Illustrative. Hofstra University students watching presidential debate in 2016. Photo: Shannon Stapleton via Reuters Connect.

Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island is in the middle of a bitter faculty dispute that has free speech nonprofits, advocacy groups, and a former student calling on the institution to close its investigation of a conservative, and openly Zionist, Jewish professor they say is wrongly accused of racially motivated “harassment” for having uttered criticism of a colleague during a meeting.

According to a blistering letter sent to Hofstra on June 6 by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), political science professor Richard Himelfarb said “word salad” in Nov. 2025 to describe the quality of a presentation which his colleague, professor Santiago Slabodsky, delivered before a committee to gain support for two courses he proposed adding to the catalogue of the university’s undergraduate Jewish studies program. During discussion, Himelfarb contended that the content Slabodsky — the university’s Jewish studies director — showcased holds a tenuous relation to the program and appeared even worse alongside “rambling” and “dissembling” arguments offered in its defense.

In response, Slabodsky, who is Latino, reported Himelfarb to human resources for harassment, alleging that the professor’s comments were bigoted and intended to demean him for speaking English as a second language.

Human resources allegedly summoned Himelfarb to its office, where it advised his accepting culpability under an “informal resolution” which also called for his issuing an apology “to the entire faculty.” Himelfarb agreed, and the matter seemed closed after he submitted a draft apology to his supervisors on April 29.

However, Slabodsky later escalated his complaint to a formal “University Harassment Review Board,” a high-level administrative tribunal which holds the power to impose severe disciplinary sanctions, including termination and revocation of tenure — dramatically raising the stakes for a professor who has taught, mentored, and provided the campus one of its only conservative faculty voices for more than three decades.

Hofstra University did not return a request for comment.

FIRE told Hofstra that the matter should never have reached this point, arguing that Himelfarb’s statements are, in addition to being non-discriminatory, protected by the First Amendment and the university’s own academic freedom policy.

“Himelfarb’s remark that Slabodsky’s proposals were ‘word salad’ is clearly speech related to teaching and thus protected,” the group said. “His remark was made at a college faculty meeting. Discussing proposed courses and curriculum is squarely part of faculty members’ teaching, especially on such occasions. By characterizing Slabodsky’s course proposals as ‘word salad,’ Himelfarb was expressing a view about the proposal’s clarity and coherence…disagreements among faculty…are protected by the principles of academic freedom and free speech.”

It continued, “Nothing on the record even suggests that Himelfarb was disparaging Slabodsky for his nationality or native language…his speech was precisely the type of petty dispute that faculty members are expected to tolerate and address without university intervention.”

During an interview with The Algemeiner, Himelfarb quipped that he should have secured legal counsel no sooner had the exchange with Slabodsky concluded, but it seemed innocuous at the time — the umpteenth instance of pedantic jousting between individuals who chose academia as a career to participate in its robust, and sometimes ruthless, marketplace of ideas. That marketplace is what drew Himelfarb to accept the university’s offer to join the faculty in fall 1992, when, fresh off completing his doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, he began teaching political science at an institution once believed to be impervious to this kind of incident.

In a different time, Himelfarb recounted, Hofstra was a small commuter school whose intellectual culture saw progressive ideology preponder without dominating the institution. Former president Stuart Rabinowitz (2001-2021) raised the university’s profile by hosting the biggest stars in American politics, liberal and conservative, and locking down the campus as the site of a general election presidential debate three consecutive times, from 2008 to 2016 — a historical first. Seven US presidents have visited the campus since 1950, appearances estimated to have generated tens of millions of dollars in free advertising even as they attracted talented students and major donors whose cash supported the university’s rising ambitions, including the launch of the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine.

David Zuniga, a former Hofstra student who attended the institution from 2009 to 2013, said during an interview with The Algemeiner on Wednesday that he remembers Himelfarb as a mission-driven educator who solicitously curated his courses to inspire students to distill truth from an array of viewpoints in a world which rewarded ideological conformity and hashtag-scholarship. A child of Peruvian immigrants and a Republican from South Florida, Zuniga said that Himelfarb was sometimes disliked for lacking the bohemian affectation and subtlety of his colleagues, as well as for relying on flippant, sharp criticism to overcome his opponents in debate.

“I watched racist, genuine, racist things as a kid directed at my mom, who was a physician who left her country and started all over again here as a medical receptionist,” Zuniga said. “My father, an engineer who left his country in Peru… has been called names and discriminated against, and insulted by the same people that drive on roads that he designed. I’m more offended as a Latino that Himelfarb is being persecuted for saying ‘word salad.'”

Zuniga implored Slabodsky to debate the professor on the issues instead. “If you want to come after [him] for his beliefs, be a man about it and do that,” he continued. “Don’t hide behind identity politics because you’re too cowardly to take a criticism.”

Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, learned about the case recently and shared Zuniga’s concerns.

“In this hypersensitive political environment where context has no role, phrases have become political slogans and attributes,” he said. “Courses should be designed with context and above all with the use of primary sources and should be critiqued on that basis. That said, individuals who don’t like their work being critiqued don’t get to throw around accusations of discrimination in order to get their courses approved.”

Debating this issue on the merits may not be possible while the university undergoes a seismic cultural shift to the left, Himelfarb told The Algemeiner, describing a campaign that began following the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump. Himelfarb’s own office was an early target, he said: in April 2018, a student accused him of uttering a racial slur during his lectures — an allegation he denies and which was never corroborated — and the episode snowballed into a movement to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from outside the entrance of the David S. Mack Student Center over the former president’s having been a slaveowner.

There were other signs that Hofstra was changing, Himelfarb said. In spring 2017, the university opened the Center for Race, Culture, and Social Justice, and by 2021 some of its faculty were staging demonstrations demanding hiring quotas and accusing the institution of institutional racism.

Meanwhile, Hofstra’s liberal arts college is seeing its lowest enrollment in years even as the prestige of its graduate programs improves, and the presidential visits have dried up. Not since Bill Clinton came to campus in 2005 for the conference devoted to his presidency has a US president agreed to participate in one — George W. Bush declined in 2013, and Barack Obama did the same in 2023, choosing instead to send a video greeting.

Himelfarb said he is saddened to see what is becoming of an institution to which he gave more than 30 years of his life.

“I am a Zionist, and this is a big part of what is going on, and you are going to encourage faculty members who are pro-Israel to basically stay silent if this is allowed to happen,” he explained. “I’ve been at this university for 33 years — my entire professional life is here, and I [will tell] you this: if I could go back in a time machine to 1985, when I had finished my undergraduate work, I would not do this again. It’s perverse and corrupt.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

Editor’s Note: Dion J. Pierre ’16 is an alumnus of Hofstra University, from which he graduated with a degree in political science and an academic minor in philosophy. He is Black, a fact he declined to disclose when he applied for college.