New York, New York -- Leonard Jeffries, Jr., may have become an academic cause celebre, but he remains an enigma to many.
Officials at the City College of the City University of New York, where Mr. Jeffries is chairman of the black-studies department, are grappling with an explosion of outrage over controversial remarks he has made -- seen by many as anti-Semitic and anti-white.
Mr. Jeffries has contended that Jews and Italians in Hollywood conspired to denigrate blacks in the movies and that rich Jews played a key role in helping to finance the slave trade. He has also said the skin pigment melanin may give blacks physical advantages. And he has spoken about the value system of European-Americans, or “ice people,” versus the communal values of Africans, or “sun people.”
In the aftermath are conflicting images of the professor.
He is both dismissed as academe’s version of the Rev. Al Sharpton, the flamboyant black activist, and hailed as a hero of the movement to bring Afrocentric ideas into the curriculum. Although Mr. Jeffries would not agree to an in-depth interview for this story, a review of his career and numerous interviews with his supporters and detractors reveal an array of contradictions:
* He is attacked as anti-Semitic, but belonged to a predominantly Jewish fraternity in college, and even served as its president for a year.
* He blasts the American establishment as racist and white supremacist, yet he benefited substantially from that system during his education. He studied, for instance, in Switzerland on a fellowship from Rotary International and won fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation.
* While he calls himself “a consummate scholar,” his published scholarship has been practically non-existent since he completed his dissertation and earned his doctorate at Columbia University in 1972.
* He is denounced by some of his colleagues at City College as a “thug” who has surrounded himself with an entourage of bodyguards and true believers. A Harvard University student reporter has filed a complaint accusing Mr. Jeffries of threatening his life during an interview. But the professor’s supporters describe him as charismatic and kind and say he needs protection against the physical threats he has received.
Mr. Jeffries’s theories and statements have raised eyebrows before, but the current controversy began when he gave a speech in July at a black arts festival in Albany, N.Y. He focused on the continuing battle over the curriculum in New York State. But in the speech, besides commenting on the slave trade and on what he said was a Hollywood conspiracy to denigrate blacks, he referred to a colleague at City College as the “head Jew,” and told the audience, “These white folks, even good ones, you can’t trust.”
While politicians and other critics have called for his ouster as department chairman, Mr. Jeffries’s supporters contend he is the victim of conservatives who oppose a more multicultural curriculum.
Since then, Mr. Jeffries, whose $70,000 salary is at the top of the college’s seniority-based scale for full professors, has occupied center stage on the “Donahue” television show and the front page of the New York Post. News outlets from USA Today to The Jerusalem Post have written about him.
Mr. Jeffries says all of the hoopla has become too much. He declined in a telephone conversation to be interviewed, saying: “There’s been too much done to distort me by the media. People are even saying I don’t have a Ph.D. now.” But in the next few minutes, he disclosed that he was negotiating to talk to the CBS show “60 Minutes.”
Mr. Jeffries also has been taking his message on the road. He has lectured to students at other CUNY campuses and at Columbia University, among other places.
“The attack on me has been going on two and a half years now,” Mr. Jeffries said, ever since he worked as a consultant in 1989 to a state committee reviewing the curriculum for the New York schools. Mr. Jeffries has said that New York’s curriculum stripped Africa of its significance, and he called for the incorporation of Afrocentric themes. Critics attacked his approach as racial fundamentalism.
Born in Newark, N.J., Mr. Jeffries attended Lafayette College from 1955 to 1959, where he joined Pi Lambda Phi, a mostly Jewish fraternity, and was elected its president in his senior year. The president of the fraternity was traditionally called “Rex,” or king. “So I had to go through college as the Rex, the king of the Jews,” Mr. Jeffries said in his Albany speech.
Sidney F. Strauss, a Manhattan lawyer, was a friend of Mr. Jeffries then and belonged to the same fraternity. He was angered by Mr. Jeffries’s remarks and says members of the fraternity never made jokes about the Rex title meaning king of the Jews.
In 1963 Mr. Jeffries received his master’s in international affairs at Columbia, specializing in African studies. His frequent trips to Africa are said to have begun then. He received his Ph.D. in political science in 1972. His 280-page dissertation, on file at Columbia, is entitled “Sub-National Politics in the Ivory Coast Republic.”
By 1972 Mr. Jeffries was on the academic fast track. After student unrest at City College spawned four ethnic-studies departments, Mr. Jeffries was recruited from San Jose State University, where he was a full professor and chairman of a black-studies department, and given a similar tenured position.
Critics today question why a freshly minted Ph.D. recipient would be hired as a full professor.
“Should the students of 1991 have to suffer because of an egregious administrative error made in 1972?” asks David J. Garrow, a former professor of political science at City College who is now a full-time writer. He has written several books on Martin Luther King, Jr.
Officials at City College who remember those turbulent years say Mr. Jeffries’s appointment was intended to give the department stability and authority.
Robert E. Marshak, president emeritus of City College, who led the institution from 1970 to 1979, hired Mr. Jeffries. The former president says Mr. Jeffries came highly recommended from Columbia. “He at that time exuded, and still does, a considerable amount of intelligence and spirit,” Mr. Marshak says. “And he seemed like a candidate for chairman who could pull the department together.”
He adds: “I did not detect then that he was willing to appeal to dubious hypotheses like melanin and the other nonsense he espouses.”
For several years now, Mr. Jeffries has been associated with controversial ideas -- not of his own devising -- such as those about “ice people” and “sun people.” In his Albany speech, he briefly mentioned that idea, but made lengthier remarks about a Hollywood conspiracy to denigrate blacks and about wealthy Jews’ financing the slave trade. Mr. Jeffries defends those notions as well-documented, but other professors at City College and elsewhere accuse him of distortions and half-truths.
Critics of Mr. Jeffries say he has created a black-studies department in his own image -- that is, a polemical one.
Others say that the department has some talented scholars but that both they and the department have been lost in the hubbub. James L. de Jongh, chairman of the Faculty Senate at City College, says the department has been “very solidly identified” with Mr. Jeffries. “To some degree the department has been isolated,” he adds. “The events of this year certainly have done that.”
Within the department, many students and professors decline to comment about Mr. Jeffries. One such professor is Wilfred Cartey, who has written several books including a recent literary analysis of Caribbean novelists. “The department, which I think is one of the strongest in the country, doesn’t need the exposure it’s getting,” says Mr. Cartey, likening the press to a “white-sheeted mob.”
In the field of black studies, however, City College is not viewed as having one of the nation’s top departments, says Molefi K. Asante, chairman of the black-studies department at Temple University. Mr. Asante says the department appears to have declined in recent years, partly because of budget cuts. He calls Mr. Jeffries a “forceful orator,” but says it’s no secret he hasn’t written any books.
Mr. Jeffries’s resume, a copy of which he provided to The Chronicle, lists seven publications, including a thesis he did as an undergraduate, his master’s thesis, his dissertation, and four other titles. The resume does not provide information on where any of the items were published or indicate if they were books or articles.
Mr. Asante defends Mr. Jeffries as probably the longest-serving chair of a black-studies department in the nation. “He came into African-American studies at a time when the demands on the director of such a program were enormous, particularly having to deal with institutional barriers,” he says.
The department now has nine full-time faculty members and has lost four full-time posts since 1985. Other social-science departments have also lost positions because of budget constraints. In the spring of 1991, 1,063 took black-studies courses.
Students on the campus give Mr. Jeffries’s classes mixed reviews. One female student, who asked that her name not be used, says she took a course taught by Mr. Jeffries about the Caribbean. “It was always interesting,” she says. “I didn’t agree with a lot he said.” What bothered the senior most was a class session where he pointed out her light skin coloring and curly hair as examples of the mixing of the races in the Caribbean. She is Puerto Rican. “I felt uncomfortable being singled out,” she says.
As it stands now, CUNY trustees have reappointed Mr. Jeffries as department chairman for a temporary term, and will decide next summer whether he will continue as chairman.
Bernard W. Harleston, president of the college, will evaluate Mr. Jeffries’s effectiveness as chairman. He calls this “a defining moment” for the department.
