The City University of New York (CUNY), a higher-education consortium with 25 campuses across the five boroughs, has hired prominent academic and anti-Israel commentator Marc Lamont Hill as the CUNY Graduate Center’s “presidential professor” of urban education, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Algemeiner.
Hill’s hiring this week has already stirred controversy in light of both his past comments concerning Israel and Zionism and numerous civil rights complaints alleging that CUNY itself fosters a hostile, antisemitic environment in which members of the Jewish community are threatened and harassed.
In 2018, Hill was rebuked by Temple University, his former employer, and fired by CNN after calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a slogan widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel.
Recently, Hill posted a photograph of himself holding a sign that said he supported the American Anthropological Association’s endorsement of the the so-called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward the Jewish state’s eventual elimination. Hill has also publicly associated with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in the past and refused for many months to denounce his antisemitism.
During a 2018 interview with The Breakfast Club, a popular urban radio broadcast, Hill called Farrakhan his “brother” and accused Israeli police of training American officers to kill Black people.
“What is happening is a normalization and legitimization of Jew-hatred that has really become part and parcel of the academy,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who founded the AMCHA Initiative nonprofit to research and track antisemitism in American higher education, said of CUNY’s decision to hire Hill in an interview. “And it’s not just that he’s proud of that and proud to tell you that, it’s that this is how he sees himself as an academic. His obsession with the Jewish state is actually the centerpiece of his scholarship, and that is probably why he was hired at CUNY.”
Rossman-Benjamin added that CUNY administrators and faculty have signaled their commitment to anti-Zionism before — including in 2022, when the CUNY Law School faculty endorsed a BDS resolution. She explained that faculty there and throughout the university system place political activism above scholarship, citing as an example the law school’s description of itself as a training ground for “radical lawyering,” a term drawn from far-left literature.
“Hill is a staunch advocate of the BDS movement,” Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, told The Algemeiner. “He ignores the total makeup of Israeli society, buying hook, line, and sinker into the white colonial narrative even though Israel largely comprises Jews of color. He’s a total propagandist in that regard, and he has made those accusations about Israel often to his own detriment. And I think people should be appalled that CUNY is legitimizing him.”
Romirowsky argued that Hill’s hiring is inconsistent with CUNY’s alleged efforts to address antisemitism on campus, a cause that CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez appeared to embrace in several public messages.
“Clearly Rodriguez’s comments have no teeth,” he continued. “Actions have to follow stating one’s commitment to fighting antisemitism. Bringing a known antisemite who has been so vocal and so pronounced about his views sends a contradictory message. I think the faculty fighting antisemitism at CUNY should be deeply concerned about what’s happening there.”
CUNY on Wednesday defended its hiring of Hill as a decision driven by merit, adding that several Jews served on the hiring committee that selected him.
“Professor Hill, a widely respected expert in his field, was unanimously selected by the Urban Education hiring committee for a position that focuses on advancing conversation and research about the role of education in American society,” a spokesperson for the university told The Algemeiner. “The committee reviewed the entirety of his scholarship and public comments, which include a public letter of apology for remarks made half a decade ago and his strong, unequivocal condemnations of antisemitism and antisemitic violence.”
The City University of New York is currently under investigation by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for allegedly neglecting to discipline a student, Nerdeen Kiswani, who threatened to set her classmate on fire for wearing an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) hoodie, and for failing to protect another Jewish student from harassment. CUNY is also the subject of a Title VI complaint, which was filed in July 2022 by the American Center for Law and Justice after accusations of antisemitism at CUNY campuses were aired during a New York City Council hearing held the previous month. It alleges that CUNY has intentionally ignored “a sustained pattern of antisemitism.”
Another investigation, launched in February 2022, is reviewing complaints that Jewish students enrolled in CUNY Brooklyn College’s Mental Health Counseling master’s program were browbeaten into denying their heritage and identifying as white. One student allegedly begrudged one of her Jewish classmates so much that she admitted in a WhatsApp group chat to fantasizing about strangling her, an anonymous student told The Algemeiner at the time.
In May, CUNY again came under a shroud of criticism when student Fatima Mohammed alleged that Jewish money influences the university’s Israel policy during a CUNY Law School commencement ceremony. Despite being widely condemned by Jewish groups and local and national lawmakers —including New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) — 40 CUNY Law faculty issued a statement supporting Mohammed’s remarks, describing them as “heartland First Amendment speech.”
In Sept. 2022, CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez acknowledged that “more needs to be done” to fight antisemitism at the university’s 25 campuses.
Neither Rodriguez nor Hill responded to The Algemeiner’s requests for comment about the latter’s hiring.