UPenn’s Francisco Gil-White Appeals to SPME Faculty Colleagues For Support

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[SPME Editors Note: University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor Gil-White is facing a difficult contract renewal situation. The matter was brought to SPME’s attention from a number of sources including SPME faculty colleagues wondering what role, if any we would play in this matter. Prof. Gil-White was a Fellow in the Solomon Asch Center for Ethnopolitcal Conflict Studies at Penn, before his appointment as Assistant Professor and specializes in ethnography, evolutionary anthropology and psychology. He was a pro-PLO advocate, who after conducting and after doing research on the founding of the state of Israel and the history of the Palestinian movement then became an advocate for Israel. At SPME’s request, Professor Gil-White has submitted the following for colleague review and support. Professor Gil White can be reached at fjgil@psych.penn.edu . His website is: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/

Professor Ian Lustick has been contacted twice for a response to this piece. Professor Lustick has not responded to either contact. However, he has been told he is welcome to publish a response at any time in SPME Faculty Forum. SPME welcomes views of SPME members. Please indicate if you would like your views published in Faculty Forum or sent directly and privately to Prof. Gil-White or SPME’s Board. Only current members of SPME are entitled to have their feedback published. SPME is now a membership organization. To become current go to spme.org/join.html .]

Before I had a chance to finish graduate school –in fact, even before I had begun thinking of getting myself a job –I was recruited to apply to the University of Pennsylvania psychology department. It was foolish to pass up the opportunity, so I applied and got the job, with the sweetener of a Visiting Scholar year up-front in which I could finish my PhD research at Penn. This was sponsored by the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, which is attached to the psychology department. It is quite uncommon these days for somebody to be offered a job before they finish their PhD (let alone for someone to be recruited to apply), and even less common when the job is in a different field from that in which one graduates (I am a biological and cultural anthropologist by training, not a psychologist). I do not say this to boast, but to establish that the UPenn psychology department considered my academic promise to be exceptional, and therefore went out of its way to hire me. Now, as the university considers my reappointment to a second three-year contract, all sorts of “problems” have suddenly been discovered with my performance, and the university appears poised to fire me. What problems? I have a total of 12 publications, fully 10 of these in the three years since I came to UPenn. My articles are published in prestigious journals and have been widely discussed and cited by scholars in many different fields. My teaching evaluations were good to begin with and have improved. Colleagues whose teaching record and publication rate are not better than mine have been reappointed without controversy in the past few years. Why not me, then, when it is obvious that I meet the standards for reappointment many times over? Amazingly (or perhaps not so amazingly), because I have chosen to defend Israel and the Jewish people, and because I have documented and denounced NATO crimes of war against the Serbs, the only European people whose members died in the hundreds of thousands in horrific concentration camps because they chose to defy Hitler and defend their Jewish compatriots. This is not speculation. Starting a year ago, my research on the Arab-Israeli conflict led me to do a public about-face, where I announced that I was switching from a pro-PLO to a pro-Israeli position, and documented the reasons why.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2322

I then came under very strong pressure to desist, which culminated in the threat that I would lose my job if I persisted. This had nothing to do with the quality of my research on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nobody has yet claimed that I got a single fact wrong. Rather, this was all about the position I took, which turned out to be politically incorrect, even though factual and accurate. Those who thus pressured and threatened me did so also in writing, and I have published the emails that document the persecution I was forced to suffer for my pro-Serbian and philo-Semitic views.http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/open.htm The main agent behind this persecution, I am convinced, is Ian Lustick, a professor in the UPenn political science department, and as passionate an enemy of Israel as one can find. Although Prof. Lustick is not in the psychology department, he is one of the directors of the Asch Center, and its resident ‘expert’ on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is essentially a propagandist for the PLO, and for this reason my documentation, and my public about-face on who has the moral high ground in that conflict, could not be tolerated. The strategy used to get me fired was to allege absurd problems with my performance. Supposedly my students had attacked me mercilessly in the evaluation letters requested for my dossier. That this is nonsense can be seen from the spontaneous and strongly supportive response of my students when I made publicwhat was being done to me.

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/support.htm

The other supposed problem was that I had not changed my mind when members of the tenured faculty had disagreed with me about how best to explain the evolution of language. Well, I didn’t agree with them, and I can’t see why I am required to. But this is what is truly shocking: I have not even published my views on language evolution, so how can this be relevant to my evaluation? This is what apparently happened. The phony “problems” with my performance were invented to create an air of controversy over my reappointment, resulting in a squeak-through vote in my favor –a vote that the university, which has the final say in the reappointment process, could easily find too controversial for its blessing, and then I would be out of a job (but the department would have officially voted “in my favor”). This sort of thing almost requires that the university’s higher echelons also have an interest in firing me, but this too is likely, and for related reasons. Last semester, the University of Pennsylvania paid to bring an internationally famous antisemite and anti-black racist, Bill Baker, to speak to our students. You read correctly. The man has written a book called “Theft of a Nation” which essentially calls for the destruction of Israel, and also chaired the Populist Party, which was founded and bankrolled by notorious Holocaust denier Willis Carto. This is the same party that David Duke, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, used to run for president, and which put forward a platform to bring back the Jim Crow laws. I excoriated the university administration in the pages of the college newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, for paying to bring such a man to our campus.

http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/401de920ab34a?in_archive=1

I demanded an explanation, and none has been forthcoming. But one cannot say that the university did not respond. Apparently, its answer will be to fire me. I am determined to stand up for my views –and say what I think is true about the Arab-Israeli conflict –despite the UPenn administration. Because the record of the persecution against me is so well­documented, this is a golden opportunity to teach a lesson to the rest of the academic world: people may not be silenced for being pro-Israel. But publicizing my case, and extracting the maximum benefit for Israel and for the Jewish community, requires resources, and those of us who currently do this work are bearing all the costs ourselves, under very difficult circumstances. For those who would like to help out with this effort, I have set up the Gil-White Support Fund, which needs urgent contributions so that, among other things, I can re­hire writer and researcher Jared Israel, who has been doing much of this work. (Below you may read Jared Israel’s latest piece on Arutz Sheva, which is a hard-hitting attack on Benny Morris’s recent supposed ‘about face’).

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=3409

UPenn’s Francisco Gil-White Appeals to SPME Faculty Colleagues For Support

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Francisco Gil-White


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