Rachel, meet Tony: Megan Dodds in the 2006 (not-the-New-York-Theatre-Workshop) production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times.

UPDATE (10 May): Brooklyn College’s Prof. Kristofer Petersen-Overton reaches similar conclusions in this article today for the Guardian.

It is the policy and purpose of the Board of Trustees to preserve, enhance, and improve the University as an institution of the highest quality and standards, with a faculty and administration charged to fulfill both the general and specific missions of the University: to educate and serve the people of New York City, to constitute an urban-oriented institution of higher education, and to engage persistently in the search for knowledge and truth. … It is the resolve of the Board of Trustees that all officers and administrators of the Board of Trustees be directed, exhorted, and admonished that the efforts aimed at the survival and preservation of the University and of its separate identity and mission, and of an appropriate and essential budget from both the State and the City sufficient to meet the vital needs of all present elements of the University shall be the first priority of all such officers and administrators.
From the City University of New York Manual of General Policy
Article II: Board of Trustees
Policy 2.1: Autonomy and Jurisdiction of the University

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx

Early this evening in a near-unanimous vote, the executive committee of the CUNY Board of Trustees reversed the earlier decision by the board to table discussion of an honorary degree this year to playwright Tony Kushner, reinstating the John Jay College’s recommendation that such a degree be granted to the dramatist. Winnie Hu reports the story at The New York Times.

This is a heartening decision (though the big story here might be in evolutionary science, board chair Benno Schmidt managing to grow a backbone in a miraculous five days’ time). It would be nice at this point to say job well done, sweep up the bunting and balloons and get back to work. It is this last imprecation, though, that sticks in the craw, because work and expression that undermines the limits of any status quo political, cultural or aesthetic assumptions and preconceptions will continue to be done — and will continue to meet with hostility, misrepresentation and silence.

The Israel/Palestine controversy has long been a third-rail issue in U.S. and especially New York politics: to indulge in an additional metaphor, it is the rabid dog at which it is unwise to shake a stick. But the CUNY/Kushner debacle is not about that, it is not about trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s or Kushner’s specific opinions on this or any other particular geopolitical issue. If this is not to become a referendum on the correctness of Kushner’s political views, however repugnant they might be to some, it should not become a referendum on Wiesenfeld’s, however repugnant they might be to others.

This is about the extent to which the boards and major donors of academic institutions feel that they have become, through their positions and financial contributions, entitled to interfere with the academic dynamics and consensus decisions of the institutions, faculties and students they claim to defend and represent.

In this particular case, the issue entered the spotlight for a number of rather peripheral reasons — the celebrity and stature of Tony Kushner; the volatility of the political questions debated; the size of the university, as well as its status as a public and not a private academic institution; and of course the publicity that attaches as a result to these first three characteristics. But none of this should serve to obfuscate the issues of academic freedom that this represents for all universities and colleges, not only on the Israel/Palestine question but on other questions of political, cultural — and artistic importance. The expression of a duly-constituted committee of academics that a public figure is due the award of an honorary degree from the institution they represent is just as much an academic expression as anything said in a lecture hall, whatever Stanley Fish might believe, and the facile dismissal of this expression by those who demonstrate an ignorance or misunderstanding of that public figure’s work is an encroachment on that expression. (And, lest we forget the parlous state of American education generally, it was a grim coincidence that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed laying off 5% of the city’s public school teachers to close a budget gap the same week; as the father of two young daughters who looks forward to their attending public schools, I am rankled by this as well.)

Although this has nothing to do with Kushner or his work per se — to say that it does is to distract attention from that central concern — he is no stranger to similar controversy in the artistic sphere. In 2006 (a century ago in Internet time), the non-profit New York Theatre Workshop announced that it would produce the U.S. premiere of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a controversial play about a young woman who died in the Israel/Palestine conflict; the NYTW then announced that it was “postponing” the production (in much the same way that Kushner’s CUNY nomination was “tabled” in the original trustee meeting last Monday), for reasons which still remain far from clear but which appeared to be the result of political maneuvering. In the wake of the debacle, Kushner played an admittedly small and peripheral role in the dialogue, but he did tell The Nation‘s Philip Weiss (instead of rehearsing the details of this controversy, I point to Weiss’ comprehensively reported article from the 16 March 2006 issue of The Nation, which is online here):

… that he was quiet [about the NYTW situation] because of his exhaustion over similar arguments surrounding the film Munich, on which he was a screenwriter, and because he kept hoping the decision would be made right. He said [New York Theatre Workshop artistic director Jim] Nicola is a great figure in American theater: “His is one of the one or two most important theaters in this area — politically engaged, unapologetic, unafraid and formally experimental.” Never having gotten a clear answer about why Nicola put off the play, Kushner ascribes it to panic: Nicola didn’t know what he was getting into, and only later became aware of how much opposition there was to Corrie, how much confusion the right has created around the facts. Nicola felt he was taking on “a really big, scary brawl and not a play.” Still, Kushner said, the theater’s decision created a “ghastly” situation. “Censoring a play because it addresses Palestinian-Israeli issues is not in any way right,” he said.

As, indeed, denying an academic honor to a figure because he does the same is not in any way right either. And it is only relevant to note the differences between the two events: CUNY is a large public academic institution, NYTW is a moderately-sized non-profit off-Broadway theatre; CUNY is an educational institution, NYTW an artistic one; Kushner is an individual, My Name Is Rachel Corrie a play — and CUNY’s executive committee reversed the original decision of the trustees, while NYTW did not reverse theirs.

The central possible similarity arises from another passage from the Nation article on My Name Is Rachel Corrie:

Questions about pressure from Jewish leaders morph quickly into questions about funding. Ellen Stewart, the legendary director of the theatrical group La MaMa E.T.C., which is across East 4th Street from the Workshop, speculates that the trouble began with its “very affluent” board. Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, echoes her. “Do an investigation, follow the money.” I called six board members and got no response. (About a third appear to be Jewish, as am I.) This is of course a charged issue. The writer Alisa Solomon, who was appalled by the postponement, nonetheless warns, “There’s something a little too familiar about the image of Jews pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.” … I doubt we will find out whether the Workshop’s decision was “internally generated,” as Kushner contends, or more orchestrated, as I suspect. What the episode has demonstrated is a climate of fear. Not of physical harm, but of loss of opportunities. …

Weiss’ fear of external influence aside, no members of any religious or social group need to be imagined pulling any kind of strings to see the dangers that even an “internally generated” decision — like that of the CUNY trustees — may mean to the chilling of expression.

Many members of boards of both artistic and academic institutions are significant donors to those institutions as well — presence on these boards is often a reward for those significant donations; and often enough, the corporate affiliations of these members are duly attached to their names in the publicity material for those organizations. Through the presence of these individuals and their money in the institutional coffers, corporate America is represented — and, at arm’s length, is dictating expression through those boards. In the not too distant past, these boards were entrusted with the defense and financial oversight of the institution and the academic or aesthetic ideals that institution represented, the debate it sponsored or the work it produced; the board’s honor and esteem inhered in that defense and in nothing else; they were not buying influence in the operations of those institutions. That, it appears, is changing, and it is good to be reminded of abolitionist Wendell Phillips admonition that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as appropriate to discussions of what is permitted in artistic and academic cultures as well as a wider democratic culture.

In 2006 Weiss quoted me in the same article. “This is far too important an issue for everyone to paper it over again, with everyone shaking hands for a New York Times photographer. It’s an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce,” I said then. I clearly did not go far enough. The CUNY/Kushner fiasco is also an extraordinarily rare picture of the way that a New York institution makes its decisions about what to honor or approve. Fine to see the Kushner award reinstated, of course — but if you’re not Tony Kushner, or you’re writing on an issue just as controversial and vital in any respect as the Israeli/Palestine question, or you’re coping with the invisible, arbitrary influence of a non-profit theatre’s board of directors and the administrative and artistic staff who are beholden to and afraid of that board, the situation remains just as dire.

Late today, The New York Times posted an article by Winnie Hu, “Reconsidering, CUNY Is Likely to Honor Kushner,” which reports on the release of a statement on the Kushner matter by Board of Trustees chair Benno Schmidt. In short, Schmidt has scheduled an executive committee session for this coming Monday, though the letter itself suggests that Schmidt intends to somehow reverse the Board of Trustees decision rescinding the award to Kushner earlier this week. He says in the statement that the trustees “made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy” in making that decision and in no uncertain terms acknowledges the threat to academic freedom this decision represented:

Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name. … [It[ is not right for the board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here. The proposed honorary degree for Mr. Kushner would recognize him for his extraordinary talent and contribution to the American theater. Like other honorary degrees, it is not intended to reflect approval or disapproval for political views not relevant to the field for which the recipient is being honored.

More next week.

UPDATE: Although surprisingly few figures from the theatre world have commented publicly on this story (as vociferous as they often are) apart from theatre critics Ben Brantley, Michael Billington and Aleks Sierz, the literary world is a different matter. Below, a few purported letters to Benno Schmidt: The first from novelist Michael Cunningham, who wishes to return his honorary degree to CUNY, and the second from literary critic Harold Bloom, who also seeks to see his old friend Benno again “in this life.” These first appeared on the Facebook page I linked to in today’s original post.

Dear Dr. Schmidt:

Like many others, I was shocked and dismayed to hear about the treatment Tony Kushner received at the hands of the CUNY Board of Trustees on May 2.  Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld’s opposition to Kushner’s honorary degree was not only malicious and inappropriate, it was based partly on untruths and partly on phrases taken out of context.  The fact that a majority of the board members – the fact that any board members at all – supported Weisenfeld turned an unfortunate incident into a shameful one.

An academic institution as generous and venerable as CUNY should not countenance the public humiliation of any artist, let alone one of Kushner’s caliber and courage.  Kushner has done more than most of us to combine high art – many of us consider it great art –with profound and vital socio-political sentiments.  Kushner’s plays have done what so few of us have managed in our own work:  it has helped raise public consciousness, without ever descending into agitprop or screed.  To deny him an honorary degree because certain members of the board disagree with some of his political views is a chilling indictment of the freedom of expression CUNY has always championed.

I was on the faculty at Brooklyn College for six years, and have always felt honored to be a member of a great institution.  I received an honorary doctorate in 2009, of which I have been enormously proud.  I feel, however, that in the light of the incident on May 2, I have no choice but to return it.  I do so with real regrets.

It is a sad day indeed.

Sincerely,
Michael Cunningham

***

Dear Benno:

It is ironic that we get in touch again about the Kushner outrage, because I still hope to see you in this life. As an American Jewish literary critic, and as an old friend of Tony Kushner, I find the CUNY action absurd. Tony is a passionate Jew, who gratifies me by saying I am his rabbi. As his literary rabbi, I affirm the magnificence of his dramatic achievement. As your old friend, I urge you to help undo this misbegotten matter.

With ward regards to both my former students, your beautiful daughters,
Harold Bloom

***

Finally, there’s this, from Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and several other books; she’ll also be “sainted” by Rev. Bill Talen at this Sunday’s Mother’s Day service of the Church of Earthalujah at Theatre 80 in the East Village:

Dear Trustees of CUNY,

In 2004 I was proud to receive an honorary degree from John Jay College in recognition, as I recall, for my work exposing poverty and promoting social justice. At the time, it did not occur to me to question John Jay’s qualifications for awarding such an honor. But today, having read of the Trustees’ vote to deny a similar honorary degree to playwright and activist Tony Kushner– as well as Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s comment in the New York Times suggesting that Palestinians “are not human”—I do have to question both your qualifications and the legitimacy of the honorary degree I was given.

Hence my decision to renounce my own honorary degree, which I will return to you if I can find it. Please expunge me from your record of past honorees.

Sincerely,
Barbara Ehrenreich

Overnight the New York Times jumped the CUNY/Tony Kushner story from the arts to the news section. This morning Sharon Otterman’s story, which appeared on page A23 of the New York edition, brings us up-to-date on recent developments here, and Prof. Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University, whose letter to CUNY Board of Trustees chair Benno Schmidt I highlighted yesterday, has written this essay, explaining her decision to return her own CUNY honorary degree in the wake of the controversy, for the Inside Higher Ed Web site. And just recently, critic Michael Billington compares Kushner’s controversial reputation with that of Harold Pinter in the Guardian, concluding:

I still find the withdrawal of Kushner’s proposed degree deeply depressing. It seems to be based on a totally inaccurate representation of Kushner’s actual views. It denies the fact that a playwright is a citizen as well as an artist and has a perfect right to express an opinion on public issues. Above all, it undermines the idea that, in a nation such as the USA, academia is the last bastion of intellectual freedom. In the end, it simply makes CUNY look puny.

CUNY itself seems to be half-heartedly and unconvincingly circling the wagons around the trustees’ action earlier this week. A statement issued yesterday by the Board of Trustees office notes that the decision to rescind the offer of an honorary degree to the playwright “should not be interpreted as reflecting on Mr. Kushner’s accomplishments”; a rather unhelpful and irrelevant statement, since nobody on either side of the debate is arguing that it was the quality of his accomplishments that led to the decision. In an earlier story by Patrick Healy, Jay Hershenson, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the trustees, said, “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority” — a description of the problem but hardly a ringing, convincing defense of the board. (Healy also reported that, “Responding to Mr. Kushner’s charge of slander, Mr. Hershenson repeated his comment,” a stonewalling which didn’t help much either.) The Times has been busy following up this story; there’s an interview by Jim Dwyer with trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld here. And finally, Ben Brantley reviewed Kushner’s new play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures today here.

Mr. Kushner must be very tired. Because it is uncertain that Kushner would now accept an honorary degree from CUNY, at least this year, the question of the board reversing its earlier decision has become somewhat … well, somewhat academic, appropriately. He has asked for an apology, and whether he should accept that as well is entirely up to him. For more news on the issue, there’s a continuously updated Facebook page here, as well as this blog dedicated to the “Kushner Crisis” at the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate.

Today’s Friday video will be unavoidably cancelled due to a few glitches at the YouTube server. It will return next week.

Tony Kushner.

FURTHER UPDATE: I continue my coverage, such as it is, in my follow-up 6 May post here.

UPDATE: At least one former CUNY honorary degree recipient has alerted Dr. Benno Schmidt, the chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees, that she would like to return the award given to her in 2008 because of the denial of an honorary doctorate to Kushner. You can read Prof. Ellen Schrecker’s eloquent letter to Dr. Schmidt here. And this afternoon, Ben Brantley in The New York Times and the Guardian picked up the story, now an international affair — and, apparently, CUNY at this time remains unresponsive to reporters’ requests for additional comment.

The last-minute revocation of the award of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner earlier this week at a meeting of the CUNY Board of Trustees, in a campaign led by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, should first be noted for what it is not (see Patrick Healy’s story in today’s New York Times for details). It is not a case of censorship or suppression; although Kushner would presumably have attended the graduation ceremony at which it would have been awarded, it is by no means certain that he would speak there. It is not a litmus test for the correct view of Israeli-Palestinian relations, or the influence of a specifically pro-Israel bent in some New York institutions (though many will think that it is, missing the forest for the trees). Nor is it an attempt to render Kushner, his work and opinions invisible; Kushner in all likelihood has enough honorary degrees to line a fireplace mantel or three,  and one from CUNY might fill an odd hole there. Kushner’s new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, is now in previews at the Public Theater.

It is, however, indicative of the degree to which wealthy individuals placed in positions of power in higher learning are able to direct the course of an educational institution’s internal academic affairs. Most boards of trustees of today’s colleges and universities are made up of major donors (Wiesenfeld himself is a Principal and Financial Advisor of Bernstein Investment Research & Management and has served in several capacities in New York state and city governments), and CUNY’s is no exception. This does not, however, necessarily lead to the conclusion that these trustees can then use the university as a personal megaphone for the expression of their own ideological and political standpoints. This expression not only takes place in meeting rooms, but across the campus as well. According to this article by Doug Chandler in The Jewish Week (which broke the story yesterday),  Wiesenfeld has also used his influence to fire a Brooklyn College adjunct professor who held anti-Israel views (the decision was later rescinded), and this 2007 article by “ACarroll” in the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate details Wiesenfeld’s ideological background and the means by which he has tried to influence academic issues at the school.

Mr. Wiesenfeld, as a trustee, is entitled to his opinions. However, he is not entitled to mutilate the concept of academic freedom, especially in an institution administered by a state government, to suit his own ideological purposes. Nor is he entitled to use his position as a soapbox, and university meetings as a megaphone, from which to issue misleading and outright inaccurate characterizations of any individual’s political beliefs. The only ideology that should inhere in the governing bodies of public educational institutions is a commitment to absolute freedom of academic and cultural discourse within the university.

Tony Kushner has responded to Mr. Wiesenfeld’s charges here, He is especially saddened to note that Mr. Wiesenfeld was able to easily sway other members of the board in his condemnation of the decision to offer him an honorary degree:

But far more dismaying than Mr. Weisenfeld’s diatribe is the silence of the other eleven board members. Did any of you feel that your responsibilities as trustees of an august institution of higher learning included even briefly discussing the appropriateness of Mr. Weisenfeld’s using a public board meeting as a platform for deriding the political opinions of someone with whom he disagrees? Did none of you feel any responsibility towards me, whose name was before you, and hence available as a target for Mr. Weisenfeld’s slander, entirely because I’d been nominated for an honor by the faculty and administration of one of your colleges?

I can’t adequately describe my dismay at the fact that none of you felt stirred enough by ordinary fairness to demand of one of your members that, if he was going to mount a vicious attack, he ought to adhere to standards higher than those of internet gossip. Mr. Weisenfeld declared to you that, rather than turn to “pro-Israel” websites, he’d gleaned his insights into my politics from the website of Norman Finkelstein. I find it appalling that he failed to consider a third option: familiarizing himself with any of the work I’ve done, my plays, screenplays, essays and speeches, for which, I assume, the faculty and administration of John Jay nominated me for an honor.

It must remain a matter of speculation why the other trustees allowed Weisenfeld to direct the approval process as he did. Is he a significant enough donor to the CUNY coffers that his departure would cripple the university’s operations? Was this simply a matter of the clan of the rich and powerful sticking together for one of their own? Is the board (and this is least likely, except to a conspiracy theorist) actually an extremist political cabal in the service of the state of Israel? And finally, given Wiesenfeld’s clear abuse of his position as a CUNY trustee over the past five years at least, why has he not been censured or removed from the board? His credentials seem no more nor less impressive than any other trustee on the CUNY board; does his presence, given his controversial and clearly politically-driven activities, continue to lend the CUNY Board of Trustees a shimmer and lustre it wouldn’t have otherwise?

As the vaunted public/private partnerships in institutions such as higher education continue to grow, this is neither the first nor the last such controversy that we shall see. It is unlikely that this decision will be reversed, since the trustees are the highest governing body of the university, and however amusing it is to think that the board will censure itself, there is no higher appeal. Perhaps the solution is to strip the board of its advise-and-consent function in terms of the academic and intellectual life of the university, both in the classroom and during graduation ceremonies. But then the trustees would have only one ideal to ensure: that of academic freedom and the right to full and complete expression of ideas, any ideas, on its campus. Nobody says that this isn’t dangerous to a variety of cultural, political and personal certainties. But education often is — and should continue to be.

Thanks to Garrett Eisler at The Playgoer for alerting me to this story.