is true as well of institutions in the states, even in red states, and it is spreading to county public health departments, small Midwestern school districts, and more. This ideology will not stop until it has devoured all of our institutions.
FUTILE RESISTANCE
Thus far, attempts to halt the encroachment of critical race theory have been ineffective. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, too many Americans have developed an acute fear of speaking up about social and political issues, especially those involving race. According to a recent Gallup poll, 77 percent of conservatives are afraid to share their political beliefs publicly. Worried about getting mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse, they remain quiet, largely ceding the public debate to those pushing these anti-American ideologies. Consequently, the institutions themselves become monocultures: dogmatic, suspicious, and hostile to a diversity of opinion. Conservatives in both the federal government and public school systems have told me that their “equity and inclusion” departments serve as political offices, searching for and stamping out any dissent from the official orthodoxy.
Second, critical race theorists have constructed their argument like a mousetrap. Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias,” or “internalized white supremacy.” I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim—such as “all whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children”—and then when confronted with disagreement, they adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame. Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort,” and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.”
Third, Americans across the political spectrum have failed to separate the premise of critical race theory from its conclusion. Its premise—that American history includes slavery and other injustices, and that we should examine and learn from that history—is undeniable. But its revolutionary conclusion—that America was founded on and defined by racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way of life should be overthrown—does not rightly, much less necessarily, follow.
Fourth and finally, the writers and activists who have had the courage to speak out against critical race theory have tended to address it on the theoretical level, pointing out the theory’s logical contradictions and dishonest account of history. These criticisms are worthy and good, but they move the debate into the academic realm, which is friendly terrain for proponents of critical race theory. They fail to force defenders of this revolutionary ideology to defend the practical consequences of their ideas in the realm of politics.
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving “cultural hegemony” in America’s public institutions. More and more, it is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.
Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak to the facts. Do they support public schools separating first-graders into groups of “oppressors” and “oppressed”? Do they support mandatory curricula teaching that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support public schools instructing white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? Do they want those who work in government to be required to undergo this kind of reeducation? How about managers and workers in corporate America? How about the men and women in our military? How about every one of us?
There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces of critical race theory: governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle.
We already see examples of governmental action. Last year, one of my reports led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical race theory-based training programs in the federal government. President Biden rescinded this order on his first day in office, but it provides a model for governors and municipal leaders to follow. This year, several state legislatures have introduced bills to achieve the same goal: preventing public institutions from conducting programs that stereotype, scapegoat, or demean people on the basis of race. And I have organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and government agencies that impose critical race theory-based programs on grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).
On the grassroots level, a multiracial and bipartisan coalition is emerging to do battle against critical race theory. Parents are mobilizing against racially divisive curricula in public schools and employees are increasingly speaking out against Orwellian reeducation in the workplace. When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many Chinese-Americans have told me that having survived the Cultural Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing happen here.
In terms of principles, we need to employ our own moral language rather than allow ourselves to be confined by the categories of critical race theory. For example, we often find ourselves debating “diversity.” Diversity as most of us understand it is generally good, all things being equal, but it is of secondary value. We should be talking about and aiming at excellence, a common standard that challenges people of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. On the scale of desirable ends, excellence beats diversity every time.
Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America—a story that is honest about injustices in American history, but that places them in the context of our nation’s high ideals and the progress we have made towards realizing them. Genuine American history is rich with stories of achievements and sacrifices that will move the hearts of Americans—in stark contrast to the grim and pessimistic narrative pressed by critical race theorists.
Above all, we must have courage—the fundamental virtue required in our time. Courage to stand and speak the truth. Courage to withstand epithets. Courage to face the mob. Courage to shrug off the scorn of the elites. When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, or more who stand up together for the principles of America.
Truth and justice are on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.
Sent from my iPhone
David Naftaly
Managing Member
CORAD INVESTMENTS LLC
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Yes, there is a difference between anti-Semitism based on hatred and bias and criticism based on one's values which one believes have been breeched.
If one believes a people have no right to exist that is, in the case of Israel, anti-Semitism and if one uses Zionism as the basis that is bias and anti-Semitic.
If one believes Israel should not respond to attacks that might not be ant-Semitic it is simply plain old stupidity.
I doubt it Alabama started shelling Georgia, Georgians would not respond.
I support Israel because I am progressive
There’s a difference between legitimate criticism and one-sided, biased condemnation of a country trying to protect its citizens
ZACK BODNER
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Biden's obsession with allowing Iran to go nuclear is simply Obama pulling the strings of his puppet and is an anti-Semitic act on the part of a former president who also happens to be a Democrat. I challenge anyone to respond in a reasoned way that says otherwise.
Back to Iran’s Nuclear Future
The U.S. barrels toward a repeat of the Obama deal despite no inspector access to crucial sites.
By The Editorial Board
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I found this article interesting because I am Jewish, I am not religious in the more orthodox sense but I am proud of my heritage, a Zionist and pro Israel, pro-Democracy and intensely American.
The
eleventh lost tribe
How sustainable are Judaism and
the Jewish people when the ties that bind them are merely “cultural”?
(May 24, 2021 / JNS)
The recently updated Pew Research Center survey of American Jewry is notable for its data showing a dramatic growth in the number of Jews of “no religion”: Jews who whose connection to the religion of their birth is “cultural,” “associational” or some other amorphous affinity.
For some, this is remembering Grandma’s matzah-ball soup, or Grandpa’s funny accent and scattered Yiddishisms. For others, it is a Jewish film or movie star, or a novel about Jews and Jewishness.
The associations are many and the feelings are undoubtedly sincere. The real question, however, is how this kind of a connection translates into an enduring tie to the Jewish people, whose Judaism is measured in generations, decades and centuries. However “meaningful” (to use the voguish catchword) this type of connection may be to individuals, is it sustainable? Is Judaism sustainable when the ties that bind it are made of tissue paper?
Little is known of the fate of the 10 Lost Tribes, the ancient nation of Israel that was conquered by Assyria in the eighth century BCE. We know that the tribes were dispersed, both from one another and within each.
How long did the associations of being the Children of Israel last? How many generations held fast to tradition, before they intermarried or simply took on the ways of those around them? Two generations? Four?
Given the hindsight of history, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that such dispersion had created an eventual inevitability.
In more recent times, we witnessed the poignant phenomenon of the Bnei Anusim, the descendants of Jewish conversos who observed certain customs and rituals performed by grandparents or even parents, not knowing why they were doing what they did, but knowing that somehow it meant something. It was important to keep going down into the basement and lighting candles on Friday nights, for example, or to clean the house thoroughly come the early spring.
So, I read these contemporary accounts of how a great many American Jews are relating to their Jewishness and wonder how soon this just disappears into the ether. There are millions of Americans who will say, “Yes, I think I had some Jewish ancestors.” Hopefully, that makes them have more empathy with the current card-carrying Jews. But in the larger reality, it’s a point of quaint historical interest and no more.
I say this neither critically nor caustically, but rather with great heaviness of heart; also with the realization that perhaps ‘twas ever thus. We are a people as ancient as the Chinese, yet the population disparity makes us a rounding error of theirs.
One can love bagels and Mandy Patinkin—and can practice Tikkun Olam, saving endangered species, being environmentally sensitive, caring about social justice—without being Jewish.
Feeling Jewish and acting Jewish are different things. Having a Jewish sensibility or a Jewish heart is not the same as living Jewishly.
It is only through the particularity of what Judaism teaches, espouses and, yes, requires, that the connections with Judaism and the Jewish people can be transmitted to future generations. The reason cultural Jews get to love their bagels and Barbra Streisand is that millions of Jews maintained their loyalty—their fealty to a particular people, tradition and religion, which, in turn, spawned bagels and Barbra.
Jewish continuity depends on a logic—and, dare I say, a business model—which is inverse but analogous to the Social Security system. With Social Security, there needs to be a pool of younger productive people doing their part and paying their dues, replenishing the kitty, so that their elders can reap the benefit of their own prior efforts.
There is a generational compact that allows the system to continue to function, to be viable. With Judaism, it is the progenitors who take it upon themselves the obligations and requirements to replenish the Jewish kitty, so that the ensuing generations can benefit from it, renew it and, in turn, replenish it.
Without a critical mass of aware and willing contributors and replenishers, the kitty goes dry. Not overnight, but as the level of the communal supply lowers, the quality and intensity of what is left becomes diluted.
It might take two or three generations, blinks of an eye in the Jewish saga, but as with the 10 Tribes of Israel, it will be an inevitability.
Some day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, there will be people wondering about the strange custom of their grandparents to put smoked orange-colored fish on rolls without holes in them on Sunday mornings, along with unhealthy amounts of a rich creamy cheese.
And they will wonder why.
Douglas Altabef is chairman of the board of Im Tirtzu and a director of the Israel Independence Fund. He can be reached at dougaltabef@gmail.com
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Hatred often bonds with stupidity. It leads to insanity and Hamas, as with all demonic groups are basically insane. BLM, Antifa etc. are all the same and when corporations fund them, liberals ignore them and Democrats embrace them they too are on the path to insanity.
Hamas’s forever war against Israel has a glitch, and it isn’t Iron Dome
Why Hamas promises another war soon, and another and another. And why it won’t work
The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred
Take a good look at who is speaking out against Jew-hate.
And who is staying silent.
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Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge
The new president, Miles K. Davis, wanted to shift Linfield University’s focus to meet student demand. Liberal-arts professors had other ideas.
Linfield University in bucolic McMinnville, Ore., resembles other small private colleges across the country struggling with financial pressures. Except its president, Miles K. Davis, isn’t the typical ivory-tower intellectual.
Mr. Davis, 61, has been pushing to change Linfield’s institutionally stodgy and politically progressive academic culture, in part by placing an increased emphasis on career education. He’s expanded his college’s nursing and business programs and eliminated more than a dozen tenured faculty positions in liberal-arts disciplines. His efforts are a case study in the obstacles to change in the long-cosseted world of American higher education.
“The academic world has become increasingly disconnected from the applied world,” says Mr. Davis, the university’s first black president, in a Zoom interview. His effort to counter that trend provoked an ugly rebellion from the liberal-arts faculty. The usually sleepy college, established in 1858, has made national news as Linfield faculty rallied support from academics across the country in their campaign to drive Mr. Davis out.
“If you’re not in the news, then you’re probably not doing enough to adapt in this changing environment,” says Mr. Davis, a U.S. Navy veteran who spent a decade in business consulting before joining Shenandoah University’s business school in 2001. He became dean there in 2012, and enrollment grew 77% before he moved on to Linfield College six years later. (It rebranded itself as a university in 2020.)
When he arrived in Oregon, Linfield’s enrollment had been shrinking for six straight years even as the student body was becoming poorer and more ethnically diverse. A third of Linfield’s 2,000 or so students are the first generation in their family to attend college.
Most colleges “were not set up to have people like me here,” Mr. Davis says. “They were founded by the elite, often by religious orders or wealthy landowners to educate their children. Now, as society has changed and as we have increased the need for credentialing in society, a lot of people are coming into institutions who look more like me.”
Mr. Davis was born in 1960 into a poor inner-city Philadelphia family and, yes, he was named for the legendary jazz musician. Neither of his parents finished high school, but they exposed him to high culture, including opera. They also provided a model of how people with different beliefs can get along: His father is Muslim, his mother Christian. He worked his way through community college, a bachelor’s degree from Duquesne University in Pennsylvania and a master’s from Maryland’s Bowie State University while helping to support his family. He eventually earned a doctorate in human and organizational sciences from George Washington University.
Four decades later, the idea of working your way through school seems quaint, what with skyrocketing tuition and other costs. “As we’ve increased our price point to enter these fine institutions, people want a return on their investment,” Mr. Davis says. “So the age in which we were able to offer education for the sake of inquiry has passed. It’s passed because we priced ourselves out of that market.”
Students nowadays “want clear career paths,” and he set about reorganizing Linfield to meet that demand. When he arrived on campus in July 2018, he began to “right-size” spending. Some liberal-arts programs had more faculty than students. So he did something unthinkable in academia: lay off tenured professors. “We looked at the 1940 AAUP document about tenure,” he says, referring to the American Association of University Professors, an organization of faculty and professional staff. “It’s meant to pursue academic freedom, not to guarantee employment for life.”
Linfield offered buyouts to 13 professors in liberal-arts programs with shrinking enrollment. “I know it’s unpopular to talk about this in education these days, but you just can’t keep offering things from a ‘field of dreams’ perspective—that if you build it, they’ll come,” he says. “You have to be aware of changing needs in society in order to develop relevant programs that people are willing to pay for.”
At the same time, Mr. Davis pressed to expand the nursing and business programs, which are more remunerative. The average annual salary of a recent graduate of Linfield’s nursing program is $83,349, vs. $20,140 for a Linfield psychology degree, according to the U.S. Education Department’s College Scorecard. Mr. Davis’s wife, a registered nurse with a doctorate in nursing practice, teaches at Linfield’s nursing campus in Portland.
To those who say liberal arts are essential to developing well-rounded students, he replies: “Yes, students need to learn how to write well, they need to speak well, they need to understand history, they need multiple perspectives. But they also need to understand finance, accounting, management.”
He also argues that schools are failing to encourage open-mindedness. “We have people who are coming into academia with very narrow perspectives on the world,” he says, “and quite frankly they often think that their perspective is right.” The purpose of colleges “is to educate, not indoctrinate. So we should teach people how to engage in the exchange of thoughtful conversation,” which “is in the mission statement—that we engage in thoughtful dialogue with mutual respect. We can disagree without being disagreeable.”
He encourages students to find friends with different backgrounds and viewpoints: “It allows you to more successfully navigate the real world. And so that is the maturation process that takes place on a university or college campus. This is what we should be doing in higher education. We should not be canceling out anybody. We should not be telling people, ‘Oh, I’ve got to protect you from this idea.’ ”
A majority of Linfield’s board supported Mr. Davis’s new course. But some faculty rebelled. The designated faculty trustee, Shakespeare scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, opposed it vigorously—and in ways that went well beyond disagreements over policy. Late in 2019 Mr. Davis and the board began discussing an amendment to the college’s bylaws to allot more seats in the faculty governance body to the business and nursing programs, a change Mr. Pollack-Pelzner and many liberal-arts professors opposed.
In a February 2020 board meeting when these changes were being discussed, Mr. Pollack-Pelzner presented a report alleging that there “had been complaints of sexual misconduct” against several trustees. One of them, David Jubb, had resigned a year earlier following allegations of sexual abuse by several female students. He has been charged with eight counts of sexual abuse and pleaded not guilty.
But no allegations against any other trustees, including Mr. Davis, had been reported to the college until after Mr. Pollack-Pelzner made them. Soon after the meeting, a faculty member accused Mr. Davis and trustee Norman Nixon of inappropriately touching her on two occasions at public events. Both trustees denied the incidents. Mr. Pollack-Pelzner also submitted an anonymous letter from a former student complaining that trustee Dave Haugeberg had made an “inappropriate” remark using an “unnecessary subjective adjective” to a group of female students at the same event and hugged her. The remark: “What’s a group of beautiful young girls doing over here by yourself?” Mr. Haugeberg said he regrets making the former student feel uncomfortable, but he intended the remark as a compliment and the hug to be congratulatory.
At a meeting in May, Mr. Pollack-Pelzner, who is Jewish, also accused Mr. Davis of making anti-Semitic comments. For one, the Shakespeare professor alleged Mr. Davis during a one-on-one conversation about “The Merchant of Venice” made an offhand remark about a study measuring the length of Jewish noses that found the length of Jewish and Arab noses were indistinguishable. Mr. Pollack-Pelzner also said Mr. Davis accused him of being “disloyal,” which the professor interpreted as an anti-Semitic slur. Mr. Davis says he recalls discussing stereotypes in Shakespeare’s work with Mr. Pollack-Pelzner, doesn’t remember calling the professor disloyal, and denies any anti-Semitic bias.
Linfield’s Title IX Coordinator decided the former student’s complaint didn’t rise to the level of sexual harassment. But it hired two separate law firms to investigate the other allegations, and they issued two reports in August 2020. One exonerated Messrs. Davis and Nixon of sexual misconduct. It found that while Mr. Davis had likely touched the female professor on the arm, the incident didn’t violate the university’s sexual-harassment policy. The law firm couldn’t corroborate the other allegation against Mr. Nixon based on interviews with seven other people at the public event.
The other report also concluded Mr. Pollack-Pelzner’s allegations of anti-Semitism “could not be substantiated,” though the professor might have “subjectively believed anti-Semitism to be behind comments” even if “none was intended.”
That didn’t settle the matter. Liberal-arts faculty continued their campaign against Mr. Davis as he pressed for more changes at Linfield. The uprising came to a head this spring as the trustees prepared to finalize a change to their governance that would give faculty in the nursing and business programs equal representation to liberal-arts faculty on the board. The change was made because two-thirds of Linfield’s graduates come from its nursing or business programs.
On March 29 Mr. Pollack-Pelzner took to Twitter to recite his accusations of anti-Semitism and sexual misconduct and insinuate that students weren’t safe at the school. Mr. Davis, he claimed, “told me that I was putting @LinfieldUniv at risk by reporting claims of sexual misconduct. The President threatened me with personal liability. . . . The Board’s lawyer threatened me with public humiliation if I continued to report sexual misconduct by Linfield trustees. . . . It breaks my heart when students ask me what they can do if they’re upset about what’s happening at @LinfieldUniv. They often ask me if it’s safe for them to report their concerns to the President and the Board. I wish I could reassure them.”
The university fired Mr. Pollack-Pelzner for cause on April 27, saying in a statement that he had “engaged in conduct that is harmful to the university; . . . deliberately circulated false statements about the university, its employees and its board; refused to comply with university policies and, in doing so, has been insubordinate and interfered with the university’s administration of its responsibilities.”
Mr. Davis is anxious to clarify that “the board of trustees did not terminate Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.” He calls the firing “a selective decision made by dean, provost and legal counsel,” who decided the professor had crossed “a bridge that had gone too far.” He adds that tenure under AAUP guidelines “protects academic freedom,” not defamation, and “does not arbitrate how we handle employment.”
Mr. Pollack-Pelzner asserts he was removed for being a “whistleblower.” More than 2,000 professors nationwide have signed a letter to the AAUP to protest his firing. It asserts: “The case is of special import—if Linfield is able to fire faculty with impunity, it will set a precedent that will eviscerate the foundational principles of both free speech and of faculty governance on university campuses.”
The AAUP sent Mr. Davis a letter on May 17 announcing an investigation of Linfield’s firing of Mr. Pollack-Pelzner by an ad hoc committee composed of professors from other institutions. Mr. Davis says the faculty association has no legal authority and doesn’t even have a chapter at Linfield. But bad publicity could tarnish Linfield’s reputation and make it harder to recruit top faculty and students.
Not that Mr. Davis is backing down. Linfield’s enrollment has grown 40% since he took the helm. “We’re receiving a lot of support from students and faculty members,” he says. “Change is hard. And so when you have change, there’s resistance.”
Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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