Brooklyn College Teacher Fired Before He Started; BREAKING: Re-hired.

Brooklyn College has a bit of an academic freedom problem.

Seems to be a pretty simple case: Kristofer Petersen-Overton, a graduate student at CUNY, was hired to teach a master’s-level class at Brooklyn College. A student found out that he’d done some work for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, then complained to the department head. That student then went to a NY Assemblyman, who complained to the College President that Petersen-Overton was “an overt supporter of terrorism” and said he couldn’t possibly teach his courses impartially.

Ashley Thorne at the National Association of Scholars thinks that Assemblyman Dov Hikind is probably right about Petersen-Overton’s lack of commitment to disinterested inquiry, but that the College has made a serious mistake:

These are antecedents that would raise doubts in our minds too that Petersen-Overton is someone who would scrupulously maintain the distinction between scholarly inquiry and political advocacy. But the time and place to have resolved that doubt was in the appointment process. Once his academic appointment was approved, Peterson-Overton should have had the opportunity to demonstrate his good will and capacity to teach “Politics of the Middle East” in a manner appropriate to the graduate program. Brooklyn College’s after-the-fact discovery of procedural irregularities it now claims as grounds for dismissing him from his appointment does not pass the test of simple credibility.

I’m not sure I would’ve hired the guy, but it’s obviously wrong to dismiss him based on what they think he might do.

The College claimed Petersen-Overton didn’t meet a certain requirement to teach graduate-level courses, so they started to look at his appointment. That requirement was news to him.

Their story appears to be, in technical terms, a load of baloney:

Indeed, Brooklyn College seems to have created a cover story to justify a decision that violated academic freedom. Like Martin Gaskell, the astronomer turned down for a position at the University of Kentucky because he was suspected of being “potentially evangelical,” Petersen-Overton appears to have dismissed for his views, not for being under-qualified. Unlike in Gaskell’s case, there is no publicly available evidence documenting this on the college’s end.

Still, the most likely reason for Petersen-Overton’s discharge is that the Brooklyn College administration feared the effects of his political perspective and how it would reflect on the college’s reputation, just as a search committee member did at UK when considering Martin Gaskell: “[A non-committee member] suggested, in particular, that we might one day wake up to a [Lexington] Herald-Leader headline citing ‘UK hires creationist as Observatory Director.’” So both colleges appear to have acted in fear and resorted to ideological litmus tests.

This happens much, much more often than most people realize.

MuzzleWatch, a site dedicated to “Tracking efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy,” reports that Petersen-Overton has been re-hired “unconditionally.” He told MuzzleWatch that overwhelming support from the academic community made it happen.

Like I said, I don’t think I would’ve hired the guy in the first place, but his dismissal seems to run on the wrong side of academic freedom.

Mitchell Langbert suggests that we need to look more closely at the situation before drawing any conclusions. He’s probably right.

Was Petersen-Overton’s dismissal fair or unfair?