A politics professor associated with leftwing activism and anti-Semitic views at Brandeis University will no longer teach at the school following a one-year terminal sabbatical.
According to The Justice, Brandeis’s student newspaper, Professor Donald Hindley will end his 52-year controversial tenure at the university, supposedly because he believed his department had grown “far more conservative,” with “far fewer…let me call them activist, liberal-minded people.”
“I just could not tolerate anymore,” Hindley said. “It just wasn’t worth tolerating anymore what the place was becoming under Lawrence.”
Hindley referred to Brandeis University president Frederick Lawrence who, last July, responded to comments about leaked faculty emails from the restricted “Concerned Listserv,” in which Hindley participated.
Daniel Mael, a Brandeis student journalist, reported at Breitbart News last summer “newly uncovered emails distributed to an official university faculty listserv, comprised of a number of well-known Brandeis professors, show the narrow agenda of the professoriate.”
Mael continued:
That agenda was on full display when 87 professors signed onto a petition protesting the honorary degree slated for women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples,” the petition stated.
Mael reported that the “Concerned Listserv,” launched in 2002, began “out of concern about possible war with Iraq,” but its subscribers criticized United States policy on issues such as the “American system,” and “the Israelists.”
Dissent was not tolerated on the “Concerned Listserv,” as Mael reported list creator Gordon Fellman explained in 2009, “It is rude to post a recipe for pork roast on a vegetarian listserv or an orthodox Jewish one, or right wing harangues on the concerned list.”
Mary Baine Campbell, one Brandeis English professor on the “Concerned” list, had this to share with fellow participants about Hirsi Ali:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali claims to have had a difficult early life, and it may be true. However, she’s an ignorant, ultra-right-wing extremist, abusively, shockingly vocal in her hatred for Muslim culture and Muslims, a purveyor of the dangerous and imaginary concept, born of European distaste for the influx of immigrants from its former colonies, ‘Islamofascism’ – which has died on the vine even of the new European right wing. To call her a ‘woman’s rights activist’ is like Squeaky Fromm an environmentalist.”
“To honor someone at graduation who is notorious for inciting hate, defending violence and insulting the bearers of one of the world’s most populous faiths, including many students and faculty, not to mention parents, is not ‘hosting,’” Campbell continued. “It’s complicity in defamation.”
Hindley, Mael said, also signed the petition against Hirsi Ali and articulated “his apathy about Palestinian terror and their disdain for Israel, attacking ‘The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government.’”
In 2007, Hindley reportedly sent another “Concerned” email with the subject line, “Plant a Tree, Bury a Palestinian.”
“Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses,” Hindley continued. “In that way, we combine great trees with our own holocaustic ethnic cleansing.”
Also in 2007, Hindley was involved in yet another controversy involving free speech – this time in the classroom.
According to The Justice:
During the fall semester of that year, students in Hindley’s class approached the Politics department chair about his use of the word “wetbacks” in class. The context of his use of the word was disputed. In response to the situation, a member of the administration was sent to monitor the classroom, and Hindley was required to take sensitivity training.
The administration’s decision in this case led the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to place Brandeis University on its Red Alert list in 2008, and FIRE named Brandeis one of the worst schools for free speech from 2010 to 2012.
Following the leak of the “Concerned Listserv” emails, Brandeis president Lawrence heard from some faculty members who were worried about the state of freedom of speech on campus.
In his official response, Lawrence simply affirmed the faculty’s right to participate “in a full, open, civil and decent manner.” He criticized “Concerned” members and their email statements as “some remarks by an extremely small cohort of Brandeis faculty members…”
“In point of fact, Professor Hindley promulgated anti-Semitism on the ‘Concerned’ Listserv,” Mael told Breitbart News after learning of the professor’s exit from Brandeis. “His remarks raised many concerns about the attitudes of alleged academics and the nature of higher learning.”
“His claim that Brandeis features an atmosphere of conservative thinking vanishes in the presence of thought,” Mael added. “It is Hindley’s intolerance and bigotry that raised a number of questions for members of the Brandeis University community who believe in basic human decency.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.