Identity of Speakers
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Samuel Abrams
Faculty/Staff
OtherSamuel Abrams is a professor of political science at Sarah Lawrence College.
Resources
Additional Information
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Incident Nature:
Other
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Incident Political Orientation:
Right-of-spectrum -
Incident Responses:
Rally or Protests
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Incident Status:
No litigation
- No protest Occured
- Did not involve Speech Codes
Summary
Samuel Abrams is a professor of political science at Sarah Lawrence College. In October, 2018, Abrams wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized student affairs administrators at Sarah Lawrence for organizing “many overtly progressive events…without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative.” Soon after, his office door was vandalized. Cristle Collins Judd, Sarah Lawrence’s president, released a statement affirming academic freedom and Abrams’s “every right” to publish and pursue his work.
In March 2019, a student group called the Diaspora Coalition occupied a campus building and published a list of demands in the student newspaper. These demands included that “Abrams’s position at the college be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color.” In addition, the group demanded that the college issue a statement condemning the “harms that Abrams has caused to the college community” and that Abrams issue a public apology. In a statement released soon thereafter, Judd criticized what she called the “inappropriateness of demands related to the work and tenure of one of our faculty members.”
