University fights anti-Semitism charges
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Minnesota's second-largest university, St. Cloud State University, is embroiled in a bitter controversy over allegations by Jewish professors that some gentile faculty members and administrators have engaged in systematic anti-Semitism and have retaliated against those who complained about discrimination.
The complaints allege offensive behavior by non-Jewish professors toward Jewish colleagues, ranging from ignorance of or insensitivity to Jewish culture and history to blatantly anti-Semitic remarks.
The administration is also accused of failing to discipline those guilty of anti-Semitism and of retaliating against professors who complain about bias by recommending their "non-retention," which is tantamount to dismissal.
At least four members or former members of the faculty have filed or are about to file anti-Semitism complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A joint committee of the state Senate will hold a June hearing on the issue, the university has hired outside experts to study anti-Semitism on campus, and the Midwest branch of the Anti-Defamation League is looking into the allegations.
St. Cloud State has 15 Jewish faculty members out of 750 and about a dozen Jewish students in an enrollment of more than 15,000.
Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said the numbers are small because of the university's reputation among Jews of fostering a hostile environment.
"I don't know any Minnesota Jews who would send their kid there. It's like sending a black kid to Ku Klux Klan University," he said.
Some outside experts who are studying anti-Semitism at St. Cloud State say it is the scarcity of Jews at the university and in the city of St. Cloud, whose population is largely descended from German Catholic immigrants, that has contributed to insensitivity.
St. Cloud is 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis, in an area where anti-Semitism was virulent during the German American Bund movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
The university has a history of discrimination claims. It has settled two class-action gender-discrimination lawsuits. And at least a dozen members of the faculty and eight students are involved in various discrimination complaints.
The school's Japanese-American president, Roy Saigo, who took over in July, said he will be "very, very aggressive" about investigating such complaints and that he welcomes open discussion "so that all parts of the university can feel comfortable and safe on this campus."
"Being incarcerated during World War II because of my race, I have very little tolerance for that kind of behavior," said Saigo, who as a child was detained with his parents in an internment camp.
The university has been recruiting students and staff members of color: 18 percent of administrators, 14 percent of faculty members and 6 percent of students are nonwhite.
Some current and former St. Cloud professors say prejudice is deeply entrenched at the university, which minorities have long referred to as "White Cloud State." Jewish faculty members and students said swastikas occasionally appear on campus and that a 24-page supplement contending that the Holocaust was a hoax was inserted last year into the campus newspaper.
Much of the current controversy stems from an EEOC complaint filed by Arie Zmora, 50, an Israeli-American who taught history for two years before he was denied an interview for tenure and forced to leave in July after persistently complaining about anti-Semitism.
In his pending EEOC complaint, Zmora said one history professor distributed a catalog of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denial literature in the department and told him he had to "fumigate" the office of a departing colleague, who was Jewish and homosexual.
Stephanie Digby, an assistant professor of biology who left St. Cloud in 1997 after five years, said she was bullied by administrators when she complained about anti-Semitism. "Life was so miserable I left," she said.
Geoffrey Tabakin, an education professor who filed an EEOC complaint, said that when he first complained to the school administration about anti-Semitism, he was told by an affirmative-action officer that "Jews are not a protected class in Minnesota."
Stephen Silberfarb, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the group that Saigo commissioned to study anti-Semitism, said the controversy has been exacerbated by the administration's failure to investigate the problem aggressively in the past.