Here Are The Facts; Now Give Him The Axe

SOME FACTS ABOUT PROFESSOR LEONARD JEFFRIES:

* At the City University of New York (CUNY), according to CUNY's student newspaper, he once told a class, "If I had my way, I'd wipe [whites] off the face of the earth."

* At the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival this July, he said that Blacks were the victims of a massive conspiracy "plotted and programmed out of Hollywood by people named Greenberg, Weisberg, Trigliani and whatnot." (He received a standing ovation.)

* On October 18, he told Crimson editor Jonathan Eliot Morgan '92 that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a "faggot and a punk."

* After discovering that some of the people who run The Crimson have Jewish-sounding surnames, he ordered his bodyguard to take Morgan's tapes and threatened to kill him if he published the interview.

Moreover, Jeffries is still the chair of the African-American Studies department at CUNY, a taxpayer-funded university. This is an outrage.

FREE SPEECH IS ONE THING, but it does not include the right to issue death threats. Nor does it include the right to take somebody else's belongings. Jeffries's actions constitute federal offenses, as well as state felonies, because they denied the civil rights of a journalist and because they were committed on City University property.

This incident alone provides more than sufficient grounds for CUNY to rescind Jeffries's tenure for his conduct unbecoming of a faculty member.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS ANOTHER THING, but it does not, in fact, include the right to advocate a Final Solution for whites in a CUNY classroom.

Jeffries can think whatever he wants. He can also say whatever he wants, within constitutional limits. But New York State need not and should not pay him to say it. We tend not to think that public education should encourage students to wipe whites off the face of the earth.

This may seem ridiculously self-evident, but last Monday (before news of Jeffries's vicious treatment of Morgan became public), CUNY's board of trustees voted to renew his appointment as department chair for eight more months. They did not censure him. They did not fire him. In effect, they rewarded him, and again provided him with a forum to air his racist, vitriolic pap thinly masquerading as scholarship.

JEFFRIES CAN ONLY IRRITATE racial wounds badly in need of healing. His message of division can only lead those who listen to him--many of them inner-city Blacks still desperate for truly equal representation--to violent conflicts with others.

Jeffries's power to incite hatred, his anti-Semitism and his anti-gay attitudes should be recognized as hateful non-scholarship, not defended under the grounds of academic freedom. They should be protected by law but not by public salary. (His treatment of Morgan, of course, should not be protected at all.)

CUNY should take away Jeffries's state-supported bully pulpit. He should be fired.

This racist bully should not receive tax dollars to spread his vitriol in a public school.