IN MAY PRESIDENT Freedman jumped into the debate over Leonard Jeffries, the controversial chair of the black studies department at City College of New York. A federal jury had decided that City College was wrong in removing Jeffries from his post. The professor, among other things, had said that Jews dominated the slave trade. "For me," Freedman told the Boston Sunday Globe, "the central question is academic competence: Is someone academically competent who argues Jews dominated the slave trade, when every other scholar comes to an opposite judgment?
"Jeffries is entitled to express his views, but the university is entitled to make sure those views are within generally accepted bounds of scholarship. It's one thing to have views that are unortho-dox those ought to be protected. But it's quite another thing to have views that are intellectually bizarre."
"The conventional example is the teacher who teaches the Earth is flat. That view ought to be protected in an academic setting, but that person ought not be teaching geography."
Freedman says Jeffries should have been kept off his chair.