‘LOONIES’ AT CUNY
Sperm donor, spy, cop hater among local college profs
A Russian spy, a “sperminator” who’s fathered 29 kids and a radical who revels in the thought of “dead cops.” Meet the esteemed CUNY faculty shaping young minds.
Many of these nutty professors are adjuncts, part-time instructors who are barely vetted and often hired on the fly just days before classes start, sources told The Post.
Some, including Hunter College sociology professor Jessie Daniels, are full-time professors. Daniels ignited a fury on social media last month with tweets about how the white nuclear family “is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy.”
She went on to tweet: “White people: do you own your own home? When you die, where’s the wealth in that house going? If it’s to your children, you’re reproducing [inequality].”
She is still teaching at Hunter’s Manhattan campus, where her bio says she is an expert in “the Internet manifestations of racism.”
In September, a tenured lecturer at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn was busted for allegedly teaching “unauthorized courses” on medical procedures, including CPR and sonography, and even selling fake certificates to those who didn’t complete the class.
The brazen prof continued the scheme even after college officials told him to stop, authorities allege.
In August, the president of John Jay College said she was “shocked” by the hate spewed by a member of her own faculty — adjunct economics professor Michael Isaacson, who tweeted, “Some of y’all might think it sucks being an anti-fascist teaching at John Jay College but I think it’s a privilege to teach future dead cops.”
The misguided message set off a firestorm of outrage, particularly since John Jay College specializes in criminal justice.
Mayor de Blasio piped in, tweeting that “New York City won’t stand for the vile anti-police rhetoric of Michael Isaacson and neither should John Jay College.”
The CUNY system is under state control, with the governor appointing the majority of its board. And rather than giving Isaacson the boot, he remains on paid leave.
Several CUNY veterans outlined how out-there instructors can get in the door, describing a process that can be overly bureaucratic and politically correct when it comes to permanent faculty, but lax in the hiring of temporary adjuncts.
The CUNY system has for years relied on an army of lower-cost adjuncts — currently 12,500 out of an overall teaching staff of about 20,000 — who are paid far less than permanent faculty and don’t have the same benefits. The adjuncts get about $3,500 per four-month course.
Adjunct lecturers need no more than a bachelor’s degree, but anyone with the title of adjunct professor is required to have a Ph.D.
By comparison, a full professor is
someone with a permanent, fulltime appointment, a Ph.D. and an annual salary up to $129,000. The university system, which enrolls 272,000 students, has just 7,500 full-time faculty members.
When in need of an adjunct to teach a course, “You’ll look in your pile of résumés that you have in your desk or you’ll call some friends,” said a Brooklyn College professor, describing the offhand process.
He added, “I assume that there’s something that happens in HR to make sure that they have to fill out a W2 and they have to probably give a diploma and a résumé.”
A retired John Jay professor said a department head would have the most influence in hiring an adjunct like Isaacson.
“If anyone’s to blame for hiring this guy, it’s the chair who really didn’t vet the guy thoroughly enough,” the source said.
Eric Linsker had adjunct gigs teaching English at two CUNY colleges, Queens and Baruch, when he was busted for allegedly attempting to throw a trash can at police during a December 2014 protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.
His arrest sparked a Facebook page called Fire Eric Linsker NOW to “build support for the termination of this professional agitator who, at public expense, imposes his lawless ideology on the minds of the children of this city.”
Baruch College adjunct Juan Lazaro slipped into the school as a political science professor from South America. But in 2010, he was revealed to be Mikhail Vasenkov, a Russian spy, who was sent home along with fellow spooks living undercover in the United States.
The professor who hired Lazaro told The Wall Street Journal he “didn’t detect anything odd” when he brought him Lazaro on board.
Insiders described a constant churn of hiring and rehiring.
“CUNY is so underfunded that it uses underpaid, temporary workers to teach more than half of its courses,” said a source. “Almost all of CUNY’s teaching adjuncts are hired anew each semester. That means that every six months, CUNY is hiring or rehiring [thousands of] instructors with little hiring infrastructure. Department chairs, on whom most of the work falls, receive zero support from the administration for the hiring process.”
A Brooklyn College professor lamented that when it comes to hiring full-time professors, the ability to weed out oddballs has become more difficult with a process that is guided by bureaucrats and diversity mandates.
He said all job candidates must be asked the same set of questions and that all reference checks must be done by the Human Resources Department.
“In the past, we were able to make calls to references,” he said. “I used to call and ask, ‘Is the guy normal?’ If they hesitated and said ‘What do you mean by normal?’ I knew the answer.”
All hiring is overseen by a college’s diversity officer, who monitors whether job candidates reflect the enrollment at the campus, the professor added.
“You’re being watched at every step,” he said. “Mostly they’re looking at diversity. That’s what they’re really looking for.”
CUNY spokesman Frank Sobrino said that “the educational credentials required of adjuncts are similar to those for full-time faculty.
“It is incumbent upon the colleges to conduct rigorous pre-employment reference checks and credential verifications,” he said.