CUNY Trustees Strip Jeffries of Chair

Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr. was replaced last Monday as chair of the Black studies department at the City University of New York (CUNY) by a unanimous vote of the university's board of trustees.

Jeffries shot back with a promise to sue the university and insisted that the faculty in the Black studies department--whom he handpicked during his 19 years as chair--would defy the appointment, The New York Times reported last week.

Jeffries still retains his tenured position in the CUNY Black studies department, also called Africana.

Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, who will take over from Jeffries on July 1, is a former chair of Yale University's African-American studies department. Gordon is expected to reshape the CUNY program and to hire new faculty.

"Dr. Gordon will bring outstanding academic credentials, commitment, and nationally recognized accomplishments," CUNY chancellor Dr. W. Ann Reynolds told the The New York Times.

Gordon did not return phone calls from The Crimson yesterday.

But Jeffries told The Times the moves to oust him were "a conspiracy against the curriculum of inclusion."

"The universities are supposed to be free from political interference, but they obviously have submitted to the hysteria of the political arena," he said.

Last October, the CUNY board of trustees came under fire from scholars and state officials when it voted to extend Jeffries tenure as chair until the end of June in an effort to assuage racial tensions on campus.

Jeffries' visit to Harvard in February prompted a campus coalition of minority groups to protest the invitation. Jeffries has made controversial comments about Black "sun people" and white "ice people" as well as theorized about Jewish conspiracies to subjugate Blacks.

While CUNY stripped Jeffries of his chair, the Manhattan district attorney last week stopped the investigation of a complaint filed by a Crimson editor in October which claimed that Jeffries threatened the student's life.

J. Eliot Morgan, a Harvard extension school student, said the district attorney's office felt it could not prove the allegations of assault and theft "beyond a reasonable doubt" without corroborating witnesses.

Morgan said that CUNY's removal of Jeffries as Black studies chair was a "step in the right direction," but he also insisted that Jeffries also be stopped from teaching at the university.