Professor Resigns Over Columbia University’s Trend Toward Communism

People walk past the Alma Mater statue on the Columbia University campus in New York City on July 1, 2013. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A Romanian-born professor who fled communism in his homeland said he recently abandoned his tenured post at Columbia University because various incidents convinced him the prestigious school is “on its way toward full-blown communism.”

Andrei Serban, an award-winning film director with an extensive list of credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), complained about the growing pressure to conform to social-justice ideals he experienced in the theater department of the Ivy League school, in an interview that aired Oct. 26 on Romania’s TVR1.

According to his online faculty biography, Serban is a Tony Award-winning theater and opera producer who was a director of the Romanian National Theater.

One example he gave from Columbia was of the pressure he felt to admit a transgender applicant who auditioned to play Juliet in William Shakespeare’s classic play.

Serban had not responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment as of press time.

In the television interview, the interviewer seemed startled by Serban’s claim that the U.S. system of higher education is barreling toward communism, which dominated Romania for much of the previous century, The College Fix reports.

Serban also explained that at a meeting convened by the dean of the art school when a professor retired, the dean said there were “too many white professors, too many heterosexual men” and that it would be best to choose a person of a minority group, or a woman, or a gay man to replace the departing teacher.

Serban, who headed the hiring committee, said the replacement hire couldn’t be someone like him because he was a male who has been “married, a heterosexual man who has children.”

The professor said in the interview that when he asked if a straight white male could be chosen if he were the most qualified candidate, he was informed that wasn’t possible.

“I felt like I was living under communism again,” Serban said.

He said he was pressured to hire a male-to-female transgender student for “Romeo and Juliet,” despite that he felt he couldn’t accept that person in the role, and his colleagues became angry with him for saying so. He said he had to resign because he wouldn’t violate his principles.

‘White Fantasies’

In other news regarding political correctness on campus, a student at Weber State University reportedly released an audio file reflecting a professor’s strange “anti-white” attitudes, in what appears to have been an unusual thought exercise.

The student, Michael Moreno, says in the recording that the instructor and debate coach Ryan Wash was arguing that science and outer space were somehow “fake” and “white fantasies.”

“Our argument will be that space is not real,” the instructor states in the recording, while discussing a debate topic apparently intended to address the validity of the United States’ collaboration with other countries in space exploration, Campus Reform reports.

Wash suggests the argument can be made that space doesn’t exist because it is “not verifiable” by his own experience, because he has not been to space.

“[Space, science, and technology] is a projection of white fantasies that have worked to control our interpretation of how the world works,” Wash says in the recording.

“Whiteness then works, and then appropriates science and technology to say, ‘This is true while this is not true, because it’s not verifiable,’” he says, adding that there should be a “hyperfocus on the experiential” for those who don’t “capitulate with whiteness.”

In the recording, Moreno asks Wash how—if space were fake and exclusively a white idea—he would explain the existence of black astronauts who have visited space. Wash then asks Moreno to demonstrate that blacks have been to space and claims no one can know for sure if they have.

“That’s what we call colonialism,” Wash replies.

“What?” says Moreno.

“Because you are using other people’s experience. I don’t even know what that verbiage means. Like what does it mean to extract someone’s experience, and use it for justification for your own political agenda?” Wash responds.

Moreno asks Wash how we can prove slavery happened if we haven’t witnessed it.

The instructor says “post-traumatic slave disorder” can prove slavery existed.

“My argument is that black people should have an inroad into that experiential, because white people’s experience determines the rest of the world. That’s just the uniqueness argument of the affirmative,” Wash says.