The Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in Tribeca, lower Manhattan, is part of the City University of New York (CUNY), and grants associate degrees in vocational, business, health, science, engineering, and continuing education fields.
In March, two Jewish professors at BMCC (they both teach math) were subjected to defamatory online reviews that falsely accused them of racist discrimination towards Muslim and Palestinian students.
The reason for those nasty attacks was the fact that both professors had complained about a recent exhibit at BMCC that featured antisemitic content and also offered students the opportunity to earn course credit by watching a film with antisemitic content. Both were sponsored by the BMCC’s Social Justice and Equity Center.
The professors contacted the center and voiced their objections, and less than a day later, both became the subject of intense vilification on the website ratemyprofessors.com. AJC Director of Academic Affairs Sara Coodin said she had no doubt the professor’s complaint was leaked to the leftist community, in violation of the school’s policy of respecting confidential information.
“If CUNY faculty, students and staff cannot report incidents of bias without fear of retaliation,” Coodin wrote, “CUNY is not a place where minorities are safe to pursue their education.”
On March 21, BMCC issued the following message to the community of students and professors:
“A recent exhibit on our campus, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), offended and distressed individuals in our community. On behalf of BMCC, we offer our deepest and sincerest apologies to anyone who was offended and felt unsafe. The exhibit presenting a perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not come from any student or academic club, was not part of an academic course, and did not offer credit.
“This serious and painful incident creates an opportunity to reaffirm BMCC’s commitment to provide an inclusive space — a brave space — where all members of our community feel welcome and multiple perspectives can exist and be encouraged in a productive learning environment that values and thrives on viewpoint diversity.”
On Monday, the extreme-leftist publication Left Voice reported that BMCC will shut down its Social Justice and Equity Center come June 30.
According to the report, the administration told the Centers’ employees that the reason for shutting it down was a lack of funding. LV noted that “it’s highly unusual for a college to found a new center like this only to close it less than a year later.”
The report opined that “the center is not being closed because of a lack of money but as an act or retaliation for a Pro-Palestinian exhibition last March and other planned events about Palestine. That exhibition, a large multi-panel timeline of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation, was taken down in response to a series of very public complaints by pro-Israeli faculty and Zionist organizations, including CAMERA and S.A.F.E. CUNY, who claim that the exhibit violated the civil rights of Jewish students at CUNY.”
The SJEC, which includes a Multi-Cultural Center, Pride Center, and Social Justice Programs, was supposed to be “a space for and about Black, Indigenous, and students of color (BIPOC), women, queer, undocumented, and marginalized students.” But it became just another hub of antisemitism, as is often the case in today’s academia.
