Who Said This Is a Purely Domestic Jewish “Word Salad” Dispute Underlain by Neo-Con Anti-Woke Politics? - Part 2

What is most especially rankling, unspeakably annoying and deeply irritating about the Himelfarb-Slabodsky Hofstra University Controversy or Legal Tussle is the fact that the plaintiff, Professor Santiago Slabodsky, would also have the temerity or the chutzpah to accuse the respondent, namely, Professor Ricahrd Himelfarb, of being gratuitously vindictive and “retaliatory” or vengeful and retributive, merely because the latter, whom the plaintiff has been fiercely fighting to have his tenure revoked and his career summarily terminated, since November last year, that is, 2025, has dared to logically elect to equally fight back and smashingly fight off this academically and professionally flagrant attempt to irrationally end his career on grounds of daring to unreservedly express his inalienable right to unfettered free speech, as unarguably granted him by the Federal Constitution of the United States of America, in the morally all-too-righteous defense of the curricular integrity and the high and the enviable academic and pedagogical standards of one of the most respectable private tertiary academies in New York State and, to be certain, the entire Sovereign Democratic Republic of the United States of America (See “Hofstra Professor Facing Possible Termination Over Discrimination Claim for Saying ‘Word Salad’” New York Post 8/22/26).

As of this writing and discursive disquisition, or conversation, if the Dear Read would, Professor Himelfarb was reported by the media to have successfully solicited the assistance and the services of the nationally reputed Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the free-speech advocacy organization and the equally respectable Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), both of which have provided Professor Himelfarb with a “Rights Lawyer.” Obviously, the plaintiff appears to have, finally, healthily and sanely arrived at the sobering conclusion that he has absolutely no reasonable course or legal legs to stand on, thus his downright absurd and hollow accusation of the respondent of the charge of vindictiveness.

Maybe Professor Slobodsky, the so-called Robert and Florence Kaufman Endowed Chair Holder in Jewish Studies, missed his high school physics classes, at least on the days that his teachers discussed the existentially critical and the indispensable subject of Thermodynamics - I suppose that was what it was called in those days and presently as well - so one or two charitable colleagues of his, either in his own Jewish Studies Program/Department, or on the Hofstra University Campus at large, could kindly reach out to Professor Slobodsky with a basic brush-up elucidation vis-a-vis the very elementary concept pertaining to “The Principles of Action and Reaction.”

Yours Truly is also quite certain that even the legendary and the immortalized non-college-educated Reggae Maestro, Mr. Robert Nesta Marley, better known globally as Bob Marley, could have taught Professor “Slobodan” Slobodsky a thing or two with a couple of his classic compositions. It is also risibly obvious that the Argentine-born Chairman of the Jewish Studies Program/Department at Hofstra University plunged himself almost gratuitously into a longstanding and patently pedestrian academic battle whose depths appear to be way out of his diving capacity; a punch way off and above his weight, as My Dear Good Jewish Brother, Richard David Goodman - yes, that is his surname, Dear Reader - would have so deftly and poignantly put it. In other words, Professor “Slobodan” Slobodsky appears to have bitten far too much than he could comfortably “masticate,” as we Uppity Rising-Star Niggers used to say at the old alma mater of St. Peter’s Secondary School - PERSCO - in Ghana’s Eastern Region.

It is also interesting and significant to promptly add to the preceding, the fact that it appears that the plaintiff had strategically decided to pick on Professor Himelfarb by way of a “deterrent scapegoat,” for are also informed by media reports that the respondent was one of at least five other colleagues who expressed strong misgivings about the curricular competence of the two course proposals (See part one of this article) that Professor Slobodsky had submitted to the College-Wide Curriculum Committee at Hofstra University for approval and implementation. Consequently, when Professor Himelfarb allegedly used the critical phraseology of “Word Salad,” to abbreviately or briefly sum up the extremely poorly thought-out course proposals that the plaintiff was so facilely attempting to insolently pass off to his colleagues in the dubious guise of competently composed viable ready-to-run course offerings, the faculty member of Hofstra’s Political Science Department was actually speaking on behalf of a significant moiety of the membership of the college-wide curriculum committee, if not the entire membership of the committee as a whole.

Now, the sole reason for Professor “Slobodan” Slobodsky’s steely determination to have his colleague “No-Name” Professor Richard Himelfarb summarily dismissed from Hofstra is much too obvious to ignore; and it is simply the fact that one does not so cavalierly and irreligiously, to speak pretty much less about downright blasphemously, presume to address The Head Jew at Hofstra - as City College’s Professor Leonard Jeffries, Elder Uncle of US Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, would have said without missing a breath or a heartbeat - in such insufferably obscene language. This was precisely what made Professor Himelfarb inescapably deserving of an Academic Crucifixion In-Toto, and the rest of his colleagues “The Graciously Saved.”

We are also thinking about the fact that an evidently “Zionist” Professor Slobodsky, although from the news article being presently discussed, both men appear to be fellow truckers in the mythological ideology and trade of “Zionism,” it is not very clear to this author from the New York Post’s news story referenced above, however, might have envisaged his main academic adversary as a “Palestinian Punching Bag” on Hofstra’s Gaza Strip, thus the plaintiff’s apparent shock and/or surprise that Professor Himelfarb would dare to so fiercely emerge fighting tooth-and-nail, as it were, for both his professional integrity and his livelihood.

In all this, however, my one great concern and worry has to do with the obviously chilling effect that the apparently poor handling of Professor Slobodsky’s complaint by the Hofstra University Administrators could have on the academic climate on campus, especially where salutary and unfettered free speech is concerned, which is unarguably indispensable for upholding high academic standards and the inviolable integrity of the name, image and the reputation of this quite respectable and formidable citadel of “higher learning,” as it were, in Nassau County, Long Island, New York.

In particular, the traumatic impact that this nightmarish siege on the psychological integrity and the professional security of Professor Himelfarb is apt to be incalculable. But, of course, the apparently knee-jerk sloppy handling of this most sensitive matter by Dr. Susan Poser, is also quite understandable, in view of the scandalously deleterious impact that such “Tarbaby Complaints” of racism and, especially, antisemitism have had on the campuses of other flagship or major universities and tertiary academies a la Trumpian MAGACRACY, such as Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as even The Almighty Harvard.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]