- Feb 5, 2002
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Mary Jane Rein decided to leave her job as executive director of the Holocaust studies center at the secular Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in hopes of finding a “warmer welcome” at a nearby Catholic university in the same city.
Rein, who is Jewish, announced that she was resigning in an April Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why I’m leaving Clark University,” following an incident at an event in which students from Clark heckled her as she attempted to introduce the evening’s speaker, an Israeli military reservist.
“There is no joy in working on behalf of those students who would, with the support of university leadership, try to silence me in public rather than engage with me civilly,” she wrote. “I can’t invest my time and efforts to advance an institution that lacks the strength of character to protect diverse points of view.”
Clark University has since issued a statement to the media denying any wrongdoing.
But Rein has already moved on to her new role at the Augustinian-run Assumption University in Worcester to launch the Center for Civic Friendship, an institution with a stated mission to be a national resource on “civic friendship, its possibilities and boundaries, and what makes it harder or easier to achieve,” the center’s website says.
Assumption is led by Greg Weiner, the first Jewish president of a Catholic university in the United States.
“To my surprise as both a scholar and a Jew, I feel a warmer welcome and more commonality of purpose at a Catholic institution than at Clark, a secular one,” Rein wrote in her op-ed.
Continued below.
www.catholicnewsagency.com
Rein, who is Jewish, announced that she was resigning in an April Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why I’m leaving Clark University,” following an incident at an event in which students from Clark heckled her as she attempted to introduce the evening’s speaker, an Israeli military reservist.
“There is no joy in working on behalf of those students who would, with the support of university leadership, try to silence me in public rather than engage with me civilly,” she wrote. “I can’t invest my time and efforts to advance an institution that lacks the strength of character to protect diverse points of view.”
Clark University has since issued a statement to the media denying any wrongdoing.
But Rein has already moved on to her new role at the Augustinian-run Assumption University in Worcester to launch the Center for Civic Friendship, an institution with a stated mission to be a national resource on “civic friendship, its possibilities and boundaries, and what makes it harder or easier to achieve,” the center’s website says.
Assumption is led by Greg Weiner, the first Jewish president of a Catholic university in the United States.
“To my surprise as both a scholar and a Jew, I feel a warmer welcome and more commonality of purpose at a Catholic institution than at Clark, a secular one,” Rein wrote in her op-ed.
Continued below.
Holocaust studies head finds ‘warmer welcome’ at Catholic university
“To my surprise as both a scholar and a Jew, I feel a warmer welcome and more commonality of purpose at a Catholic institution than at Clark, a secular one.”
www.catholicnewsagency.com
