BUZZ
Key Takeaways
- Cornell professor Eric Cheyfitz chose to retire rather than accept a two-semester suspension for asking an Israeli student to leave his class, which was deemed a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.
- The incident arose in Cheyfitz's class, where he claimed student Oren Renard was disruptive and had faced complaints from peers.
- Critics of Cheyfitz, including law professor Menachem Rosensaft, accused his course of promoting a biased narrative against Israelis, while Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff labeled the course as factually inaccurate and radical.
- Cheyfitz’s lawyer said Cornell's actions conceded a violation of academic freedom, indicating a broader conflict surrounding academic discourse on sensitive geopolitical issues.
A Cornell professor has decided to retire rather than serve a two-semester-without-pay suspension for telling an Israeli student to “leave his course.”
According to The Cornell Daily Sun, under the terms of the retirement “agreement” which took effect last Tuesday, Eric Cheyfitz will get paid for the upcoming spring semester.
An investigation had determined that Cheyfitz “violated federal anti-discrimination law” by “asking” student Oren Renard to leave his “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” class last semester.
Cheyfitz alleged Renard had been “disruptive,” and that other students “complained to [him] of [Renard’s] presence as the course’s only graduate student and of his pro-Israel speech during class discussions.”
Renard “was either ‘simply making contradictory comments’ or ‘not participating in the discussion,'” Cheyfitz said, adding he “upset […] my students, and appeared to be not doing the readings.”
Sumitra Pandit, a student in the “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” seminar, agreed, saying “It was pretty obvious that [Renard] was just there to argue with pro-Palestine students.”
Pandit also claimed a Palestinian student had dropped the course due to Renard’s “derailing the conversation.”
Prof. Cheyfitz also alleged Renard had recorded other students in the class leading to concerns “over being doxxed.” He believes Renard enrolled in the class “to surveil students.”
Cornell’s Student Code of Conduct prohibits any recording to “appropriate, distribute, share, or use someone’s likeness, identifying personal data, or documents without permission.”
The American Literatures professor pointed out he had “initially welcomed Renard into the class,” and noted he himself “identifies as Jewish,” and that his daughter and grandchildren are Israeli citizens.
Last December, Cornell law professor Menachem Rosensaft called Cheyfitz’s course “inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship.”
The class “intends to convey a narrative that casts Palestinians writ large as protagonists while Israelis and, by extension, Jews will be portrayed as villainous antagonists perpetrating ‘settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel’ against a background of ‘plausible genocide,’” Rosensaft wrote in a Daily Sun op-ed. “Not only is such a narrative historically false — more importantly, it also constitutes antisemitism on steroids.”
Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff had a similar view; the Daily Sun had obtained an email from Kotlikoff to a faculty member stating that the “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” class offered “a radical, factually inaccurate, and biased view of the formation of the State of Israel and the ongoing conflict.”
Cheyfitz’s lawyer Luna Droubi disputed Cornell’s “false account of what transpired” and said “by choosing to resolve this matter [the school] has essentially conceded that they violated Professor Cheyfitz’s academic freedom.”
MORE: Cornell’s Cheyfitz: American Dream now a ‘hallucination’
