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A DePaul professor who was suspended after having a spirited discussion about the Middle East with Muslim students sued the university and two of its officials for defamation yesterday. Professor Thomas Klocek alleges the administrators wrongly characterized his arguments as racist and bigoted. He seeks damages against the school for maligning his "integrity and professional competence." Last September, Klocek attended a Student Activities Fair on the Chicago campus and happened to visit the table of the Students for Justice in Palestine, a statement announcing the lawsuit stated. After the professor took a handout that showed an Israeli bulldozer destroying a...

CHICAGO (AP) A former DePaul University instructor filed a defamation lawsuit Tuesday against the school, claiming officials maligned him publicly after he got in a heated argument with pro-Palestinian students at a campus activities fair. Thomas Klocek, a 14-year part-time professor, has not worked at DePaul since the Sept. 15 incident involving students from two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and United Muslims Moving Ahead. Both Klocek and the students agree that a loud argument began after the instructor picked up a pro-Palestinian flier from one of the groups. The students complained to school authorities that Klocek identified himself...

Under the title of "DePaul's predicament: The choice--Stop--or stop justifying--anti-Israel sentiment," the Chicago Jewish Star returns to the issues haunting Chicago's DePaul University. In its previous edition, the Star summarized Thomas Klocek's free speech struggle against DePaul, and it included this quote from Klocek, "I stood for Israel, because it is in the right. I paid the price at a Christian University." The Chicago Jewish Star is not available online, it's a free-weekly. If you're in Chicago's Loop, look for a Jewish Star newspaper box and pick up a copy to see the entire editorial. Here are some excerpts: During...

So what happened? On September 15, 2004, I attended a student activities fair at the Loop Campus of DePaul University. I noticed a group there called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and I saw they had some literature. On the front of one of the brochures was a picture of Rachel Corey, the American who had been accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer. The literature, however, had her murdered by the Israelis; it also included many other incendiary and anti-Israeli remarks. As I was reading the pamphlet, I asked the students, “Did you know that in addition to the...

CHICAGO, May 18, 2005—DePaul University administrators have suspended Professor Thomas Klocek without a hearing after he engaged in an out-of-class argument with pro-Palestinian students at a student activities fair. When the students complained to administrators, Klocek was denied the rights that DePaul guarantees to professors accused of wrongdoing and immediately suspended. Statements from DePaul administrators indicate that Klocek was disciplined because of his harsh criticism of the students’ viewpoint, despite DePaul’s stated commitments to free speech and academic freedom. “DePaul has unquestionably violated Professor Klocek’s due process rights, and the university did so because his statements were allegedly offensive,” commented...

URGENT NEED: DePaul students who support Klocek Please e-mail me at klocekbacker@yahoo.com if you are a current DePaul student who'd like to go "on the record" in support of suspended Professor Thomas Klocek. I will e-mail you back with the details. Thanks!!!!

During the past five years issues relating to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have challenged university administrators. Not least among the institutions embroiled is DePaul University. The nation’s largest Catholic university, DePaul serves more than 23,000 students. Founded on the principle of admitting people of all religions, the university has no idea how many students are Catholics, Muslims, or Jews, although anecdotal estimates in the Jewish community peg the number of Jewish students at around 1,000. On the one hand, Jewish students at DePaul encounter a campus environment well equipped to serve their social, spiritual, and educational needs....

Like many other students, over the past four years at DePaul, I’ve had very little opportunity to directly see the administration working for the well-being of the student body. In fact, I would say quite the opposite. I’ve seen computers taken out of dorm rooms, free prints removed and tuition and fees increased. That is until recently. DePaul University, more specifically Dean Dumbleton from the School for New Learning and Vice-President Doyle from the office of student affairs made a very difficult decision to protect the students. During this year’s fall quarter at the Loop Campus Student Involvement Fair, representatives...

To: DePaul University Whereas we the undersigned believe that academic institutions have an obligation to promote and encourage the free exchange of diverse ideas and opinions on controversial matters; And whereas, after examining various accounts regarding the circumstances surrounding the unpaid suspension of DePaul Professor Thomas Klocek, we believe that he was punished primarily because of the content of opinions he expressed on a controversial subject; And whereas we believe that his due process rights, including his right to an open, comprehensive hearing on the charges against him, his right to confront his accusers, and his right to academic freedom...

Another word for ‘politically correct’ is ‘intolerant’By JAY AMBROSE Guest Commentary MY ONLINE dictionary has a politically correct definition of “politically correct,” saying that the phrase refers to support for “broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.” It gives a hint at the real meaning when it says the phrase can point to someone who is perceived as being “overconcerned with such change, often to the exclusion of other matters,” and that PC behavior “involves changing or avoiding language that might offend anyone.” But the definition...

Professor Thomas Klocek, the De Paul teacher who was fired after debating Mideast policy with some Muslim students on campus, will be the guest today on "Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily RadioActive," the nationally syndicated talk program. As Farah explains in a recent column, nine days after the spirited argument, which lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, Klocek received an "emergency suspension" and was unceremoniously kicked off the campus. He was offered his job back if he agreed to monitored teaching and apologized to the students, but he refused. A lawsuit may be in the offing. Besides his special guests, Farah will...

DePaul’s Jihad against academic freedomApril 18th, 2005 DePaul University in Chicago is one of the fastest growing universities in the country. It has become the largest Catholic-affiliated university in America. Muslim and Arab students are one of the segments of DePaul's student population that has seen the greatest increase in numbers in recent years. Although no figures are available, these students are an important source of revenue for the University, and many may well pay full tuition, making their attendance particularly lucrative. Perhaps in recognition of this market segment, the University hired Norman Finkelstein to teach in its Political Science...

Facts are stubborn things - except when you create your own. When I was asked about the "Jenin Massacre" by a Muslim student during an event at Norfolk's Old Dominion this week, it became clear we were coming from two very different perspectives: reality vs. mythology. There was no "Jenin Massacre." Period. The only "massacre" that took place at Jenin was that of the truth. Palestinians, long masters of media manipulation, went by the hundreds to foreign media - whom Israel kept outside of the armed conflict - to claim that over 500 innocents had been slaughtered. The man at...

Chicago’s DePaul University, which has taken a couple of hits for its grotesque squashing of a professor’s free-speech rights, is hitting back, adding defamatory insult to career-ending injury – and a question comes to mind. It’s a question that was asked by the counsel for the Army in 1954 when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was seeking out Communists in the government. He threw his charges around with little or no evidence; others in Congress did the same, and sometimes reputations were recklessly ruined. In the hearing, McCarthy got tangled with the counsel, Joseph Welch, in suggesting that a young associate of...

Catholic universities in the United States have in recent years shown a weakness for cultivating far-leftist anti-Semites and haters of America. Perhaps the best known has been Notre Dame, home of the extremist Kroc Institute, which attempted to sponsor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Arab with ties to Al Qaeda, for a three-year professorship. But in many ways, DePaul University is even worse. DePaul is a large, if not particularly academically renowned, Catholic college in Chicago, nominally associated with “Congregation of the Mission,” more popularly known as the Vincentians. Until recently, the main cause of controversy surrounding DePaul was its insistence...

After the University of Colorado's Ward Churchill scandal, you might think it's nearly impossible for U.S. universities to get rid of faculty members. It's not so. While it's true that faculty members can embrace terrorists, demean their victims, plagiarize the work of others, lie about their ethnic backgrounds for better positions and generally hold America and Americans in contempt, there is something they can say on the college campus that will get them fired. In fact, I can tell you very easily and succinctly what a college professor can do to get the ax on nearly any university campus across...

Columbia Unbecoming is on the whole just a series of complaints having to do mainly with manner or etiquette in the classroom, but the real issue has to do with the meager and politicized content that professors choose to teach. As Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies department at King’s College, University of London, implied on March 6 in Uris Hall, Massad’s classroom hysterics are not the real problem. The real problem is a polite and affable man like Professor Khalidi, who nevertheless peddles political propaganda in class, propaganda masquerading as real scholarship.Two articles in the March 23, 2005...

During his 14 years at DePaul University, Thomas Klocek dwelled in adjunct-professor purgatory, quietly coming and going times a week from his Loop classroom and his home on the city’s Southwest Side. His evalutions from students in the university’s School of New Learning were consistently positive—and that, apparently, was enough for his bosses because nary a supervisor visited his classroom. Klocek’s invisibility ran out, however, one day in September when he got caught up in a heated debate at a student activities fair on the school’s downtown campus. He stopped at a table where two student groups—Students for Justice in...

Liberals need to watch their mouths. After the build-up to war and the presidential election, it's as if they got drunk and said some things they shouldn't have. On www.sorryeverybody.com, liberals have posted messages such as, "We're sorry half our country is a bunch of morons." That translates from drunk-speak to English as "Hey, I'm not going down without a fight!" It's as if now, instead of sobering up and apologizing for their indignation, they're just getting drunker in their bitterness. It's gotten so out of hand, columnist Jay Ambrose recently wrote that liberals' lack of tolerance for conservative or...

Thomas Klocek showed up at DePaul University one day this month to stage a news conference. He taped his mouth shut and used rope and more tape to bind his arms and torso. His point was that the university had gagged him, denying the long-time adjunct the opportunity to teach because of views on the Middle East that he expressed one day in September. That’s one view of the case — and a view that is spreading widely online, where Klocek is being embraced by various groups as a victim of political correctness. Because Klocek was accused of intimidating pro-Palestinian...