[ “The unprecedented and unjustified seizure of Professor
Wilson’s entire collection of books, letters, computers, research
and lectures, openly violated state law, CUNY’s own policies and the
US Constitution”] [[link removed]]

CUNY’S ALLEGED WRONG DOINGS – HOW RUMORS AND WRONGDOINGS SMEARED
DR. JOSEPH WILSON  
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Cornel West
September 30, 2021
Caribbean Times
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_ “The unprecedented and unjustified seizure of Professor
Wilson’s entire collection of books, letters, computers, research
and lectures, openly violated state law, CUNY’s own policies and the
US Constitution” _

Professor Joseph Wilson has filed a $2 million dollar suit against
CUNY, claiming it wrongfully terminated him and discarded his
collection of African-American research, worth over $12 million
dollars, in the process, Photo: Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily
News

 

New York Attorney General Letitia James is to be commended for her
fearless pursuit of Donald Trump in a “criminal capacity”  and
for her office’s investigation of sexual misconduct allegations made
against Governor Cuomo. Additionally, AG James’ support for racial
justice and the Black Lives Matter movement is particularly
noteworthy.  

However, the AG’s representation of her client, the City University
of New York, in Dr. Joseph Wilson V. New York State et al, is deeply
troubling legally, ethically and morally.  

CUNY is the nation’s largest urban university system with over
500,000, predominantly minority students. Moving forward in federal
court, Dr. Wilson’s case has profound Fourth Amendment and national
ramifications as a bellwether for research confidentiality,
intellectual property rights, academic freedom and racial relations in
higher education.  

Dr. Wilson’s case revolves around malicious rumors foisted by a few
faculty adversaries who made unsubstantiated claims of illegal conduct
including tuition theft, grade tampering and plagiarism. Those
meritless rumors were thoroughly investigated, resulting in neither
civil or criminal claims against Professor Wilson. Nevertheless, false
claims precipitated CUNY’s  2012 warrantless search and seizure of
Dr. Wilson’s campus offices containing 40 years of his research and
scholarship, including rare archival materials he discovered,
pertaining to Dr. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph and other
civil rights luminaries.  

The unprecedented and unjustified seizure of Professor Wilson’s
entire collection of books, letters, computers,  research and
lectures, openly violated state law, CUNY’s own policies and the US
Constitution, as documented by Dr. Wilson’s legal team. The
University has failed to provide an accounting of Dr. Wilson’s
seized intellectual property and archival materials, as a matter of
court record. 

CUNY administrators failed to obtain a search warrant, or catalog what
they seized. Dr. Wilson’s research was literally trashed based on
photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts. CUNY never created a
legally required chain of custody of Dr. Wilson’s property. His
life’s work is unaccounted for and was lost, stolen or destroyed. 

By way of background:  in 2015, William Thompson CUNYs  Board of
Trustees chair, then newly appointed by Governor Cuomo, invited New
York’s Inspector General to review the conduct of Brooklyn College
President Karen Gould and to asses the investigative procedures used
by CUNYs Office of General Counsel.  

In 2016 the IG issued  an Interim Report, finding CUNY’s OGC
investigative and administrative actions violated state law. The
IG’s Report resulted in the resignation of 2 college presidents and
CUNY’s General Counsel Schaffer, for, among other reasons cited by
the IG,  financial improprieties and illegally failing to properly
engage the IG in investigations of CUNY’s faculty or staff. CUNY
failed to engage the IG in its investigation of of the rumors
regarding Professor Wilson. In an unprecedented, unethical break with
the university’s “no comment “ policy during an ongoing
investigation, CUNY contemptuously defamed Dr. Wilson in a planted New
York Times article, while simultaneously withholding exculpatory
evidence. 

The federal court’s mandated discovery revealed that CUNY withheld
critically important exculpatory evidence for over 7 years, including
Dr. Wilson’s Worker Education Director’s Appointment Letter,
concealed in the General Counsel’s office, authorizing the very
duties he was charged with during his fraudulently conducted and
obviously unethical arbitration, resulting in his termination.  

Full disclosure: I have known Dr. Wilson and have admired his
voluminous publications on race and Black workers for decades. I am
intimately familiar with this case and offered to testify on his
behalf. However, Assistant Attorney General Mark Klien blocked my
testimony. I am also personally familiar with racially related
academic disrespect and mendacity. 

Shockingly, the AAG made racially insensitive remarks including asking
Dr. Wilson, who is African American, if he was  a “gangster”,
while angrily tossing a large stack of papers at him during his
deposition. In court, the AAG called world renowned African American
scholars , distinguished professors Gerald Horne and Robin Kelley
“so called experts”. The AAG permitted, without sanction, CUNY’s
intimidation and threats against the Africana Studies department chair
in supporting Dr. Wilson’s claims, according to sworn deposition
testimony.  

While the nation is rightly riveted by racial injustice and in
healthcare and in the criminal injustice system, we must not lose
sight of insults and injuries in the academy, especially regarding the
under representation and the disrespectful treatment of African
American faculty. 

The recent UNC tenure rejection of Nikole Hannah Jones,  award
winning journalist, scholar and leader of the New York Times 1619
Project, has created a First Amendment case that deserves the national
spotlight. Both the Jones and Wilson constitutional cases are endemic
of undervalued and disrespected Black faculty elevated to a national
moral issue resonating far beyond the university systems.  

The Daily News coverage of the trashing of Dr. Wilson’s scholarship
(Feb 26, 2019) portends major embarrassment for AG James, CUNY’s BOT
Chair William Thompson and Governor Cuomo as the double racial
standard, blatant illegalities and conspiratorial facts become public,
should this case go to trial before a Brooklyn jury.  

AG James inherited this case from her predecessor and may not be 
fully aware of her office's transgressions. Nevertheless the buck now
stops at AG James regarding illegal, unethical actions and coverups by
her CUNY client, under the guise of sovereign immunity used to shield
bad state actors. 

As national attention and outrage grows, Wilson V. New York must be
expeditiously and fairly resolved in the name of racial justice and
academic equity. AG James must reverse her office’s current
indefensible approach that is tantamount to an assault on academic
freedom, profoundly undermining a spectrum of academic rights,
particularly concerning undervalued African American faculty who
precariously grasp positions in universities across the nation. 

_[Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual.
He is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian
Practice at Union Theological Seminary and holds the title of
Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at
Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of
Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three
years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton._

_He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his
classics, Race Matters
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memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud
[[link removed]]. His most recent
book, Black Prophetic Fire
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look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and
their visionary legacies.]_

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