Rutgers Demotes Professor Who Wrote Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts
By Aiden Pink December 10, 2017
A tenured professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey has been removed from teaching and leadership positions after he was found to have written or shared several anti-Semitic remarks on his Facebook page.
An internal investigation found that Michael Chikindas, a professor in the Department of Food Sciences, “posted extensive bigoted, discriminatory, and anti-Semitic material on social media,” university president Robert Barchi and chancellor Deba Dutta wrote Friday in a letter to faculty.
Chikindas had blamed Jews for the Armenian genocide, posted anti-Semitic memes depicting Jews as hook-nosed merchants, and called Judaism “the most racist religion in the world.” The material was first uncovered by the blog Israelycool.
“This material perpetuated toxic stereotypes and was deeply upsetting to Jewish students, faculty, and staff across our community. The fears and concerns they have expressed to us and many university leaders are both justified and understandable,” the letter said.
As a result, Barchi and Dutta wrote, Chikindas will no longer teach required courses, has been demoted from his position as the director of Rutgers’s Center for Digestive Health and will be required to undergo sensitivity training and be subjected to “ongoing monitoring.”
Barchi and Dutta also wrote that the university would be “seeking further disciplinary action” through procedures agreed to by the faculty union.
Rutgers has one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country, with approximately 6,400 Jewish undergraduates, according to the Forward College Guide.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
