Today, a friend of mine received an e-mail labeling me “a white supremacist.” The e-mail was forwarded to me and I smiled upon recognizing a familiar name — Jonathan Farley, an academic admirer of Che Guevara. The Washington Times, Tuesday, December 3, 2002:
Vanderbilt professor outrages Confederate progeny
Says Rebel soldiers deserved gallows
By Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A Vanderbilt University professor has stirred outrage in Dixie by declaring that Confederates were “cowards masquerading as civilized men” who should have been executed at the end of the Civil War.
“Every Confederate soldier … deserved not a hallowed resting place at the end of his days but a reservation at the end of the gallows,” Jonathan David Farley, an assistant professor of mathematics, wrote in a commentary in the Tennessean, Nashville’s largest newspaper. The United Daughters of the Confederacy [UDC], the professor wrote, is an organization that “honors traitors.”
Vanderbilt sparked conflict over Southern heritage this year when the university said it would strip the word “Confederate” from a dormitory, Confederate Memorial Hall, built in the 1930s with donations raised by the UDC.
Mr. Farley’s Nov. 20 column in the Tennessean increased the furor. Mr. Farley has complained of threatening e-mails and phone calls, while the newspaper has received letters from across the country.
“The majority of the letters have been from out of state, because it became an Internet thing,” said John Gibson, the reader editor of the Tennessean, adding that out-of-state letters “rarely” are published in the paper.
Tim Chavez, a columnist for the Tennessean, described one 66-year- old reader’s frustration over Mr. Farley’s views: “This just burns me because I don’t know what to do about it,” the man said. “If someone compared your ancestors to mass murderers, what would you do?”
Mr. Farley called Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest “a 19th century Hitler,” called Confederate heritage groups “the new holocaust revisionists,” and said that “the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed, and their lands given to the landless freed slaves.”
Allen Sullivant, chief of heritage defense for the Sons of Confederate Veterans [SCV], said Mr. Farley is “entitled to his opinion, even one that’s based on misinformation, ignorance and bigotry.”
In response to complaints from SCV members, Mr. Farley has posted e-mail replies that “drip venom,” Mr. Sullivant said. Replying to one SCV member, Mr. Farley vowed to “form our own armies to expose and smash you. . . . Very simply, we represent good and you represent evil.”
Mr. Sullivant said such “blatantly, openly hateful” messages show that Mr. Farley is “just one of these people who’s got a real chip on his shoulders.”
A native of Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Farley, 32, is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities. His parents are both academics. His father, an immigrant from Jamaica, holds a Ph.D. in economics, while his mother, an immigrant from Guyana, holds a Ph.D. in history.
On his university Web page [www.math.vanderbilt.edu/farley] Mr. Farley poses beside a large poster of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whom he calls a hero.
Mr. Farley has been politically active since moving to Nashville from Berkeley, Calif., in 1997, mounting a Green Party campaign for Congress this year, describing the two major party candidates as “two old white men with identical views.”
He challenged Rep. Jim Cooper, Tennessee Democrat, in the Nov. 5 election, placing a distant fourth with 1,205 votes.
Last year, Mr. Farley wrote an article criticizing Chelsea Clinton for supporting the U.S. anti-terrorism effort.
“One of Bill Clinton’s redeeming traits is the fact that, when he studied at Oxford, he opposed America’s war,” Mr. Farley, then a visiting scholar at England’s Oxford University, wrote in a British newspaper, the Guardian. “Maybe sometime, Chelsea, you will too.”
A Vanderbilt spokesman said that Mr. Farley, who is not tenured, is protected by the university’s academic-freedom policy.
“Professor Farley is speaking as an individual, he does not represent Vanderbilt University’s policy, and his statements are neither supported nor endorsed by the university,” said Michael Schoenfeld, Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for public affairs.
Note that, as of December 2002, Farley was untenured and had only been at Vanderbilt about five years. I point that out because, on his personal Web site, Farley claims to have “received tenure at Vanderbilt University in 2003, but fled Tennessee after receiving death threats from supporters of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.” Did Vanderbilt really grant tenure to Farley after he’d incited this public-relations debacle, or is he engaged in self-dramatization?
At any rate, after leaving Vanderbilt, Farley landed a job at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, a fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, and was published on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. So it isn’t as if he’s living in a van down by the river or anything.
Why does Professor Farley bear such ill-will toward me? Read the article carefully. I’d taken the time to do a bit of research so that, in the space of a single 635-word news article, readers learned that:
- Farley had run for office against a popular Democratic congressman;
- He had criticized Chelsea Clinton (!!!) for supporting the War on Terror; and
- He had praised Che Guevara as a “hero.”
The article was accompanied by a two-column photo of Farley posing with his Che poster, and it isn’t hard to imagine the difficulty Vanderbilt had trying to explain that little detail to outraged alumni. And at a time when Democrats had just had their butts kicked in the 2002 mid-term election — in part because they were viewed as squishy on terrorism — Farley probably hadn’t won himself too many friends by denouncing Jim Cooper as an “old white man” and slagging Chelsea.
So instead of being seen as a victim of right-wing malice — a cause célèbre, a martyr for academic freedom — Farley became a liability whom even Democrats dared not defend. And being smart enough to locate the tipping point at which his support at Vanderbilt began its irretrievable collapse, the professor evidently has never forgiven me.
