On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt criticized university presidents for hiding behind the tenure system to avoid disciplining antisemitic faculty members and said that while there may be some limits placed by the tenure system, college presidents still have some leeway to act.
Greenblatt stated, “[L]ook at what happened at Cornell or at Columbia or at so many of these places where tenured faculty, who are protected by their system of employment, somehow, literally, the students they are supposed to be responsible for and teaching, instead they terrorize and they taunt. We saw it at Stanford. We saw it at Cornell. Now, let me say something, although there is tenure, Andrea, these presidents do have the authority to remove people from committees, to prevent them from getting promotions. There are ways you could tell a professor that you don’t want him or her to teach altogether. I do think that these presidents have kind of hid behind the tenure system. But they are the ones who are responsible and need to be accountable to their children, to their students, and to the parents like me who send our kids to these places.”
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