University Accused Of Anti-Semitism - News about religious cults and sects

Minnesota's second-largest university, St. Cloud State University, is embroiled in a bitter controversy over allegations by Jewish professors that some gentile faculty members and administrators have engaged in systematic anti-Semitism and have retaliated against those who have complained about discrimination.

At least four members or former members of the faculty have filed or are about to file anti-Semitism complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A joint committee of the state Senate will hold a hearing on the issue in June, the university has hired outside experts to study anti-Semitism on campus, and the Midwest branch of the Anti-Defamation League is looking into the allegations.

The complaints allege offensive behavior by non-Jewish professors toward Jewish colleagues, ranging from ignorance of or insensitivity to Jewish culture and history to blatantly anti-Semitic remarks. The administration is also accused of failing to discipline those guilty of anti-Semitism and of retaliating against professors who complain about bias by recommending their "non-retention," which is tantamount to dismissal.

St. Cloud State has 15 Jewish faculty members out of 750 and about a dozen Jewish students in an enrollment of more than 15,000.

Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said the numbers are small because of the university's reputation among Jews of fostering a hostile environment. "I don't know any Minnesota Jews who would send their kid there. It's like sending a black kid to Ku Klux Klan University," he said.
Some outside experts who are studying anti-Semitism at St. Cloud State say it is the scarcity of Jews at the university and in the city of St. Cloud -- whose population is largely descended from German Catholic immigrants -- that has contributed to insensitivity toward Jews. St. Cloud is 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis, in an area where anti-Semitism was virulent during the German American Bund movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
The university has a history of discrimination claims.
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