To the Editor:

In his essay “Kafka Comes to CUNY” (The Chronicle Review, March 4), Corey Robin is right, of course, that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul never should have ordered the removal of a job posting for two professors of Palestine Studies at Hunter College, which is part of the City University of New York. Political interference in curricular matters, even at publicly funded schools, is an unacceptable violation of academic freedom.

He should have stopped there. The rest of his essay, about the presumably dreadful consequences of Hochul’s interference, stacks argument fallacies upon invented harms.

Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, begins by asserting that Hochul’s objection was to even “mentioning [the] historical phenomena” of settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid in the job ad. Maybe so. But it is at least equally plausible, as I recently explained in The Hill, that the problem with the job post was its single-minded focus on Israel’s purported crimes, to the exclusion of any other aspect of Palestine Studies.

The Hunter College post included no references to Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, or even armed struggle, all of which have played significant roles in Palestinian life and history. Moreover, the recruitment of “candidates interested in pubic-facing work” makes it clear that anti-Israel activism was a requirement for the job. None of that would justify Hochul’s intervention, but it does blunt Robin’s claim that there could be no valid concerns about the ad.

Even if Robin is right about Hochul’s objection, however, he makes the unwarranted conclusion that perhaps “a scholar studying or even mentioning these historical phenomena cannot be hired at CUNY,” and it may not “be long before a course examining them cannot be taught at CUNY.”

There was nothing in Hochul’s statement that would constrain teaching about the violence and dispossession endured by Palestinians. My initial internet search found at least nine courses at CUNY, including two at Hunter College, that cover those subjects, none of which were challenged by Hochul.

Robin finishes with a two-step. First, he invokes his wife’s grandparents, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, bringing with them an impressive library of Jewish books. One volume, now in possession of Robin’s family, is A Palestine Picture Book, featuring stunning photographs from the Jewish Yishuv in British Mandate Palestine.

“Virtually every page,” Robin tells us, includes references to “colonies, colonists, settlers, or settlements.” Thus, he maintains, even Jews once admitted that their presence in Palestine constituted settler-colonialism, meaning that there couldn’t possibly be a valid objection to using the term in a job ad.

Robin is wrong. The early Jewish “colonies” in Palestine had no relationship to imperialism or colonialism. Indeed, they were often established in defiance of, or noncompliance with, the Ottoman and British Empires.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the term “colony” often described a purposeful or cooperative community, or place of refuge, as in artists’ colony, religious colony, or even leper colony.

In 1856, for example, the “Amana Colonies” were founded in Iowa by Amish pietists escaping persecution in Europe. Ohio’s “Oberlin Colony,” the site of the eponymous college, was established in 1833 by Presbyterians as home for a utopian community of “consecrated souls.” According to Wikipedia, there have been at least 65 “Arts Colonies” in the U.S. since 1907, the first having been the MacDowell Colony in Vermont. Enslaved people who escaped to Canada founded the “Refugees’ Home Colony” in 1851.

Robin’s second step argues that Hochul’s rejection of the Hunter College job posting “could prohibit the teaching of a Jewish text — written by Jews, published by Jews, featuring photographs taken by Jews for the Jewish National Fund — once owned by two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, now owned by a Jewish woman in Brooklyn.”

Whether or not Robin meant to be taken seriously, litigators will recognize this as a “parade of horribles.” It is a rhetorical fallacy that predicts a series of increasingly undesirable consequences ranging from improbable to absurd.

Higher education in New York would be better off if Hochul had stayed out of the Hunter College faculty search, but it is not helpful to exaggerate the impact of her intrusion.