Professor Jeffrey Lax, dean of the business department at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College near Sheepshead Bay, has filed a complaint with the school’s administration alleging anti-Semitism among the school’s faculty, The NY Post reported Monday (Liberal CUNY profs plotted to exclude Jew from meeting: probe).
According to Prof. Lax, a group calling itself the Progressive Faculty Caucus scheduled a meeting on a Friday night in March 2018, to keep him from participating, since he is an observant Jew.
PFC was established in response to President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. The topic of the Friday night meeting was discrimination against LGBT on campus. The NY Post report pointed out that Prof. Lax is a progressive who has publicly supported LGBT protections under the Civil Rights Act.
The Post obtained a 90-page report on the rancor within the 2-year college’s faculty. Among other things, the report alleges that “there is certainly discord between complaints and respondents, and they are having a difficult time interacting with one another in a collegial manner.” According to the report, leftwing professors who did not get along with Lax scheduled the March 2018 meeting on Friday night so he won’t be able to participate.
One witness told investigators that the leftist professors discriminated against Lax “because he would ‘bash’ the PFC every time he showed up to an event.”
Another witness said the leftists hated Lax “because he was pro-Trump, pro-Israel, he’s a Zionist, conservative American.” The witness added the same professors were concerned that Lax would take over the meeting and be “a chilling effect.”
Back in 2017, Prof. Lax sued Stuart Suss, a former interim president of Kingsborough, in Brooklyn federal court, for allegedly telling a math professor named Ronald Forman that there were “too many Jews” on the faculty at Kingsborough Community College.
All three academics are Jewish, by the way, but Suss and Forman are members of a Conservative synagogue. Lax defines himself in the court papers as an “Orthodox or ‘obvious’ Jew.”