Source: The Associated Press | Saturday, February 23, 2002

State University of New York professors have called for Candace de Russy to be removed from the SUNY Board of Trustees because of her criticism of black studies programs.

The delegate assembly of professors in the United University Professions union recently voted to seek the conservative trustee’s removal, a union spokesman said Friday.

“She has the right to say anything, no matter how stupid, as an individual, but she is a member of the Board of Trustees of SUNY, so she takes on institutional responsibilities,” said William Scheuerman, president of the professors’ union.

“But why does she have to embarrass the university? And the way to fix that is to get her off the board,” the union president said.

De Russy of Bronxville said Friday that the union was trying to deny free speech of anyone who doesn’t pass its “political litmus test.”

The SUNY trustee said she had no plans to leave the SUNY board. She also said black studies programs should be folded into a school’s history department or some other department and not allowed to continue as separate entities.

No stranger to controversy, de Russy drew national attention in 1997 when she led an attack on a SUNY New Paltz conference on women’s sexuality called “Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women’s Sexual Freedom.” She and other critics described the conference as a how-to recruiting session for homosexuals, featuring simulated sex acts and sex toys.

The professors’ union vote came in the wake of a Feb. 4 article in Newsday dealing with black studies programs. De Russy was quoted as saying: “What happened is they became therapeutic in nature, and the goal became consciousness raising as opposed to conveying solid scholarship.”

On Friday, de Russy told The Associated Press that many black studies programs as well as women’s studies and other humanities curriculums developed since the 1960s began with solid, rigorous academics, but have “degenerated into advocacy and activism.”

She called for an examination of the academic rigor and balance of views of all programs, including traditional disciplines.

“Many undergraduate programs, whether they are fully cognizant of it … came to be dominated by leftist academics steeped in the anti-western ideology of cultural Marxism,” she said Friday. “It’s main theme has been that all cultures are equally good and humane except American and western cultures, which are oppressive and violent and which must be relentlessly criticized.”

She said black studies programs shouldn’t “neglect and negate the American and the West’s very extraordinary and unique cultural legacy” that includes individual liberty, tolerance, democracy and social and political equality.

“One should have no objection to any field of inquiry,” she said, “but one should object to a field of inquiry that defines itself by answers and not by questions and excludes important points of view.”

Specifically, she said the black studies programs at SUNY Old Westbury and Stony Brook were lax.

William McAdoo, chairman of SUNY Stony Brook’s Africana studies department, objected to the de Russy comments as reported earlier in Newsday.

“To say that most black studies programs are un-American smacks of McCarthyism, smacks of the whole fascist kinds of repression that took place in the 1950s in the U.S.,” McAdoo told Newsday.

“Scholarship or departments that can’t tolerate criticism have departed from the standards of academic debate and discourse,” de Russy told the AP. “I was trying to enter into a discussion.”

SUNY spokesman David Henahan said calls for de Russy’s resignation are an overreaction. He defended the SUNY programs, but refused to comment on what de Russy had said or on her apparent concerns.

A spokesman for Gov. George Pataki, who appointed de Russy to the SUNY board in 1995, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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