Will CUNY Continue to Become a Post-Truth, Antisemitic University?

I myself am a graduate of the Department of Music of the CUNY. My grandmother came to the United States by herself at age 19 to escape antisemitism, and, although poor, she devoted herself to financing my university education at CUNY. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust. My grandfather, Yakov Zelechin, changed his name to “Jack Jackson” in 1936 in order to avoid antisemitism.

In 2019, Hunter College professor Philip A. Ewell shocked the music world when he indicted the important music theorist Heinrich Schenker, a Viennese Jew who died in 1935, as a “virulent racist,” “white supremacist” and Nazi sympathizer. He also accused generations of Schenkerian scholars of trying to “whitewash” the theorist’s racism and prevent Blacks from succeeding in music theory. 

Then, in July 2020, faculty and graduates of the CUNY doctoral program in music organized a national censure resolution condemning Schenker and all those who defended him as “racists.” But Ewell was just the tip of a much larger spear, its shaft being a group of enablers, including department heads, school administrators and music faculty at CUNY and throughout the U.S. This censure resolution provides a clear example of the harassment of Jewish scholars for objecting to antisemitic conspiracy theories. One of the most appalling and pernicious claims, published in an article posted by CUNY on the Graduate Center website, is that Schenker “supported the white supremacist and German nationalist movements that presaged Hitler.” In fact, Schenker condemned Nazism as early as 1923, and again in 1933; he never supported or endorsed any proto-Nazi movements. Publishing such assertions stains CUNY’s reputation as a serious research university.

Another clear indication of Ewell’s indifference to or blindness toward antisemitism is his silence on the problem of antisemitism in the lyrics in hip-hop and rap, and his advocacy of using hip-hop and rap in music classes to discuss racism. Ewell has described writer Amiri Baraka as an anti-racist predecessor of today’s hip hop and rap artists; Baraka famously wrote, “I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured.” Without proper vetting and appropriate critique, the teaching of rap and hip hop can become a means of injecting antisemitism into the music curriculum at CUNY and elsewhere.

Recently, a hearing was held by the New York City Council to investigate widespread antisemitism at CUNY. There are specific occasions when academic freedom does not protect antisemitic administrators and professors. Three alumni and one former teacher asked the City Council to intervene by condemning specific antisemitic behaviors in the CUNY music departments and, if appropriate measures are not taken, withdraw all tax-payer funding.

There are specific occasions when academic freedom does not protect antisemitic administrators and professors. 

CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez was supposed to have attended the hearing on June 8; however, it was postponed to June 30 in order to accommodate his schedule. Then, at the very last minute, he decided to skip the once-postponed hearing altogether, replacing himself with his legal counsel Glenda Grace, and two other administrators, “who sparred with Council members throughout the hearing.” The head of the CUNY Graduate Center, Robin Garrell, who made a cameo appearance of just one hour at the outset, was therefore not present to hear allegations from CUNY music alumni that the Graduate Center music department had disseminated false allegations about Schenker and Schenkerians on its website. Time and time again, when asked factual questions by the chair Eric Dinowitz, and council members Inna Vernikov and Kalman Yeger, about various manifestations of antisemitism at CUNY, these officials could not answer. Clearly they had not done their homework, and their attitude and demeanor, if not their words, projected their response: We know nothing so that we cannot be held accountable. The evasiveness exhibited by these CUNY officials was painfully reminiscent of more than one post-war Nazi defendant: “Did not the gas chambers pour out their smoke, smell, and screams just a stone’s throw from your office? … and yet you still say you heard, saw, and smelled nothing?”  

Clearly they had not done their homework, and their attitude and demeanor, if not their words, projected their response: We know nothing so that we cannot be held accountable. 

In closing, I reference an astonishing painting by Georg Grosz, from 1942, now hanging at Hofstra University, called “A Mighty One on a Little Walk Surprised by Two Poets.” If you look closely at it, you will see that the two “poets”—actually, one is clearly a musician playing the harp, while the other is indeed a scribbling poet—are wearing elaborate, heavy wooden earplugs screwed to their ears. Grosz’s point is that these groveling poets, artists, musicians—these supposedly university-educated intellectuals, albeit freezing to death on the Russian steppe while their master, protected by his warm greatcoat, whips them to obedience—must “hear no evil, and see no evil.” This painting reminds one all too well of the CUNY president’s no-show, and the eloquent ignorance of his minions.

Timothy L. Jackson is Professor of Music Theory at University of North Texas.