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DePaul University Doesn't Want Anyone to Stick up for Israel

OK, I admit that aside from the fact that they occasionally make the NCAA tournament, I haven't known a lot about DePaul University.

Now I know more. I noticed on LGF, this story, covered by Roger Simon and Marathon Pundit.

It concerns, "Professor Thomas Klocek, who has been suspended after a verbal altercation with Muslim student groups."

I am not going to re-report the whole thing, as it has been well covered and I would just like to draw your attention to it.

Roger Simon said:

Thomas Klocek, a teacher at DePaul University, got into a dispute with some Palestinian students that may be costing the teacher his job of fifteen years as well as his health insurance. (Klocek, who is 58, has a serious kidney condition. He is also Catholic, not Jewish, although he defended Israel against accusations of - what else? - Nazism by the students.)

The "dispute" was a normal political conversation in which two sides disagree. It didn't happen in class, and it was not with people that are students of his. He simply told students that he disagreed with them. They said Israel treats the Palis like the Nazis treated the Jews. He disagreed and walked away. They wrote an angry letter and the university fired him. Whoa - compare that with the treatment of the Columbia professors who truly do use their classroom positions to force their opinions on others.

Apparently a Susanne Dumbleton, Dean, The School for New Learning, made the call.

Nine days after the incident, Klocek was called to the office of Susanne Dumbleton, dean of the School for New Learning. Dumbleton told him that she had received two letters, one each from SJP and UMMA, and that “there were very serious charges against me from the students,” according to Klocek, who never saw the letters.

He said Dumbleton told him that she had met with the students and their faculty advisors from the two groups, and that they were “hurt and crushed” by Klocek’s remarks. “They said you used your title as a professor and your power over them to force them to accept your remarks as true. The dean said she agreed with them,” Klocek related. (Dumbleton did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with Chicago Jewish News.)

Force them to accept his remarks as true? That is a beautiful charge. What are they, idiots? They are not even his students. They don't have to accept what he says any more than you or I do, and that is no basis to fire someone.

A note on contacting DePaul: Bear in mind that we have only heard one side of the story at this point. I am skeptical of what Depaul has in their defense and the onus is on them to refute this, but they have yet to say their piece. Sometimes firings can have a lot of reasons behind them and he may be picking and choosing one item. I think it is fine to express your views on this, but please be polite. If you just send of a rude email to Dumbleton or whoever they will likely just think you are a prick and ignore you. The saving grace for Miss Dumbleton is that you can get her as a result if you look up "dumb" as a last name in their staff/faculty directories. That's funny.

Also, I noticed that the campus Jewish community seems to be particularly wuss-wuss about this.

Ammi Dorevitch, executive director of Hillels Around Chicago, a consortium of Hillels at smaller local schools, and director of the DePaul Hillel, said that the organization was aware of the Klocek affair but had no plans to become involved in it.

"I see it as an issue between the administration and a faculty member," she said. "It's an administrative issue, not something Hillel would get involved in."

Rabbi Paul Saiger, director of Hillels of Illinois, agreed that "we decided to stay out of it. We don't know (Klocek), we never had any contact with him, we weren't present at the thing itself. He hasn't come to the Jewish community asking for help."

Rabbi Roy Furman, who teaches religious studies at DePaul, said he has not become involved in the situation because "I only know about it second or third hand, and my guess is that it is a contested situation; depending on which side you were on, you saw things differently."

He said he doesn't know if students feel free to take a pro-Israel position on the DePaul campus because "there are relatively few people who are in the moderate camp on either side. Those who are, get along with one another and those who aren't, don't. There are some students on campus who have families living on the West Bank, and they see and feel things from a different perspective. They may not be very appropriate in how they present things."

Final note:

Klocek said that he has "decided not to quit, but to fight." He said he believes the case has important implications not only for free speech and academic freedom but for the treatment of university professors throughout the country who do not have tenure, noting that at several universities, Holocaust deniers have been retained on the faculty because they have tenure.

Posted by amir at March 20, 2005 05:28 PM