Professor who Tweeted Against PC Culture is Out at NYU

Michael Rectenwald Photo: Douglas Healey

By Melkorka Licea, NY Post

An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his “incivility,” The Post has learned.

Liberal studies prof Michael Rectenwald, 57, said he was forced Wednesday to go on paid leave for the rest of the semester.

“They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective,” the academic told The Post.

People have no tolerance for perspectives that run counter to their own. Everyone assume their truth is the truth and anyone who disagrees with them is completely wrong and has no right to question their beliefs. This is why American politics has become so insane.

Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” policing Halloween costumes and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.

He chose to be anonymous, he explained in one of his first tweets, because he was afraid “the PC Gestapo would ruin me” if he put his name ­behind his conservative ideas on the famously liberal campus.

“I remember once on my Facebook I posted a story about a kid who changed his pronoun to ‘His Majesty’ because I thought it was funny,” he told The Post. “Then I got viciously attacked by 400 people. This whole milieu is nauseating. I grew tired of it, so I made the account.”

On Oct. 11, Rectenwald used his ­internet alter ego to criticize “safe spaces” — the recent campus trend of “protecting” students from uncomfortable speech — as “at once a hall of mirrors and a rubber room.”

Two weeks ago he posted on his “anti-PC” feed a photo of a flyer put out by NYU resident advisers telling students how to avoid wearing potentially offensive Halloween costumes.

His caption read: “The scariest thing about Halloween today is . . . the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance. NYU RAs gone mad,” he wrote.

“It’s an alarming curtailment of free expression to the point where you can’t even pretend to be something without authorities coming down on you in the universities,” Rectenwald told The Post.

But the Twitter feed soon sparked a “witch hunt” by the growing army of “social justice warriors,” he said.

In an interview published Monday in the Washington Square News, NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper, the eight-year instructor admitted he was the Deplorable NYU Prof.

“My contention is that trigger warning, safe spaces and bias hot-line reporting is not politically correct. It is insane,” he told the student paper. “The crazier and crazier that this left gets . . . the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off [and] getting more pissed.”, he was quoted as saying.

The divorced father of three came forward because “I thought there was nothing objectionable about what I had said.”

But Rectenwald says he began getting “dirty looks” in his department and on Wednesday figured out why: A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor in the same paper.

‘Academic freedom: It’s great, as long as you don’t use it.’

 - Michael Rectenwald

“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote of the untenured assistant professor.

“We seek to create a dynamic community that values full participation. Such efforts are not the ‘destruction of academic integrity’ Professor Rectenwald suggests, but rather what make possible our program’s approach to global studies,” they argued. Rectenwald likened the attack to “a Salem witch trial. They took my views personally. I never even mentioned them and I never even said NYU liberal studies program. I was talking about academia at large,” said the professor, a popular instructor who was graded 4.4 out of 5 on ratemyprofessors.com.

The same day the letter was published, Rectenwald was summoned to a meeting with his department dean and an HR representative, he says.

“They claimed they were worried about me and a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health. They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help,” Rectenwald told The Post. “Then they said I should leave and get help.”

He said, “They had no reason to believe that my mental health was in question, unless to have a different opinion makes one insane.”

Students told him that professors openly discussed with students how he may be fired.

The leave has “absolutely zero to do with his Twitter account or his opinions on issues of the day,” said NYU spokesman Matt Nagel.

But Rectenwald is disheartened.

“I’m afraid my academic career is over,” he said Rectenwald. “Academic freedom: It’s great, as long as you don’t use it.”

If there is no freedom of speech in universities, there can be no freedom of speech anywhere. God help America.

Hungary’s Orban: Send Illegal Immigrants to non-EU Camps ‘on Island or in North Africa’

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban © Kacper Pempel / Reuters

The EU should reverse the influx of illegal migrants by rounding them up and sending them to camps outside its borders, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said in an interview as his country holds a referendum on mandatory EU migrant quotas.

The Hungarian leader’s hard stance against immigration reflects a deep divide in European opinion, which has been highly polarized by the huge influx of refugees that started last year.

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted she would like to “turn back time” to better prepare herself, the German federal government “and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation we were rather unprepared for in the late summer of 2015.”

“I would also like to turn back the clock… what a good idea,” Orban said. “But the problem is that it is not possible.”

On October 2, Hungarians will vote on Brussels’ plans to distribute some 160,000 refugees and migrants among the 28 EU member states, a ruling which was passed last September. Hungary was among four nations that voted against the step, and it has legally challenged it.

Hungarian President Janes Ader said in a statement posted on his office's website on Tuesday that the vote will be about the following question: "Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament?" as cited by Reuters.

Speaking with the Hungarian news website Origo.hu, Orban suggested there should be an effort to try and reverse the flow of arrivals.

“Those who came illegally, they must be rounded up and shipped out,” Orban told the website. “We must set up large refugee camps outside the EU, with armed security and financial support provided by the Union. Everyone who came illegally must return there. There they can file for asylum. Until then, they must remain in large, non-EU camps. This could be an island, it could be a coastal area in North Africa, but the security and supplies of that area must be guaranteed by the EU in its own interest.”

Orban is protecting Hungary from cultural suicide that most EU countries have lovingly embraced. 

Finding an island that's habitable with no residents or residents willing to be invaded is not going to be easy. Whether an island or North Africa, it will mean an increase in drownings as people will set out again to make it to Italy.

Liberal-minded people will find the idea offensive, but what they are doing now is worse, and allowing huge numbers of Muslims into Europe will be the end of Europe within 2 generations.

Orban said he believed the refugee crisis was a result of the emerging phenomenon of a “global village,” in which the world has come so closely together this has made some people think they have a right to go anywhere they please.

“But I belong to those who do not want their piece of the world’s civilization to change, and in particular do not want to change the culture of a piece of land that we call Hungary. I love this country.”

Orban’s latest remarks have already drawn criticism.

“This merely makes clear what we have understood about the Hungarian government’s policies all along — they want a zero refugee policy, even if that means mass deportations,” Helsinki Committee co-chair Marta Pardavi told the Financial Times.

Last week, Luxembourgian Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told the Die Welt newspaper that “Hungary is not far from an order to shoot refugees” and suggested that the country could be “excluded” from the EU for treating refugees “nearly as bad as animals.”

Orban has made a number of controversial remarks about asylum seekers in the past, such as suggesting pig’s heads be placed on top of the fence along Hungary’s border to better repel refugees. Recently, the Hungarian government has also released leaflets depicting some areas in London, Paris, Brussels and other European cities as no-go zones that have too many migrants whom “the authorities cannot keep under control.”

Hungary, a member of the EU, took a restrictive approach to the refugee crisis that started last year. In September 2015, it erected a razor-wire fence on its border with Serbia to stem the refugee flow and a month later it built another on the border with Croatia.

In June this year, Hungary allowed police to send back all illegal immigrants detained within 8 km from the fence and also further limited the number of daily entries for migrants to 30.