In an 11th hour development, CUNY’s chancellor, Felix Matos Rodríguez, has pulled out of the City Council’s investigative hearing to “expose a pervasive culture of antisemitism on City University of New York’s campuses.” 

The hearing had been scheduled for June 8 but was postponed until Thursday because Mr. Rodríguez claimed a scheduling conflict even while saying he “really wanted to attend.” 

Then, instead of attending Thursday, Mr. Rodríguez “sent a lawyer and two witnesses to appear on Zoom,” according to Council Member Inna Vernikov, a CUNY graduate who initiated the hearing. 

In a tweet, she called the cancellation “a sham,” adding that “hundreds of students and professors have experienced antisemitism at CUNY and some of them have been waiting so long to testify about their horrific experience.”

Referring to Mr. Rodriguez, the council member said: “The top guy in charge who gets paid $670,000 a year with our taxpayer dollars does not have the guts to show up.”

Mr. Rodríguez’s office did not respond to requests for comment.  

The hearing comes against a backdrop of escalating conflict within the sprawling CUNY system. A pro-Israel group, Safe CUNY, has filed a complaint with the American Bar Association against CUNY Law for its faculty-backed Boycott Divest Sanction resolution, calling it discriminatory. 

The complaint states: “Outrageously, the resolution goes so far as to defame and target specific individual Jewish CUNY members.” Mr. Rodríguez has publicly opposed BDS, noting in a statement that CUNY “does not support and to be clear cannot participate in BDS activities, and is required to divest public funds from any companies that do.” 

In reaction to the chancellor’s cancellation Thursday morning, Safe CUNY tweeted that the chairman of the Committee on Higher Education, Council Member Eric Dinowitz, should “demand that Mr. Rodriguez show up for today’s hearings.” 

One person who did plan to testify was a one-time CUNY student, Rena Nasar First. She was to talk about a Kingsborough Community College communications professor, Michael Goldstein, who “was the victim of a smear campaign calling for his termination and even physical violence against him because of his open expression of his Zionism.”

In an editorial in the New York Daily News, Mr. Goldstein related that “vandals defaced a photo of my father with anti-Semitic graffiti, including the words “F–k Trump Goldstein, Kill the Zionist Entity.” 

A professor of business at CUNY, Jeffrey Lax, told the Sun that he was a “lifelong CUNY student” who plans to testify about his experiences with antisemitism.  

“In May 2019,  I filed a report with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” he explained, “which completely vindicated all of my claims. They found that Jewish professors were discriminated against, and subject to a hostile work environment.” 

Mr. Lax described how “observant and Zionist Jews were banned from the CUNY teachers union meetings, and these meetings were held purposely on Friday nights,” the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.  

Others have taken note of what has transpired at CUNY. The state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Lee Zeldin, volunteered that “CUNY has displayed a disturbing tolerance and promotion of antisemitism that needs to be identified, called out, and crushed.” 

The northeast director of StandWithUs, a nonpartisan Israel education organization, said Mr. Rodriguez’s failure to attend the hearing, “which was specifically rescheduled to accommodate his schedule … reinforces the feeling of marginalization that Jewish students are experiencing.”