‘Anti-PC’ Professor Michael Rectenwald is Suing NYU and Four Professors For Defamation and Wants You to Know It
Michael Rectenwald is suing Liberal Studies professors and the university over what he alleges are defamatory emails, and has spoken to the New York Post, the Daily Caller, Fox News and other outlets about it.
by Sam Raskin and Téa Kvetenadze
Michael Rectenwald, the self-styled “anti-political correctness” NYU professor, filed a lawsuit against the university and four other professors for defamation on Jan. 12.
As first reported by the New York Post, Rectenwald, a Clinical Professor in the Liberal Studies (LS) department, alleges colleagues Jacqueline Bishop, Amber Frost, Carley Moore and Theresa Senft libeled him in department-wide emails and that the university did not protect him in response. Rectenwald is requesting both compensatory and punitive damages.
Citing emails by current and former LS faculty members as evidence, Rectenwald alleges that the individual defendants “sought to maliciously portray” him as “a racist, sexist, misogynistic, dishonest, drug user and/or drug addict suffering from mental illness and/or instability.” He alleges that NYU as an institution is “vicariously liable” because the email exchanges took place “under the full control and observation” of the school (the emails were all from .nyu accounts), and that the administration “chose to do nothing.”
Rectenwald also claims his career has been imperiled as a result, that his five-year contract with NYU is unlikely to be renewed because of the emails and his time at the university will be “prematurely curtailed.” He says the “most damaging” offense, however, is the harm done to his wider professional and academic reputation.
In the emails, various professors accuse Rectenwald of, among other things, using drugs, being unstable and unfit to teach, bullying other faculty — particularly women of color — promising a position at NYU to a friend, leaking an interview question to said friend as chair of a hiring committee, as well as physical and sexual harassment.
He asserts that he has suffered personally, professionally and emotionally as a result of the emails. The lawsuit lists his “constant” humiliation, ridicule and isolation by his colleagues and he describes himself as an “outcast.” For example, Rectenwald claims he was afraid of being “attacked verbally and possibly even physically” by his colleagues and requested his office be moved from the LS building; he has since relocated to the Russian and Slavic Studies Department.
While the lawsuit states that Rectenwald had requested the change of location because he felt “so disturbed and distressed,” he told NYU Local via Facebook Messenger that he was asked by the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity executive director if he wanted to move and accepted the offer.
This is not the first time Rectenwald has courted controversy. On Oct. 24, 2016, he revealed himself as the person behind a previously anonymous Twitter account in an interview in Washington Square News. On @antipcnyuprof, Rectenwald — who had been a communist for his entire adult life until 2016 and claims on his website he was an apprentice to iconic left-wing poet and activist Allen Ginsberg — sought to parody and ridicule what he believes to be the misguidedness of so-called “social justice warriors” and political correctness on NYU’s campus and beyond.
“What if Trump triggers a few hundred thousand liberal totalitarians to jump out of their dorm windows? one can only hope. #TriggerWarning,” he tweeted from the account in September 2016. Along similar lines, he tweeted in October, “The identity politics left: they need a safe space that is once a hall of mirrors and a rubber room.” Both tweets appear to have been deleted.
The interview prompted 12 members of the LS department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group to issue a statement condemning Rectenwald. The next day, he met with then-LS dean Fred Schwarzbach, a meeting also attended by NYU’s Head of Human Resources, in which Rectenwald says he was “coerced” into accepting a leave of absence for the rest of the fall semester. He says he only agreed to the request because he “felt the administration’s strong suggestion represented an implicit threat” ahead of an upcoming promotion. In the lawsuit, he claims Schwarzbach whispered to him that it had nothing to do with his Twitter posts or interview (which was echoed by NYU spokesperson Matt Nagel to the New York Post and NYU Local in late October). Rectenwald was later promoted from Clinical Assistant Professor in early November.
“They claimed they were worried about me and a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health,” Rectenwald recalled to the Post. “They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help … They had no reason to believe that my mental health was in question, unless to have a different opinion makes one insane.”
According to Rectenwald, the university then caused him “public shame and ridicule” by posting an email exchange between him and Schwarzbach discussing the leave on its website and “revealing his private medical information to other NYU Faculty members.” The lawsuit states that these emails “wrongly created the impression that Professor Rectenwald had an emotional or medical issue that required a leave.”
The erstwhile communist, who now considers himself a “cultural and social” libertarian, then began a media blitz, making an appearance on Fox News and writing an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he described his experience with the supposed ills of left-wing political correctness. In the following months, Rectenwald mostly stayed out of the news, though on Facebook and Twitter he continued to express his views on what he regards as the unreasonable norms of left-wing campus culture.
On April 13, 2017, a piece was published on Quillette titled “The De-Professionalization of the Academy,” under the pseudonym “Alex Southwell,” a professor at a fictional metropolitan university who taught in the “General Studies Department,” which Rectenwald began circulating. The piece, as described by the writer, is a “jeremiad decrying the direction that academia has taken,” and lamented that some faculty members at his university were underqualified and the university’s diversity initiatives were “hastily and thoughtlessly administered.”
On May 6, an essay titled “Have You Found the Place that Makes You Want to Swallow Its Rhetoric Whole?” was published on Quillette under Rectenwald’s name. In it, Rectenwald criticizes contemporary leftist activism while delving into his own personal history, including the deterioration of his relationship with his ex. He also briefly mentions a period when he used Adderall.
And on May 7, Rectenwald reached out to NYU Local about a “real scoop of a story,” and sent a link to the pseudonymous Quillette post from April; he said he could back its veracity but insisted he didn’t write it. “I am not going to vouch for having written it, ever. But, I know that the stories are true, and that they can be confirmed by talking to the right people about the particular issues,” he wrote over Facebook Messenger. “Let’s just say I was a witness.”
According to the lawsuit, the email sequence in question began after the publication of his article in May. In his telling, the “attacks” from colleagues reached a “fever pitch” when they learned of his pending book deal (Rectenwald told Local he has since begun searching for a new publisher), and thus began what is described as a “coordinated and sustained defamation campaign designed to inflict emotional distress on him and ruin his reputation.”
Following Rectenwald’s tweet about a publisher offering an advance for a forthcoming book, the first email in the series was sent on May 8 at 3:14 p.m. by Theresa Senft to an “extended” listserv of NYU academic faculty with the sardonic subject line “Congrats to Michael Rechtenwald [sic] on his 75K advance from St. Martin’s Press!” (Senft, a Clinical Assistant Professor in Global Liberal Studies from 2011 until last year, is currently a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and could not be reached for comment.)
In the email, she heavily criticized the essay by Rectenwald published two days prior on Quillette, which, she wrote, “shows us how feminism is a damaging ideology that has taken its toll on him personally, professionally, and sexually.” Senft also mentions the pseudonymous “Alex Southwell” piece, saying it led to racist emails being directed at a newly hired black female colleague, though she never directly names Rectenwald as its author. Both comments are cited in the lawsuit.
Other faculty members chimed in to detail their own experiences with Rectenwald, who was copied on Senft’s email and responded that his views had been misrepresented and the email “ascribes positions to me that I do not hold.”
Jacqueline Bishop, who was copied on the original email, first replied after 5 p.m. Bishop, a Clinical Assistant Professor, was named in the lawsuit for several claims she made, including that Rectenwald was a “racist, sexist, misogynistic, adderal-filled [sic] bully” and had been aggressive and threatening towards various faculty, particularly women of color such as herself; attending hiring committee meetings while “high and incoherent” and feeding a friend the questions they were going to ask candidates for a writing professor position; and describing an incident in which he sent her a “nasty abusive email” when she did not give Rectenwald her login information so that his son could use her computer while she was away. Bishop did not respond to a request for comment.
The next morning, after several professors joined the email series with their own criticisms of Rectenwald, he “desperately” sent a faculty-wide email saying he had “never expressed racist, sexist or misogynistic views,” according to the lawsuit.
Amber Frost, an adjunct professor, first got involved on May 10, and wrote in an email the next day that Rectenwald had been harassing her for more than two years in both her professional and personal life. She said he began to hate her “so intensely” when she “rebuked his overtures to ‘friendship’” after hearing that he had been telling her friends and fellow activists that she had gained her position using “sexual favors.” The two allegations were listed as causes of action in the suit, both of which Rectenwald denied to NYU Local. Frost did not respond to a request for comment.
The final individual named in the suit, Carley Moore, first engaged with the email series on May 11. Moore, a Clinical Professor, wrote that Rectenwald “was and continues to be unwell” in regards to his medical leave and echoed Bishop’s claim that he has a history of abusing women of color in the department. She described him as waging an “ongoing campaign to silence and harass anyone who seeks to challenge his delusional, narcissistic, and drug-fueled narrative.”
While the three aforementioned statements were the ones specified as causes of action, Moore also detailed how Rectenwald had written her several “hostile and abusive” private emails the previous semester about what he viewed as her lack of qualifications to be a full professor. (Moore pointed out in her email that she is the author of two published books in addition to numerous essays, poems and other work, and had “taught in the program for 15 years with high evaluations” before being awarded the full title). She declined to comment on the matter to NYU Local.
Reached for comment on Tuesday, NYU spokesperson John Beckman said, “This suit has no merit.”
After reneging on an agreement for an interview, Rectenwald reiterated his motivation for filing the lawsuit in a statement to NYU Local.
He clarified that he is not suing over opinions or insults expressed by his peers — such as calling him a “coward,” “fragile white male,” “intellectually impotent man,” “intellectual tumbleweed,” “sad pathetic soul” and “Satan” in emails — but for what he sees as defamatory statements.
“I filed the lawsuit because several of my NYU colleagues targeted me with a series of false and malicious statements in emails sent to over one hundred members of the NYU Liberal Studies Faculty,” he stated. “These defamatory statements have been and will continue to be emotionally, personally and professionally damaging.
“Moreover, the University has not taken any steps to protect me from this abuse and harassment, and indeed has fostered and tolerated an environment in which any professor who does not subscribe to the ‘social justice’ left-liberal orthodoxy is considered to be fair game for ad hominem and/or defamatory attacks.”
In his telling, by filing the lawsuit Rectenwald seeks to “restore the right of free expression” at NYU and on campuses nationwide.
Asked about the irony that Rectenwald — who rails against “safe spaces” and supposedly overly-sensitive students and faculty on campus — had moved offices to avoid colleagues who he felt threatened by, and is suing for defamation, he attempted to draw a distinction between his own behavior and the kind he has commonly criticized. “This was a veritable academic firing squad,” he said. “There is a world of difference between the so-called ‘micro-aggressions’ perceived by the ‘social justice’ left on the one hand, and genuine defamation on the other hand.”
Further, Rectenwald claims it is his critics who are behaving hypocritically by insulting him. “It was my attackers who were engaging in the exact sort of abusive, bullying, and harassing behavior that they purport to speak out against,” he said.
Rectenwald, who is white, added, “I was abused and pelted with racist, sexist and other remarks that denigrated me on the basis of my race and gender.”
Last week, Rectenwald appeared on “Fox & Friends” to talk about the lawsuit and air his grievances to co-host Brian Kilmeade. The segment featured graphics which dramatized the situation, such as “Trouble with Schools” and “Liberal Bias on Campus.”
“You let the PC culture on campus have it,” Kilmeade said while introducing Rectenwald.
“They had just instituted a bias-reporting hotline on campus,” Rectenwald said of the motivation for creating his Twitter account. “This turns the whole campus into a surveillance state, in effect, and that really disturbed me.”
Later in the interview, Rectenwald complained universities were losing academic, intellectual and expressive freedoms.
Additionally, Kilmeade mentioned the former John Jay professor Mike Isaacson, who in August tweeted that he was excited to teach “future dead cops.”
“He’s been the worst defender!” Kilmeade said of Isaacson, who was also a lecturer in Macroeconomics at NYU from 2014–16 according to his public CV. Isaacson was one of those who criticized Rectenwald during the May email exchange, referring to him as an “asshole” several times.
Rectenwald agreed with Kilmeade and cited the situation as evidence of a “double standard” on colleges campuses. “He never gets called out by his university,” Rectenwald said. (Isaacson was in fact placed on administrative leave by John Jay in September.)
Asked by Kilmeade if his experience fighting against what he sees as degradation of campus culture has been worth going through, Rectenwald said it has been. “Somebody has to do it. If it’s not me, who’s it going to be?” he said. “This has got to be stopped.”
In addition, right-wing website Frontpage Mag published an interview with Rectenwald on Monday.
Rectenwald told NYU Local he is tentatively scheduled to again appear on Fox News to discuss the situation on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” this week.
NOTE: Téa Kvetenadze is enrolled in a class taught by defendant Carley Moore this semester.
