A lot of college catalogs mention the church identity of their school, so I didn’t know if it really meant something [in Davidson’s case]. Nobody had told me anything about it as an exclusionary principle, but I did learn when I was here that there were no Jews on the faculty. Not just not tenured, but there were no Jews on the faculty at all. So, that meant that they took this notion of who they were Davidson took this notion of who they were seriously, and they put it in practice
Dr. Ronald Linden retired in 2019 as Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pitt, he served as Director of the European Studies Center and Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies. A Princeton Ph.D., Dr. Linden was Director of Research for Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany during the momentous changes that ended communism and the division of Germany. In 2009 he was invited to contribute to the volume, The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the US Department of State. He was a candidate for hire at Davidson in the spring of 1977.
Summary: Ron Linden describes applying for a professorial job at Davidson College in 1976. He speaks about the interview process and the discussion he had with College President Samuel Reid Spencer about Linden’s Jewish faith and how the Davidson bylaws only permitted Christian teachers. Linden recounts his surprise when he received a job offer that was subsequently rescinded and his shock when the incident made national news as “The Linden Affair.” He details his experience visiting Davidson as a guest of the college four decades after Davidson discriminated against him on account of his Jewish background.
Related Artifacts
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