This compelling volume focuses on the story of Andrew Pessin, a tenured philosophy professor at Connecticut College, who was accused by students and faculty of having “directly condoned the extermination of a people” based on a deliberate misreading of his 2015 Facebook post on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Salem on the Thames captures the events as they unfolded and discusses topics such as Western sentiments concerning Israeli-Palestinian relations, academics and free speech, antisemitism and diversity on the college campus, and social media and politics. The Pessin affair offers us a case study in a tendency towards “public shaming” reminiscent of the Salem witch trials that deeply compromises the integrity of academia.
İçerik tablosu
Table of Contents
Preface
Richard Landes
Introduction
Asaf Romirowsky
Andrew Pessin’s Facebook Post during Operation Protective Edge
Condensed Timeline
Part I: When Criticizing Hamas Became a Campus Hate Crime
Richard Landes
1. The Post: On Truth and Metaphor
2. The Shameful Dishonesty of It All: An Annotated Chronology from the Perspective of the Victim
3. The People: Mc Carthyism, New London Style
Part II: Studies in Pessinology
4. Connecticut College Acts Out a Staged Emergency
Ashley Thorne
5. “I Was Rude, You Were Evil”: Reflections on Academia, Liberalism, and the Betrayal of Andrew Pessin
John Gordon
6. The Pessin Case: The Response of Jewish Colleagues
Fred Baumann
Part III: Reflections: Salem on the Thames – Stampeding a Herd of Cats
Richard Landes
7. What Connecticut College’s Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us
8. Reflections on Academia and Freedom: The Case of Connecticut College, Spring 2015
9. Pessin, Ironic Prophet: The Liberal Emperor’s New Clothes of Humanitarian Racism
Part IV: Appendix – Documents
Pessin Affair: Dramatis Personae
Online Petition Posted March 18, 2015
Bibliography
Yazar hakkında
Richard Landes trained as a medieval historian. He specializes in messianic and apocalyptic movements, as well as shame-honor cultures and the impact of literacy on their dynamics. He has recently completed a history of the opening years of the twenty-first century, as a turning point in relations between two millennial movements: global Jihad and post-modern progressivism.