As reported earlier this week, University of Minnesota Interim President Jeffrey Ettinger announced on Monday, June 10, that he had paused the search for the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies director in the face of public outrage, “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps” after “members of the University community [came] forward to express their interest in providing perspective on the hiring.”
Ettinger took this extraordinary measure after internal and external stakeholders expressed dismay over Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Ann Waltner having offered the directorship to Raz Segal, a professor at Stockton University who argues that the Holocaust is not unique compared to other genocides. Segal also has asserted in an essay entitled “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” that, by fighting back after the October 7 attacks, Israel was guilty of committing genocide against Gazans.
Most recently, this controversy spurred a bipartisan, bicameral group of 67 state legislators to write a letter to Ettinger and the Board of Regents with concerns of a broader environment of anti-Israel sentiment and actions being fostered on campus. The letter’s lead authors are Representative Marion Rarick, a Republican representing the Buffalo area northwest of the Twin Cities, and Senator Ron Latz, a Democrat representing a western suburban area that includes St. Louis Park.
In the letter, the legislators wrote:
It is with mixed feelings that we write to you today regarding the potential hiring of professor Raz Segal to be the next director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the U of M. While we are elated that President Ettinger has put a pause on the selection of the Director and will be deciding the next steps, we are extremely concerned that it took an outcry from the Jewish community to bring about this action. A better course of action to be taken in the future for this position and others like it with such external impact in the community would be to include Jewish community leaders, Jewish professors, staff, and students of the U of M in all matters of this magnitude. This is not a time to brush aside their voices, to ignore their concerns or to give in to the loud minority who wish them to be silent.
An equal concern, if not a greater one, is that this is not an isolated incident. There have been a number of concerning actions and events as of late including: the inflammatory posting on the CLA website housed within the U of M’s website to which 26 members of the House expressed our strong objections – but the posting remains to this day; the anti-Israel encampments which led to the administration negotiating with the activists and giving them a platform to demand the University follow BDS in its investment decisions; the Cultural Critique journal editors explicitly rejecting a submission by an author because of his affiliation with an Israeli academic institution; and just over the weekend, the vandalism of Hillel.
The University of Minnesota is a public, land grant institution and as such has the highest responsibility to all your students, staff, and faculty to the communities that surround your campuses, and to the citizens of Minnesota whose tax dollars fund your great institution. To that end, we urge you to consult with Jewish community leaders and Jewish members of your university in all matters regarding Jewish life on your campuses.
Meanwhile, 200 left-wing college professors from the University of Minnesota and elsewhere have signed a letter to Ettinger condemning him for pausing the hiring process. The letter complains that the “administration has consistently responded favorably to pro-Israel and Zionist demands” and claims—without providing evidence or examples—that the university has punished or ignored “pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide advocates.”
In response to this, Minnesota’s most prominent conservative think tank, Center of the American Experiment, sent an email to the organization’s thousands of supporters saying, “Raz Segal is the wrong person at the wrong time to head up Minnesota’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies department. President Ettinger made the right decision to pause the hiring process and now a new search must be initiated.”
Providing a link for supporters to sign a petition to Ettinger, Center of the American Experiment continued, “Hundreds of [our] supporters have already sent a message to university leadership. We need to drown out the voices of liberal college professors with [those of] Minnesotans who pay the bills. This is our university, and it should reflect our values.”
