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Fire Professor or Lose Funds, Columbia Alumni Say
Columbia Spectator ^
| 04/03/03
| Margaret Hunt Gram
Posted on 04/03/2003 9:16:45 AM PST by Jeff Head
Some alumni donors are pressuring the president's office and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations to fire Professor Nicholas De Genova for statements he made in last week's anti-war teach-in.
In the past few days, donors have barraged the offices with emails and phone calls, informing the University that they feel that De Genova overstepped the limits of academic free speech.
In mass-mailed email messages circulated among each other, alumni have urged each other to issue an ultimatum to the University: Fire De Genova or lose our donations.
"We've gotten a lot of calls," said Thomas Gray, who is in charge of alumni giving in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. "The people who have called have been very upset. They're proud of their college heritage, and they're very unhappy that this occurred."
CC alumnus Steve Stuart wrote an email a few days ago to over 100 alumni--whose combined "net worth," he said, is at least $250 million--asking them to express outrage to University President Lee Bollinger.
"Until he is fired, the University will suffer," Stuart said. Many of those alumni responded to Stuart's request with letters sent directly to Bollinger. Like Stuart's, nearly all of the emails issued warnings regarding the alumni's continued financial support of the University.
Frank Cicero, CC '92 and Senior Vice President of Investment Banking at Lehman Brothers, told Bollinger that he felt De Genova's presence on campus "pollutes the educational atmosphere."
That "pollution" may compel Cicero to stop contributing to the University.
"In the past, I believed that it was naive and in bad taste for alumni to withhold gifts because of the political opinions of faculty members," Cicero said in his email to Bollinger. "However, I am now considering doing just that in response to the vile and mendacious comments made by De Genova."
Donor Peter Ross, CC '87, MBA '94, and a member of the Ivory Capital Group, told Bollinger that De Genova's comments made him ashamed of the University.
"This will weigh heavily on my heart at the end of the year when I consider the financial sacrifice that I am willing to make for the University," Ross wrote.
For other alumni, the controversy has become a family matter. Vincent Butkiewicz, CC '79 and MBA '85, promised Bollinger that he would cancel the donation he made in a recent fund drive, assuring him that "you should not expect to see any donations from me nor an application for admission from any of my children until Prof. De Genova has been fired."
Peter Butkiewicz, CC '85, sent a nearly identical email. And their father, John Butkiewicz, CC '51 and a former member of the U.S. Army, informed Bollinger that he was revising his will to exclude Columbia.
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TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; US: New York; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: alumni; antiamerican; columbia; columbiau; degenova; leftists; marxists; nicholasdegenova; proamerican
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To: Jeff Head
In the past few days, donors have barraged the offices with emails and phone calls, informing the University that they feel that De Genova overstepped the limits of academic free speech. I doubt very much that these people think he "overstepped the limits of free speech". I am sure it's more like I choose not to give my money to a university that has professors with these points of view. I hate how the media try to couch it as limiting free speech.
To: Rummyfan
In case this has not been noted, take a look at what David Horowitz tells us about De Genova's boss, the chairman of the HISTORY DEPARTMENT at Columbia University.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/dh20030331.shtml Moment of truth: For the Anti-American Left
David Horowitz (archive)
March 31, 2003 |
Every movement has its moment of truth. At an anti-war teach-in at Columbia last week, Anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova told 3,000 students and faculty, Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place.
De Genova continued: The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus. This was a reference to the ambush of U.S. forces by an al-Qaeda warlord in Somalia in 1993. The Americans were there on a humanitarian mission to feed starving Somali Muslims. The al-Qaeda warlord was stealing the food and selling it on the black market. His forces killed 18 American soldiers and dragged their bodies through the streets in an act designed to humiliate their country. In short, America can do no good, and nothing that is done to America can be worse than it deserves.
The best that could be said of the crowd of Columbia faculty and students is that they did not react to Mogadishu remark (perhaps they did not know what Mogadishu referred to). But they applauded loudly, when the same professor said, If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine.
In other words, the American left as represented by faculty and students at one of the nations most elite universities wants America to lose the war with the terrorist and fascist regime in Baghdad. In shorts, the crowd might just have well applauded the professors first statement as well.
The phrase a million Mogadishus, has a resonance for those of us who participated in an earlier leftist peace movement, during the war in Indochina. In 1967, at the height of the conflict, the Cuban Communist leader, Che Guevara (still an icon among radicals today) called on revolutionaries all over the world to create
two, three, many Vietnams, to defeat the American enemy. It was the Sixties version of a call for jihad.
In the late Sixties, I was the editor of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the New Left and I edited a book of anti-American essays with the same title, Two, Three, Many Vietnams. Tom Hayden a leader of the New Left (later a Democratic State Senator and activist against the war in Iraq) used the same slogan as he called for armed uprisings inside the United States. In 1962, as a Marxist radical, I myself had helped to organize the first protest against the war in Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, America had only 300 advisers in Vietnam, who were seeking to prevent the Communist gulag that was to come. John F. Kennedy was President and had been invited to speak on the campus. We picketed his appearance. Our slogan was, Kennedys Three Rs: Radiation, Reaction and Repression. We didnt want peace in Vietnam. We wanted a revolution in America.
But we were clever. Or rather, we got smarter. We realized we couldnt attract large numbers of people by revealing our deranged fantasies about America (although that of course is not how we would have looked at them). We realized that we needed the support of a lot of Americans who would never agree with our real agendas if we were going to influence the course of the war. So we changed our slogan to Bring the Troops Home. That seemed to express care for Americans while accomplishing the same goal. If America brought her troops home in the middle of the war, the Communists would win. Which is exactly what happened.
The nature of the movement that revealed itself at Columbia is the same. When the Mogadishu remark was made, it was as if the devil had inadvertently exposed his horns, and someone needed to put a hat over them before others realized it. That someone was the demonstration organizer, Professor Eric Foner, the prestigious head of Columbias history department. Actually, when Foner spoke after De Genova at the teach-in, he failed to find the Mogadishu remark offensive. Instead Foner dissociated himself from another De Genova comment to the effect that all Americans who described themselves as patriotic, were actually white supremacists.
But the next day when a reporter from New York NewsDay called Foner, the professor realized that the Mogadishu remark had caused some trouble. When asked now about the statement he said it was idiotic. He told the reporter, I thought that was completely uncalled for. We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers. Foner did not say (and was not asked) how he thought organizing an anti-American demonstration to protest Americas war in Iraq and express the hope that we lose would not encourage the enemy and possibly lead to American deaths.
Eric Foner is the scion of a family of American Communists (and American Communist leaders) at that. In the Sixties he was an anti-American Stalinist.
******
WHAT AN OUTRAGE!! These anti-American commies control our once-great universities and ought to be torn out by the roots. Tenure or no tenure, they must go!!!
To: Ignatz
I saw that the other day. I try to drop by the good ole DN every once in awhile. What a liberal piece of crap that paper is (and has been for some time).
To: B4Ranch
LOL! That'll keep him in his hole.
To: Diddley
Mr. Bollinger:
YOU have the right of free speech also.
You CAN say that such statements (although "protected") undermine the United States.
You CAN say that De Genova should be called to acount for his remarks by the public.
You CAN say that - although De Genova has the right to speak - he can morally be held to pay for his statements.
YOU, Mr. Bollinger, HAVE the right to free speech also.
You CAN make the the above statements and similar ones.
It would be a good-faith example of how YOU exercise YOUR free-speech. Will You do it?
Or, you CAN say that you don't care if allumni withold funds, you will not condemn De Genova. Ahhh Mr. Bollinger. First you implement an Affirmative Action policy at the University of Michigan that winds up in front of the Supreme Court and now you defend statements made by this guy. geesh!
145
posted on
04/03/2003 1:32:13 PM PST
by
cebadams
(much better than ezra)
To: Jeff Head
Just think how long De Genova would have lasted if he had wished for AIDS to kill all gays, or a million Rwandas to cleanse Africa?
Academic freedom and free speech my a$$.
146
posted on
04/03/2003 1:39:21 PM PST
by
Carry_Okie
(Because there are people in power who are truly evil.)
To: Carry_Okie
My, that would have been "hate speech" don't you know?
To: Jeff Head
Doubleplus ungood.
148
posted on
04/03/2003 1:46:03 PM PST
by
Carry_Okie
(Because there are people in power who are truly evil.)
To: Alberta's Child
Academic freedom is usually understood to relate primarily to the classroom and research aspects of the subject a professor teaches. If this nitwit anthropologist postulated that the first inhabitants of America were marxist transvestites, academic freedom would protect his right to do so. However, IMHO academic freedom does not protect him if he chooses to make a political diatribe at a rally. Suppose that a coach, who is also a faculty member in the physical education department, says at a rally before a basketball game that he expects the team to deliver a million mogadishus, and other grotesqueries. Would the university tolerate that? Of course not. President Bollinger needs to find other work. A man who probably squats to pee is not up to leadership in this day and age.
To: upchuck
They'd love for us to fire him, but it's not going to happen," Gray said. "He's protected under academic free speech."
Freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from consequences.
To: Jeff Head
Destroy this man. When he's done, he shouldn't be able to get a job teaching a bum to roll off a bench.
To: IronJack
he shouldn't be able to get a job teaching a bum to roll off a b LOL!
To: IronJack
he shouldn't be able to get a job teaching a bum to roll off a bench LOL!
To: Jeff Head
bump
154
posted on
04/03/2003 4:51:16 PM PST
by
Dubya
(Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father,but by me)
To: Jeff Head
All of the bullshit coming out of the halls of higher education, take away the thoughts I have of myself having only a high school edu. These people really do lack something besides a high IQ...
155
posted on
04/03/2003 4:58:57 PM PST
by
sit-rep
To: Jeff Head
The pendulum swings like a pendulum do.
To: Jeff Head
And we see who has the real stroke...alumni donors!
Hit 'em in the wallet! Works every time.
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