BY ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI

Not long after the election of Donald Trump, I shared a message in support of the right of undocumented students to pursue their education at City University of New York (CUNY), produced by a group of faculty and students and intended for inclusion on syllabi, to a faculty email list at Kingsborough Community College, where I teach.

A colleague named Joshua Dietz wrote me off-list, accusing me of spreading “propaganda” and “clogging [his] inbox with garbage.” He expanded in a subsequent email: “I would highly recommend you reconsider the thought process that lead [sic] you to believe that urging others to ignore and violate the law is a good thing.”

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten pushback from conservative colleagues (the South Brooklyn neighborhood where Kingsborough is located is a tiny Trumpian stronghold amidst the rest of bluer-than-blue Brooklyn), so I didn’t think much of it—at least until I read, a few weeks ago, that Joshua Dietz was also “Josh Neal.”

Under his real name, in addition to practicing hypnotherapy and playing guitar in an alt-rock band, Dietz taught psychology at a number of CUNY campuses—including, for at least five years, at Kingsborough.  But under the name Josh Neal, he is a white supremacist with a national profile.  He has been the co-host of the “The McSpencer Group” podcast alongside Richard Spencer, the most famous neo-Nazi in America.  His own podcast, “No Apologies,” has featured worshipful interviews with such vile figures as David Duke and Patrick Little.  Neal/Dietz’s hateful output could be found all over the internet (at least until his identity was revealed—since then, much of his online presence has been deleted).

The more information surfaces, the more disturbing the story becomes.  Dietz has apparently taught at no fewer than five other CUNY campuses, as well as at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn.  Among the CUNY schools at which he is documented to have taught are York College—where nearly 90% of the student body is Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, or Asian—and Medgar Evers College, a historically black college named after the slain civil rights leader.

But I take Dietz’s long-time presence at Kingsborough personally.  Nearly 70% of Kingsborough students are deemed “minority” students, and more than half of our students were born outside the U.S., representing 142 different countries and 73 different native languages.  Dietz’s student evaluations on Rate My Professors suggest that he taught at my campus from at least 2012 until 2017; public payroll records suggest he may have been teaching full-time for some of that period.

I will leave the reader to do the necessary math in order to work out how many Kingsborough students took introductory and intermediate psychology classes with someone now revealed to be a prominent white supremacist.

The only official comment from Kingsborough has been a one-line sentence from an unnamed spokesperson noting that Dietz does not currently work at the college.  There is just one exception to this silence: when I and others tried to open a public email discussion, asking for some answers and further discussion regarding Dietz’s position at the college, Kingsborough President Claudia Schrader chided us for being “unprofessional” and “not collegial.”

In the spring of 2018, the interim president who preceded Schrader had arbitrarily shut down access to an all-faculty email list because of alleged complaints about “political” emails; only college administrators are now able to write to the faculty list, while a separate opt-out “discussion list” was set up for college employees.  President Schrader’s warning to end what she saw as an “unprofessional” and “not collegial” discussion was thus particularly chilling.

This silence (and silencing) should be shocking, but bitter experience suggests that the two biggest fears of university administrators are bad publicity and litigation (in that order).  The resultant strategy, no matter how dire the revelations, seems to be to keep your mouth shut and hope it all blows over.

Against this silence, it seems important to note that what transpired at Kingsborough isn’t simply a bizarre and disturbing but ultimately isolated incident.  It suggests the need to face some hard truths about our profession in our political moment.  What should come next is a real conversation about the structures that allowed this to happen.

Here are three of many possible ways into the discussion that must follow—not just at Kingsborough or at CUNY, but at public universities across the country.

1) Austerity education and adjunctification: Among many other things, this is a story about austerity education, and its preeminent academic form: the exploitation of contingent adjunct labor.

Joshua Dietz taught as an adjunct lecturer on at least six different CUNY campuses over a series of about seven years.  All available indications suggest that he was completely unqualified to be teaching psychology at the university level; his professional website, which has been taken down since this revelation appeared, mentioned that he has a master’s degree in clinical psychology, but not where he received it from; he appears to have no other academic or professional credentials, nor to have been a licensed psychotherapist (he ran a business called Tranceformation Hypnosis & Counseling).

My point is absolutely not to say that Dietz was less qualified because he was an adjunct; indeed, the enforced collapse of the academic job market means that there is an enormous pool of highly qualified un- and under-employed scholars and teachers.  The necessary question, given the available pool of qualified candidates (especially in New York City), is how someone who according to all available evidence was basically a guitarist with a sketchy hypnosis business wound up teaching literally hundreds of students at multiple CUNY campuses.

Let’s start with the academic employment practices produced by austerity budgets.  As has been amply documented, CUNY, like so many public universities, has gone for decades without sufficient public funding.  Not surprisingly, one of the results has been an increasing reliance upon the exploited labor of contingent faculty.  At CUNY, adjuncts make up 65% of the faculty, teaching more than half of all classes.  They are currently paid as little as $3,222 per course.  For someone living in New York City, that doesn’t even qualify as poverty wages.

A related but less often discussed effect of austerity on a public university like CUNY involves departments having to hire contingent faculty on an at-will basis.  As state funding has decreased, the share of CUNY’s budget that comes from tuition has grown from 20% to almost 50% over the past 30 years.  Not only are class sizes increasing as a result; the number of students who need to be enrolled for a class to run keeps rising as well.  Depending on how enrollment numbers turn out, departments find themselves either having to cut courses that have already been assigned (which almost inevitably means an adjunct will lose one or more classes at the last minute), or else having to suddenly open up new sections and find faculty to teach them.

That’s what austerity education looks like: needing to hire someone to teach a class starting next week, who will get around $3000 to do so.  In this case, Joshua Dietz/Josh Neal got the job(s).

2) Institutionalized white supremacy and patriarchy: To be clear: Joshua Dietz didn’t get the job simply because he was a white male.  But given current institutional perceptions, it did mean that he looked the part.

P. L. Thomas, a professor of education at Furman University, has aptly described what functions as the unspoken norm in academia, despite all the rhetoric and policies touting “diversity”: “the norm is a white male template masked beneath veneers of ‘most qualified candidate,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘valid,’ and ‘civil discourse’” (we might add “professionalism” and “collegiality” to the list).

This deep-seated template should be distinguished from more conscious and overt racism, sexism, and homophobia (although there’s plenty of that to be found, both at Kingsborough and in academia more generally).  As the political scientists Rebecca A. Reid and Todd A. Curry have put it, expanding on Thomas’ phrase: “All of us have inherited a white, heteronormative, male template, and our institutions perpetuate it…. This template dictates certain research agendas, epistemologies, and methods as legitimate while discarding or marginalizing those that do not fit neatly within this framework.”

Two particular aspects of the white male template fit the Dietz/Neal situation particularly well.  First is the fact that, as Thomas writes, in academia as in the larger society, “the face and voice of tradition remain white and male, and the face and voice calling for equity tends to be a so-called minority.”  So it goes with academic hiring: even when an institution trumpets its strong desire to “increase diversity,” the “diversity” hire is always seen as the exception; hiring a white male professor is, in this context, just hiring “a professor.”

The second aspect is more insidious, since it functions more on the individual than on the institutional level.  From graduate program admissions to academic job searches to tenure and reappointment, when the time comes to choose among the many available qualified candidates, it boils down to the intangible question of whether a particular candidate is “the right fit.”  All too often, “‘not the right fit,’” Reid and Curry write, “is still code for the fact that those hiring: a) perceive the individual as not a real scholar, b) do not want or cannot see themselves working with the individual, and/or c) believe the probably token individual will not be happy in the department and thus will leave.”

Colleagues I spoke to who had met Joshua Dietz described him using language that reflects this white male template: he seemed “polite,” “articulate,” “thoughtful,” “composed,” etc.  In short, he fit the template; although no one used the phrase explicitly, he was “a good fit.”

In the wake of the revelation that this “good fit” turned out to be Richard Spencer’s sidekick, a number of colleagues responded with some version of the statement: “But we can’t start doing political litmus tests for job candidates!”

Needless to say, I agree.  But there’s no need to jump to the conclusion that a “litmus test” is the only way this situation could have been avoided.  Here’s an alternative starting point: Black and African-American, Latinx and Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans make up nearly 70% of Kingsborough’s student body, but less than 30% of the faculty.

Forget litmus tests: let’s start by seriously addressing those figures, and by figuring out how to make our faculty more closely resemble our student population.

3) The right’s use of the “political correctness” card: We’ve all heard it: campus leftists are stifling academic freedom, enforcing a regime of political correctness, making the university a hostile space for conservative voices!  Never mind that the data suggests the very opposite; the right’s narrative of “political correctness” on campus has become utterly ubiquitous.

The success of this attack has in turn influenced university administrators concerned about maintaining good PR coverage.  When the University of Chicago administration sent out its infamous letter to the entering freshman class in 2016, parroting right-wing polemics against “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” one critic rightly described it as a “publicity stunt” that used the claims of “not coddling students” as a way of “coddling donors.”

Here’s where we find ourselves: liberals and leftists, who have been the primary defenders of academic freedom, are viewed with suspicion by pundits and state legislators; all too often, university administrators are accordingly cowed.  Meanwhile Nicholas Kristof scolds us every few weeks about the need to “try harder to recruit job applicants who represent diverse views, to bring conservative speakers to campuses and to avoid a hostile work environment for conservatives and evangelicals.”

To be clear: there is no evidence that anyone who hired Joshua Dietz/Josh Neal was aware of his political views.  But it’s not a coincidence that the Dietz/Neal situation emerged in a context where campus leftists are called upon constantly to defend against accusations of “illiberalism,” while the right is encouraged to raise its voice in the name of academic freedom.  Nadje Al-Ali has aptly noted the resultant double-standard: at the same time as left-liberal forms of political speech have been increasingly targeted on campus (especially when related to Palestine-Israel), the right has effectively instrumentalized the concept of academic freedom to create platforms for its most loathsome expressions (see, for example, the almost constant campus tours of figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter).

We’ve certainly experienced this phenomenon at Kingsborough.  In a three-month period in early 2019, at least fourteen separate articles, videos, and calls to action on right-wing sites accused progressive faculty members at Kingsborough of orchestrating a campaign of harassment against conservative administrators and faculty.  No evidence was provided for any of these allegations, but nevertheless, the accusations brought by a few right-wing faculty and administrators were amplified by right-wing websites such as the Daily Caller, Frontpage Mag, Campus Reform, World Israel News, United for Israel, and Stand With Us.  At least two faculty members—I was one of them—had to seek protection from campus security after receiving threats that stemmed from being named in these articles.

In particular, accusations of anti-Semitism were leveled against progressives by a college administrator and occasional adjunct in the business department, who claimed that he was being targeted because “I’m Jewish, politically conservative and I believe in Zionism.”  The Lawfare Project, a right-wing legal and political advocacy group, has sent letters threatening lawsuits against several progressive faculty members for unspecified acts of discrimination, a strategy that legal defense groups such as Protect the Protest have come to call “SLAPPs”—that is, “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation” (all of those targeted by these letters have been active in campus union organizing, for example).

An investigation conducted by CUNY’s Central Office of Public Safety concluded that there was no evidence that linked progressive faculty at Kingsborough to any reports of wrongdoing (the Kingsborough administration initially refused to release the findings of this investigation, and finally did so only in response to a Freedom of Information Law request).  That hasn’t stopped the college administration from hiring the notorious anti-labor law firm Jackson Lewis to investigate further unspecified allegations against progressive faculty members.

As Sarah Jaffe has written, regarding the terrifying increase in anti-Semitism in the U.S. alongside the increasing weaponization of charges of anti-Semitism by the right: “It is useful for those in power to be able to pretend that critiques of their power are attacks on its victims—to present [Rep. Ilhan] Omar and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the cause of rising anti-Semitic violence, even as we see more clearly than ever that such violence is coming from white supremacists.”  A recent report by Political Research Associates, published on the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, states it even more directly: “it is important to understand how antisemitism and anti-immigrant racism are core mobilizing strategies of the Right in the Trump era.  Make no mistake, it is the White nationalists and their dog-whistling allies in the Trump camp who pose the principal threat to U.S. Jews.”

Given the barrage of unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism leveled at progressive faculty at Kingsborough, and the seriousness with which the administration has pursued them, the revelation that a literal neo-Nazi had meanwhile been teaching at the college (and the administration’s subsequent silence) is a particularly frightening example of where the right’s game of “political correctness” has brought us.

Guest blogger Anthony Alessandrini is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and of Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.  He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different.