Response to Professor Skloot

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Dear Professor Skloot:

Thank you for your email commenting on our May 15 letter to CUNY’s Board of Trustees about its award of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner. We are happy to respond to the points you made and will do so below. In our letter to the Trustees, it was not feasible to cite the various sources of information that substantiated the facts and views we decided to include. Indeed when we were first alerted about the CUNY controversy, we heard rumors of violations of the integrity of the nomination process and conflicts of interest for the nominators, which, after careful investigation, we found plausible but too tentative to include in our letter.

In your letter, you accused us of using “language that is both condescending and, I believe, dishonest in its motives.” Instead of challenging and requesting sources or evidence to support our statements, you found us guilty of “ignorance, dogmatism and bogus authority (all those 55,000 people who are so versed in things Kushner).” You concluded by condemning us for “sorry narrow-mindedness in a public expression of astonishingly poor judgment and self-righteousness.”

Below, we respond to each of your challenges:

I am astonished that the Board believes that making this award to one of the most acclaimed, taught, and produced playwrights in the United States can be criticized for its “politicization of the university.”

We never questioned Tony Kushner’s contributions as a playwright, nor would it have been appropriate for us to do so. We believe that individuals are entitled to express their views wherever they may fall on the political spectrum. However, we also believe that a university should not provide a platform for, let alone bestow its highest honors on, individuals who violate basic principles of academic discourse, civility and integrity, and who make incendiary and distorted accusations that feed or have the potential of feeding bigotry and hatred. Advocacy of academic boycotts specifically violates those basic principles. As we said in our letter:

We are distressed that you have chosen to give your highest honor to someone who frequently makes incendiary and biased accusations against Israel, thereby feeding the fires of antisemitism, hatred, and genocide incitement now prevalent in the Middle East. By accepting this politicized nomination, you are also giving the CUNY stage to a celebrity advocate of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, through direct statements and through his role on the Board of “Jewish Voice for Peace.” This is a position that all American universities have rejected.

To further substantiate our assertions, the unacceptability of advocates of boycotts on the American campus was articulated in a 2007 open letter by Columbia President Bollinger, subsequently endorsed by 300 other college presidents and 56 Nobel Prize winners. Addressing a British academic union’s proposed boycott of Israeli colleges and faculty members, the statement said:

We do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.

Did Tony Kushner advocate such boycotts, sanctions and divestments from Israel?

Although, in recent interviews, Mr. Kushner has denied his advocacy of such measures, CAMERA ( Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) reports, and we have verified that:

Kushner sits on the governing Board of Advisors of the “Jewish Voice for Peace,” which advocates divestment and boycott campaigns against Israel. His name appears on JVP letterhead, including on a letter “salut[ing]” the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) for its move toward divesting from companies that do business with Israel.

The letter posted on the JVP Web site not only applauds selective divestment focused on particular companies as proposed by the Presbyterians but says “we absolutely reject the accusation that general divestment or boycott campaigns are inherently anti-Semitic.”

JVP also posted a related statement saying:

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest grassroots Jewish peace group of its kind in the United States, applauds the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) for its recent vote to explore divesting from companies who profit from the harming of “innocent people, Palestinian or Israeli.”

Jewish Voice for Peace also helped spearhead the campaign aimed at intimidating the Caterpillar company into refusing to sell bulldozers to Israel.

Its “Action Center Homepage” calls on the public to “Urge the Caterpillar board of directors to stop selling bulldozers to Israe! l.” ; Although a shareholder effort failed to win support, JVP indicates it will renew similar efforts in the future.

Currently, JVP’s website invites people to petition TIAA CREF and all American universities to divest from companies like Caterpillar because of its Israel business.

Did Tony Kushner disassociate himself, recently, from JVP’s advocacy of boycotts and divestments?

No, Tony Kushner continues to be listed as a member of JVP’s Advisory Board, its highest governing body (see http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/content/advisory-board ).

Did Tony Kushner engage in incendiary and biased statements about Israel?

Yes, an example of such statements is Kushner’s characterization of Israel as engaging in ethnic cleansing:

[Israel was] founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing, and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people.
Yale Israel Review (Winter 2005)”

For the sake of brevity, we refer you to the CAMERA website, which provides a long list of Kushner’s similarly defamatory and baseless accusations (http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=181&x_article=2033 ).

You are incorrect to say that CUNY’s Board of Trustees selected Kushner for an honorary degree. His name was chosen first by students and faculty of a constituent department and advanced through the various stages of approval until it landed on the BoT’s agenda/ suppressed de bate/ susceptibility to public intimidation

We never suggested that the selection was initiated by the BoT or that the nomination process was corrupted. Like that of most universities, CUNY’s BoT is chartered to make final decisions in certain areas, the grantin! g of ten ure and honorary degrees included, all nominations being advisory to this highest body in the university. What we denounced as inappropriate is the Executive Committee’s decision, a couple of days after the BoT’s decision to table the nomination because of serious concerns regarding the candidate, to override that decision, in response to email and street protests. The Executive Committee thereby “suppressed debate” and showed that the university was “susceptible to public intimidation.”

There IS evidence that Kushner’s importance and excellence has already been acknowledged by honorary degrees from more than a score of higher educational institutions:

We never disputed or addressed that fact, although it is orthogonal to the controversy at hand. The decision of any number of universities to award Kushner an honorary degree does not require CUNY or any other university to do likewise.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to document the reasons for our letter to the CUNY BoT.

Sam Edelman, Executive Director SPME
Awi Federgruen, Charles E Exley Professor of Management, Columbia University
Judith S. Jacobson, Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University