Students Vow Boycott of Cuny if Tenure is Withheld from Professor

A spokesman for four Lehman College students who met this morning with City University Chancellor Robert Kibbee over refusal of tenure to a Judaic studies teacher at Lehman said today the students told Kibbee they planned to organize a boycott of CUNY if the teacher was not granted tenure, with a one-week deadline for action to give tenure.

Sandi Goodman, a Lehman senior who is co-chairman of the Jewish Action Coalition (JAC), and one of the four students, reported on the meeting with the Chancellor. The Lehman College administration informed assistant professor Jane Gerber she would not be given tenure for the 1977-78 academic year, a decision which will terminate her position as a faculty member According to one account, the administration gave “budgetary problems” as the reason for the refusal of tenure.

Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams and the American Jewish Congress were among individuals and groups protesting the refusal. The JAC staged a sit-in of the office of Lehman president Leonard Lief Tuesday and through the night. The 15 students and rabbis yesterday ended the sit-in, described as completely peaceful, after Glenn Nygreen, dean of students, arranged the meeting with Kibbee. Ms. Goodman is co-chairperson of the JAC, an ad hoc coalition of members of Hillel, Yavneh, the Jewish Students Union and other campus groups.

Ms. Goodman said the four students told Kibbee that it was “tragic” that the students had been “driven to such drastic actions” as the sit-in. She added “we are now prepared to do whatever may be necessary to retain Dr. Gerber” if the Chancellor “failed to rectify the injustice.” She said Kibbee promised the four students that a decision would be made by the deadline next Friday.

DIFFERENT VERSION OFFERED

A somewhat different version of the meeting was given by a CUNY spokesman, who said that Kibbee had agreed to hear the students’ views and that he heard the two male and two women students out “attentively” but made no commitment. The spokesman said Kibbee had told him that the question of provision of tenure was not a matter he could handle “unilaterally” and that the Board of Higher Education, the agency which runs CUNY, would have to act and that Lief would have to be involved. Lief returned today from a vacation.

Ms. Goodman said the JAC had not investigated whether Kibbee had the power to arrange tenure but that the students feel the Chancellor “does have the power to influence Lief to change his mind.” She said that Kibbee told them he did have the authority to act on the issue.

Ms. Goodman said that the tenure denial had “absolutely nothing” to do with budgetary prob- lems and that the action was “flagrantly discriminatory” to the Jewish community which “had been disgraced and outraged” by the tenure denial.

The JAC said previously that while there are two tenured professors in the Lehman Judaica department, they are both linguists and that Gerber, a Ph.D. in Jewish and Islamic history, is the only faculty member teaching ancient, modern and American Jewish history, as well as a course on the Holocaust.

In recent years, the once heavily Jewish enrollment at CUNY colleges has dropped sharply. Ms. Goodman estimated that only 20 to 25 percent of the students now at Lehman are Jews. She said that, if the JAC does decide to launch a boycott of CUNY, it expected support from sympathetic non-Jews. About a quarter of the students in the Jewish studies unit are non-Jews.