CUNY Board Nixes Honorary Degree For Playwright Tony Kushner

[Scurrilous]

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s Israel views presumably behind rare move

<snip>

"In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.

The action was taken presumably because of the author's critical comments concerning the State of Israel.

The move took place at a meeting of CUNY's board of trustees Monday night after one of its members, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, raised objections to plans to honor Kushner by John Jay College, one of the system's schools.

The outcome may have been the first time in CUNY's history that its board of trustees vetoed an honorary-degree candidate proposed by one of its schools, according to a source with knowledge of the university."

more

[oberliner]

1. Tony Kushner Responds to CUNY Board Decision

At the May 2 public meeting of the CUNY Board of Trustees, which was broadcast on CUNY television and radio, Trustee Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld delivered a grotesque caricature of my political beliefs regarding the state of Israel, concocted out of three carefully cropped, contextless quotes taken from interviews I've given, the mention of my name on the blog of someone with whom I have no connection whatsoever, and the fact that I serve on the advisory board of a political organization with which Mr. Weisenfeld strongly disagrees. As far as I'm able to conclude from the podcast of this meeting, Mr. Weisenfeld spoke for about four minutes, the first half of which was a devoted to a recounting of the politics of former President of Ireland and UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson that was as false as his description of mine.

Ms. Robinson, however, was not on public trial; I was, apparently, and at the conclusion of Mr. Weisenfeld's vicious attack on me, eight members voted to approve all the honorary degree candidates, including me, and four voted to oppose the slate if my name remained on it. Lacking the requisite nine votes to approve the entire slate, the Board, in what sounds on the podcast like a scramble to dispense with the whole business, tabled my nomination, approved the other candidates, and adjourned. Not a word was spoken in my defense.

I wasn't told in advance that my willingness to accept an honorary doctorate from John Jay would require my presence at a meeting to defend myself. As far as I know, no one who might have spoken on my behalf was notified in advance. I'm not a difficult person to find, nor am I lacking in articulate colleagues and friends who would have responded. For all his posturing as a street-tough scrapper for causes he believes in, Mr. Weisenfeld, like most bullies, prefers an unfair fight.

But far more dismaying than Mr. Weisenfeld's diatribe is the silence of the other eleven board members. Did any of you feel that your responsibilities as trustees of an august institution of higher learning included even briefly discussing the appropriateness of Mr. Weisenfeld's using a public board meeting as a platform for deriding the political opinions of someone with whom he disagrees? Did none of you feel any responsibility towards me, whose name was before you, and hence available as a target for Mr. Weisenfeld's slander, entirely because I'd been nominated for an honor by the faculty and administration of one of your colleges?

Read the rest here:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/tony_kushner_responds_cuny_board_decision

[xchrom]

2. +1

[aquart]

3. Did CUNY owe him a degree?

And why John Jay where the students can barely read? The last thing on God's earth that would interest them is a playwright. Odd. Really.

[oberliner]

4. Some more info on Mr. Wiesenfeld

From 2007:

In his first con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing for CUNY Board, State Sen­a­tor Daniel Hevesi ques­tioned Wiesen­feld sharply about these reports, includ­ing alle­ga­tions from Com­mu­nity Advo­cate Isaac Abra­ham that he had called blacks “sav­ages.” As Hevesi remarked, “I don’t know what to believe, but if some­one calls blacks ‘sav­ages’ they have no busi­ness being on the CUNY Board of Trustees.”

Even though Hevesi went on to say, “I know this nom­i­nee does not have the char­ac­ter to sit on the CUNY Board,” Jef­frey Wiesen­feld was con­firmed by the full State Sen­ate in June, 1999, and then re-appointed by Pataki in a last minute “emer­gency” meet­ing of the state sen­ate, just before the end of Pataki’s term on Decem­ber 13th, 2006. For more on this see “Pataki Appoints Two Trustees in Last Minute Sen­ate Meet­ing” in the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 edi­tion of the GC Advocate.

Most recently, Wiesen­feld has been in the fore­front of the attack on aca­d­e­mic free­dom in 2007. As New York Board Chair of the Stop the Madrassa Coali­tion, he has joined a group that has repeated base­less charges that a new dual lan­guage Ara­bic Eng­lish pub­lic school, the Kahlil Gibran Inter­na­tional Acad­emy, would inevitably become a haven for ter­ror­ists and was already a rad­i­cal “Madrassa” reli­gious school. None of the coalition’s alle­ga­tions against the school or against the Prin­ci­pal were or are grounded in fact. Nor were the numer­ous arti­cles in the New York Post or the New York Sun, which linked them to its main web page.

After months of media harass­ment, the Prin­ci­pal of the Gibran school Deb­bie Almontaser was hounded out of her posi­tion when she was required to be inter­viewed by the New York Post, with min­i­mal to no pro­tec­tion from the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. The New York Post demanded to know Ms Almontaser’s views about T-Shirts that a female youth group was sell­ing, which dis­played the slo­gan “Intifada NYC” to indi­cate Arab empow­er­ment. Despite no direct involve­ment with the girls group, and despite denounc­ing any vio­lence, Deb­bie Almontaser’s efforts to explain the sig­nif­i­cance of the slo­gan to the Arab com­mu­nity was dis­torted in the right wing media and she was forced out by risk averse city offi­cials. She was suc­cess­fully scape­goated– despite a long career of almost unmatched inter­faith dia­logue and community-based peace work.

http://www.gcadvocate.com/2007/11/spotlight-on-the-board-of-trustees-jeffery-wiesenfeld-islamophobia-and-the-madrassa/