August 28, 2023

Where Does CUNY Stand?
CUNY Alliance for Inclusion

The state of things at the City University of New York is captured in lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem of 1919,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Brimming with passionate intensity, many CUNY faculty, particularly in the social sciences, rise to take their part in the eternal struggle against evil. But an ideology must be careful in choosing its victim if it is to give meaning to the lives of its adherents and mobilize the masses. Countless centuries of redemptive hatred of Judaism in Western civilization supply an immediate choice for the epicenter of malevolent power in a complex world that controls people’s lives and world events.

Making this ideological choice the center of their personal and academic lives may destroy their personal integrity and academic freedom, it may be racist, it may require the fabrication of history and undercut the interests of those they claim to be defending, and it may erode the source of support for the university—the people of New York State—but no matter. Campus ideologues have fallen back on the time-tested monster. As Marx put it,

Emancipation from haggling and from money, that is to say, from practical and real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

CUNY’s self-proclaimed social justice faculty and staff union has turned a blind eye to real injustice throughout the world and chosen instead to unjustly condemn a single foreign nation, the Jewish state, Israel, and this, for defending itself from intense rocket fire in the 2021 Gaza War. This biased condemnation by the Delegate Assembly of CUNY’s union has set a pattern for the demonization of Israel with a manufactured history in the classroom and at graduation ceremonies, and even at the Graduate Center’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity. Instead of standing against antisemitic attitudes that some students bring to campus, these students’ prejudices are reinforced. This robs students of a meaningful educational encounter and makes many Jewish students feel unsafe.

If CUNY is not to go down the rabbit hole of selective racism and instead continue its historic tradition of academic integrity and moral clarity, it must reverse course. CUNY must earn the trust of the people of New York State and provide a welcoming and supportive atmosphere where all its students can realize their dreams. Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and his administration must adopt a clear definition of antisemitism, one that does not specifically allow for the use of double standards against one nation on the planet. It must also seek to hire outstanding public intellectuals who can stand for justice for all, without exception.

We are therefore shaken to find that CUNY has set itself upon an opposite course. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York announced this week that it has hired Professor Marc Lamont Hill of Temple University as a Presidential Professor of Urban Education. Professor Hill’s research interests, as listed on the Graduate Center website, include Racialization, State Violence, Settler-Colonialism, Public and Counter-Public Pedagogies, Transnational Political Solidarities, Middle East and Palestine. Professor Hill has managed to master this diverse assemblage of disciplines, along with other interests, by channeling them towards the goal of undermining Israel.

We understand that Professor Hill is a recognized and acclaimed expert on race and educational policy, but this doesn’t excuse his many past offensive remarks and virulent anti-Israel activism, which have landed as deeply offensive on the campus Jewish community at Temple and elsewhere where he has been a guest speaker. Speaking to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Professor Hill speaks approvingly of “Black Lives Matter … talking about the dismantling of the Zionist project” and “very explicitly embracing BDS on those grounds.”

How will this play out at CUNY? How far will Professor Hill go in his efforts to ostracize Zionists from progressive causes and circles? What is the impact on the credibility of CUNY faculty of a Presidential Professor supporting hoaxes such as the Deadly Exchange libel invented by Jewish Voices for Peace, in which Israel is falsely accused of training US police officers and then held responsible for police brutality against Blacks in the US.

We appreciate that faculty search committees and department chairs as well as Deans must have a central voice in hiring decisions, the final decision rests with university senior leadership and the CUNY Board Trustees which must carefully assess the ramifications of a new faculty member on a host of matters, including the impact on the CUNY campus climate.

Our concern is not with Professor Hill's expertise in the field of urban education but with his disregard for the facts, historical and current, in favor of ideological bias when it comes to Israel. This indicates a lack seriousness in his broad approach to scholarship. These flaws cannot be overlooked in a person hired in the rank of Presidential Professor. While we find his biased views on the Jewish state abhorrent and antisemitic, we acknowledge his right to have and express these views. The question we ask is if these views are consistent with the high standard of scholarship, which we and the public expect from academics who occupy the highest academic ranks at CUNY. We believe that appointing Professor Hill as a Presidential Professor will seriously damage CUNY’s reputation for objective scholarship of the highest quality.

In its response to inquiries about the hiring of Professor Hill, CUNY touted Professor Hill’s apology in the Philadelphia Inquirer half a decade ago for proclaiming that justice required a "free Palestine, from the river to the sea." The article entitled I’m sorry my word choices caused harm, can be found at https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/commentary/marc-lamont-hill-temple-university-cnn-palestine-israel-united-nations-20181201.html.

In this non-apology, Professor Hill places all the blame for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians on Israel. There is no indication that the determination of the Palestinian leadership not to settle for anything less than the destruction of Israel is a problem, nor is the terror launched against Israel and Palestinian incitement against it a problem. A Palestinian state could have been formed for the first time in history during the 1930’s and 40’s and after the 1948 armistice, but the Palestinian leadership chose otherwise. Later, Israeli peace offers which would have led to a Palestinian state were met with renewed terror campaigns.

Professor Hill uses the apology to claim the moral high ground, “One simply cannot be progressive if they ignore the plight of Palestinians.” But one can be truly progressive by standing against the demonization of Israel as the bedrock of Palestinian society. Palestinians need leaders who care for their people more than perpetuating corrupt or terror societies that keep them in power.

Professor Hill doubled down on his antipathy towards Israel during the Gaza War of 2021. He commented, “The violence is being perpetrated by the Israeli state. That’s what started this… There is a power dynamic here and guess what, Palestinians don’t have bomb shelters.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg5jipsaexg)

Apparently, launching a thousand rockets at Israel, or Hamas’ covenant that declares that every Jew should be found and killed has nothing to do with starting the violence. No, the violence started when Israel finally responded to stop the rockets.

With his antipathy towards Israel and with his self-proclaimed abhorrence of antisemitism, Professor Hill appears to be a perfect fit within that part of CUNY that rises to singularly demonize Israel as they profess their opposition to racism and antisemitism. One wonders, however, whether Professor Hill is the best judge of antisemitism. When Sean Hannity asked Hill whether Louis Farrakhan, who called Judaism a “gutter religion,” was an antisemite, Hill, who knows Farrakhan well enough to appear in photographs with him, responded, “I do not know if he is an antisemite,” and protested that the quote was taken “out of context.”

The CUNY Alliance for Inclusion (CAFI) works to safeguard academic freedom and to see that CUNY remains an open educational institution and does not become a reeducation center where only ideologically correct views can be expressed. In that spirit, we invite all faculty, students and administrators at CUNY to visit our website at https://www.cunyallianceforinclusion.org/ and to engage with us in dialogue. We invite Professor Hill to end his support for denormalization and attend the lecture and discussion to follow at the Graduate Center on September 21 on Advocating Empathy and Reconciliation in the Midst of Conflict by the courageous Palestinian peace activist, Professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi.