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PARTISAN REVLEW
classroom teacher despite his provocative public statements, but rather
giving students an alternative . I was quite shocked however when the
late Irving Howe, once my professor, expressed outrage at the Levin case,
but fell into a deep swoon of silence when I tried to press him on that
of Professor Jeffries, Chairman of the African American Studies
Department. Among other sweeping assertions in a speech at Albany that
led to his dismissal as chairman, Professor Jeffries claimed, "Russian Jewry
had a particular control over the movies, and Iwith
1
their financial part–
ners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction of black people."
A chairmanship at City College entitles its holder to make college–
wide decisions as a member of the Personnel and Budget Committees,
rule on division tenure recommendations (in Jeffries's case , the Social
Sciences Division), and automatically seats the holder on the Faculty
Council. The chairman sets policy within a department and must be re–
sponsible not only to the department but to the administration. A
chairman is entitled to free speech, of course, but he or she cannot be a
loose cannon, and the college rules, allowing the President to dismiss a
faculty-elected chairman, recognize this. The meddling of a federal court
in issues of college policy is a kind of specious doublethink. Tenure was
not questioned, salary was not docked, nor were punitive teaching
schedules imposed by the college. Professor Levin's course is a required
one for every student at the college. During some semesters, Levin taught
the sole section on a particular day and hour. Professor Jeffries's depart–
ment teaches courses that are optional requirements of education majors
at City College. One of my minority students came to mc in the course
of a past semester, deeply upset by remarks about race made by an in–
structor under Professor Jeffries's jurisdiction.
It
is a strange notion of
academic freedom that excludes a student's right of choice when faced
with instructors whose views are deliberately abrasive either to minorites
or majorities.
There is some painful irony here. The administration at City
College, in trying to be both correct and decent, was rapped on the
knuckles. Professor Jeffries and Levin were judged "politically correct."
That message may have amused the media, but it sent a wave of dismay
through many of thc teaching and secretarial staff to whom the college's
sense of decorum is important. The difficult issue of how independent a
department is of the central administration, of the goals of the college at
large, was in question in the case of Professor Jeffries. We all know that
departments are not independent of the college deans and officers, yet no
one on the faculty would wish their departments to simply be sub–
servient. Departments, however, which have become so "political" that
their members no longer share the same standards of impartial judgment,
of
conc~rn
for facts that can be demonstrated, as one hopes most rep-
