A Brooklyn College adjunct professor is claiming that he was fired because of his pro-Palestinian politics. College officials say that Kristofer Petersen-Overton, 26, was fired from teaching a Middle East politics class because he didn’t have a Ph.D. But Petersen-Overton thinks it was because of political pressure from outside the college…
"[He] simply did not have the credentials to be teaching at the graduate level,” said Brooklyn College spokesman Jeremy Thompson. Petersen-Overton thinks that he was fired after complaints came from Assemblyman Dov Hikind… This isn’t Brooklyn College’s first brush with Middle East controversy: last summer, an alumnus cut his alma mater out of his will because freshman were assigned a book by a “radical pro-Palestinian.”
http://gothamist.com/2011/01/27/brooklyn_college_prof_says_he_was_f.php#
Around the same time, another History Department professor whose name I no longer remember assigned rabidly anti-Israel propaganda as mandatory class reading material. A Sociology professor was fired for making anti-Christian remarks.
And the History or Sociology Departments are regarded as far more centrist than Political Science.
BC’s Politics professors regard centrist Democrat Bill Clinton as a radical right-winger.
Once I asked a classmate during class if he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism is a necessary stage of development before the onset of communism. He answered that it is not. I asked whether he believes Marx is too conservative, and was told that while Marx is not a conservative, he’s too far to the right for the student’s taste. Several people defended the idea that Marx is just not leftist enough. Nobody dared to disagree – that’s how your grade gets dropped.
In the view of typical Brooklyn College political science professor and students whose opinions do not get penalized, capitalism is the only or at least the primary reason for global suffering; the United States is at the helm of the capitalist system that seeks to promote American white men at the expense of all others; and Israel is the weapon Washington uses to colonize and abuse the Middle East.
As a Brooklyn College Political Science graduate, I can’t remember a single time when any of my professors said something positive about the United States or Israel. In most classes, mocking “right-wingers”, including mainstream Democrats, is presented as teaching.
On occasion, the views of some Brooklyn College humanities professor hits the news and a scandal breaks out. But I don’t see how the views of Kristofer Petersen-Overton are different from the rest of the department.
The real investigation would require us to consider why is it that no Republican, no centrist and no moderate Democrat can ever get hired to teach there. Why is it that hardly any American is to the left of Karl Marx, and yet these are the only people who can get a PoliSci teaching job?
