Henderson looks into scholarship issue

Henderson State University is researching the issue of a scholarship honoring an alumnus who, some Jewish leaders say, was a Holocaust denier.

Arkansas Tech University already has come under criticism from the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive and other Jewish organizations, along with national and international scholars, over a separate scholarship honoring the same person, the late Michael Link, who taught history at the Russellville-based school before his death in 2016.

Arkansas Tech has stood by that scholarship saying it “did not find evidence supporting [the Anti-Defamation League] claims.”

Aaron Ahlquist, regional director of the league’s South Central region, declined to comment on the Henderson scholarship Wednesday.

Henderson spokeswoman Tina Hall said Tuesday the Arkadelphia-based university “has not been contacted by any group about the scholarship that was left to the [HSU] Foundation” in Link’s will.

“We are aware of the concerns sent to Arkansas Tech by the ADL and the allegations are disconcerting,” Hall said. “Our own university’s current review of Mr. Link’s writing shows no evidence he was a Holocaust denier, nor is there anything to prove he was not.

“Much like our colleagues at Arkansas Tech, we cannot predict Mr. Link’s intent and he is not here to provide answers. Given the seriousness of this matter, we are still researching this issue and have not made a final decision with regard to the scholarship,” Hall added.

Earlier this year, Henderson announced the Michael Link History Scholarship of $7,500 annually to support “high-achieving” senior history majors. The Michael Link History Endowment was created with $190,000 from Link, a 1962 and 1963 graduate of Henderson State.

Hall said neither the university nor the foundation, the school’s fund-raising arm, decide on the naming of scholarships. “The naming was identified by the donor in his will,” she said.

At the HSU Foundation, Jennifer Boyett, its executive director, said it “holds the belief that by accepting the gift, we have agreed to the naming that was stipulated in Mr. Link’s bequest.” Boyett is also vice president of university advancement at HSU.

Arkansas Tech spokesman Sam Strasner said Wednesday the Tech scholarship, called the Michael Arthur Link and Mary Reid Kewen History Scholarship, was specified in Link’s will. Kewen was Link’s mother.

Ahlquist said if Arkansas

Tech lacks “the flexibility to rename the scholarship, then [it faces] a very clear-cut moral decision” going to the heart of the message it sends others, especially the state’s Jewish community.

Russellville will be the setting of a Holocaust March of Remembrance on Sunday. Marchers are to gather at 2:30 p.m. at the Russellville Depot at 320 West “C” Street.

In a letter to two Arkansas Tech administrators, another history professor there, James Moses, recently wrote he was “appalled” in 2005 when he learned his fellow professor listed “three works which I knew to be both anti-Semitic in nature and examples of Holocaust denial” as among those works students in a seminar were to select for one reading.

Moses, who is Jewish, recalled telling the university president at the time about “the utter and absolute unacceptability of those books as historical works, and urged him to take action, up to and including the professor’s dismissal.”

In the letter, released by the university Tuesday, Moses said his colleague “denied any attempt to deny the Holocaust, but rather stated his intent was to offer the widest possible range of views on the event.”

Moses said “punitive measures” taken against the tenured professor at the time included not allowing him to use the readings at issue or to address the Holocaust at all during the seminar and removing him from the graduate faculty.

“The professor was then barred from teaching courses at all the following semester,” Moses wrote.