In the spring of 1990, a single statement ignited a controversy that deeply divided the Grant Campus. What began as an offhand remark soon spread beyond the classroom, sparking outrage, protest, and heated debate about race, academic performance, and free speech. As students, faculty, and outside organizations weighed in, the campus found itself at the center of a larger discussion on bias in education and the limits of academic freedom. The fallout from the incident would leave a lasting mark on the college community.
It all started when an Honors Microeconomics professor made an incredibly controversial comment. Early on during her class on February 21st, 1990, Professor Jan Parker said, “If I could only know one thing about a student, and I got to pick my students, If I could only know race or ethnic background, I’d choose Jews first and blacks last.” The statement caused intense discomfort and shock to several of the 11 students in Professor Parker’s class. One student later told the Western Student Press (WSP) at the time, “I couldn’t believe that Professor Parker could so passively state that one race was somehow more geared toward success than another. She said that Jews do better simply because they are Jewish, and blacks do worse simply because they’re black and that science has proven that intellectual potential is defined only by genes and that blacks genetically have a lower potential.” Another student told the WSP, “Some of the things that she said about blacks did bother me.”
The comments initially didn’t attract much attention around campus. Some of the students who were disturbed by the comment shared what they heard with friends and colleagues. It wasn’t until the WSP learned about the comments that attention began to grow. In an interview with the WSP, Professor Parker told then Editor-in-Chief Lauren Burke that she backed her comments with 30 years of evidence from her gradebooks of Jewish students being the most successful academically and black students being the least successful academically.
Parker said in that interview, which was published on April 3rd, 1990, “It is a silly statement, but it could have been summarized in a way that almost all faculty would agree, that we like motivated students and with Oriental and Jewish kids’ education is foremost. For blacks often, it appears that education often in the home is not that important and their role models are not professors.” Parker continued, “I mean a disproportionate number of professors are Jewish, a disproportionate number of blacks are great athletes and entertainers … Intellectual blacks, well, they’re not observed by many of the black students.”
After the WSP published an article about the incident on April 3rd, 1990, Parker passed out the WSP the following day to all of her students and said, “I don’t want to say the obvious because you, you know it’s just more offensive.” She continued “If you’ve been around and you have a mind, you know that what I said is true. I don’t need to turn to a lot of books to prove it to you.”
These comments, along with her original comment on February 21st, 1990, stunned the Grant Campus community and attracted attention from outside media organizations, like Newsday. When asked by Newsday if she stood by her generalizations about different ethnic group’s academic performance, she responded “Of course, it’s the environment. We discussed that [in class]. A Jewish child gets a book at an early age; the black child gets a basketball.” She did admit she regretted making the statements in her Honors Microeconomics class, saying “I had no conscious racist intent but have come to see the implications of the statement and do apologize for them.”
Many students and faculty were outraged by her comments in both Newsday and the WSP articles about her. On May 2nd, 1990, the African Peoples Association, a club on campus, held a rally demanding action against Parker from the college’s senior administration. Students protested outside of her classroom and wanted to hear from her, one student even knocked on her classroom’s door while she was teaching. One protestor said, “More people need to be aware. Professor Parker the person, is not the issue; it’s the type of thinking that she represents. We respect freedom of speech, but as a professor in the classroom, she should not make comments of that type.”
16 members of the Grant Campus faculty signed a letter criticizing Parker’s comments, which was subsequently published in the WSP. “Professor Parker cited only her grade books as proof. These are hardly a sufficient sample and surely open to challenge as an unbiased source since they may reflect her conclusions. She apparently admits herself that her view was supported not by scientific evidence but intuition. In the WSP interview, she is quoted as saying: you want me to be scientific, it’s intuitive,” the letter stated. The letter concluded, “Professor Parker is a generous person; she has frequently extended herself to assist all types of students as many of us know. We cannot overlook, however, the prejudicial statements attributed to her in the WSP.”
Parker was not fired or suspended after her statements. In fact, Parker didn’t face any disciplinary actions for what she said. President Kreiling initially said he wouldn’t take action against Parker because she told him in a private letter that she never made the comment. After Parker publicly admitted to making the statements, Kreiling still chose not to take action against her. In a letter to the college community, Kreiling emphasized the importance of the college being a place for equal education opportunity and academic freedom.
Despite the several criticisms, many students came to support Professor Parker and defend her statements. John Caroll, one of the students in Parker’s Honors Microeconomic class who heard the statement live, told Newsday “We’re talking about one of the best professors on campus being torn down.” Caroll told the WSP that “Statistics say that the order of grade performance is Jews, then Caucasians, and then blacks at the bottom … What she said on the day in question (February 21, 1990) was in no way prejudiced.” Another student in her class told Newsday “She is the professor that asks the most of me … She gives out her home phone number. Motivation was the issue — not race.”
One student who wasn’t in Parker’s class wrote a letter to Newsday defending Parker even stronger than her own students did. After criticizing President of Suffolk County Community College (SCCC) Robert Kreiling’s letter saying that you can’t predict a student’s academic performance based on their race or ethnic background, George Altemose wrote “Does any serious person doubt that the performance of Jewish college students has surpassed the performance of black college students, using any reasonable standard of measurement? Altemose continued, “Why is it that a simple observation that reflects negatively on the black population is met with such incredible outrage and righteous indignation? Are we supposed to deny that black students seem to do poorly in school, or do we simply have a tacit agreement not to mention it in public?”
The entire situation began to divide the Grant Campus. John Caroll, the same John Caroll who defended Professor Parker’s comments, wrote in an opinion in the May edition of the WSP that “The student body has been forced into two camps: the ‘supporters’ of Professor Jan Parker and those ‘against’ her. A person’s stance on this situation has been used as a measurement of their worth.” The Long Island NAACP demanded that Parker be fired and joined with several black SCCC professors to demand that more black professors get hired at SCCC.
Parker never faced any disciplinary actions for what she said. Parker retired from teaching at SCCC in 2002. In 2016, Parker was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year Award by the Jefferson’s Ferry Lifecare Retirement Community. It’s unknown where she currently resides.
