Your Cart is Empty
Gabe Levin
The Nation
Excerpt: Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Henry F. Haidar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here.
Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Yael Halevi-Wise '97
January 11, 2024
In the interest of free and accurate speech, please note that the alternative motion proposed by Cary Nelson and Russell Berman, did indeed mention Israel and Palestine too, as you can see here:
EMERGENCY MOTION FOR MLA DELEGATE ASSEMBLY January 2024 (1/2/24)
BACKGROUND: The October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israeli towns and kibbutzim was followed by a major war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. These events have produced a unique and extremely contentious series of North American campus debates, demonstrations, and bitter social media messages with highly stressful consequences for students of varying ethnicities and political beliefs. Controversy surrounding a congressional hearing featuring three university presidents’ campus responses spread worldwide
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/harvard-mit-penn-presidents-antisemitism.html). Students from a variety of backgrounds have testified to feeling unsafe on campus as a result of the hostile climate created
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-campuses-rattled-israel-hamas-war-60-minutes/). Some have felt the right to express their political, cultural, or religious beliefs threatened.
Disagreements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have a long history in English and foreign language departments. MLA’s Delegate Assembly itself has a long history of debating relevant motions and resolutions as well. Rather than press the DA to take sides in these debates, we are urging MLA’s Executive Council help preserve an educational environment where all feel free to voice their positions and concerns.
MOTION: The MLA DA moves that the MLA EC take immediate steps to urge university administrators to defend from threats, harassment, and violence all faculty members, students and staff, regardless of their position on the conflict in the Middle East. As part of that effort the DA asks the EC to write to all North American English and language departments to ask their aid in preserving their campuses as civil environments for academic freedom and free expression.