Professor Andrei Serban from Columbia University has resigned because the university is “on its way toward full blown communism,” The College Fix has reported.
Prof. Serban was an award-winning Professor of Theatre Arts in the Faculty of the Arts at Columbia University. He has won several Obie and international awards for his directing performance and served as the general director of the Romanian National Theatre. He immigrated to the United States from Romania in 1969 and taught at Columbia for 27 years beginning in 1992.
In a recent interview for Romanian TV, Prof. Serban revealed that two main events led up to his decision to leave Columbia University.
As the director of the hiring committee for the Arts faculty at Columbia, he was charged with hiring a new faculty member after a different professor retired. In the interview, he recounts how he was told that the committee could not hire a straight, white male to fill the open position. They were told the new professor would preferably be a woman, a lesbian, or a man who was either gay or a person of color.
Seemingly incredulous in the interview, Prof. Serban said, “The Dean of the Art School told us that we are too many white professors, too many heterosexual men, and it would be best to hire a new educator, woman preferably, minority, and if she is gay it would be just fine, but if it’s a man, it would be preferable someone who is Latino or black.”
Prof. Serban recalls that he asked the Dean of the Art School what the committee should do if the best qualified candidate happened to be a white male. He said he was told, “No, you cannot select this candidate.”
Though Prof. Serban was just speaking hypothetically at the time, in the end the best qualified candidate did happen to be a straight, white male who wasn’t hired in favor of a gay, black man.
In response to the incident, Prof. Serban says, “I felt like I was living under communism again.”
Yet, this wasn’t the only event that led up to Prof. Serban’s resignation.
Later in the interview, he recollects that in a college admission interview, a prospective male student auditioned for the school by memorizing and preparing to recite Juliet’s monologue instead of Romeo’s. After questioning why the student decided to do so, Prof. Serban said he felt immediate hostility from the other professors on the admissions committee. He recounted that they didn’t understand why he wasn’t convinced that the student would be able to play a convincing Juliet.
Other troubling news has also recently come out about Columbia University, an Ivy League school.
Last year, the conservative organization Campus Reform released a video it filmed on the campus of Columbia University interviewing students about the First Amendment.
In the video, the interviewer named Chabot Phillips promised $20 to a student who could name all five freedoms protected by the First Amendment. These include the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to petition the government and the right to peaceably assemble.
Some students couldn’t name a single right guaranteed to them by the First Amendment. One student responded, “I mean I can guess. Umm. The First Amendment. Nah.”
The record holder for the number of freedoms that someone could mention was three.
Another student that had taken constitutional law and was taking classes at law school could name only two.
This trend goes alone with a recent poll that found increased support for communism and Marxism among millennials. The story was brought to you by The Daily Citizen.
If the video and poll are any indication, it seems that Columbia University may need to focus more on the education of its students, specifically informing them about the freedoms they enjoy as Americans, rather than the sexual preferences of their professors.
