Columbia College professor Zafra Lerman has weathered some stormy relationships in her 33 years at the school. She lost the chairmanship of the science department—which she founded—in the late 1980s, after a significant faction in the department rebelled against her. And three years ago Columbia brass ordered a midnight raid on her lab at the college’s Institute of Science Education and Science Communication. The break-in led to the firing of a member of Lerman’s staff, who allegedly used a lab computer to generate cartoon images of Columbia president Warrick Carter that had been popping up on posters around the school and on a Web site. Now the latest storm is blowing up into an international academic squall.
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According to Lerman’s attorney, Laurel Bellows, the professor returned from a lecture gig at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo last month to find that she’d been suspended without pay, locked out of her office, and banned from campus. To make matters worse, Bellows says Columbia is “torpedoing” the project dearest to Lerman’s heart: the Malta Conference, a biennial meeting of scientists dedicated to fostering peace in the Middle East. Columbia has provided critical administrative support since its 2003 launch. But in late October, with the fourth Malta Conference scheduled to start in Amman, Jordan, on November 14, the college canceled most of its staff support and a promised donation. Bellows says the administration instructed Lerman’s staff not to communicate with her, canceled her international cell phone, and took full control of the conference account—which had been set up and managed through the college—making it impossible for Lerman or anyone associated with the Malta group to access it.
Walter says the Malta Conference grew out of a conversation he and Lerman had at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. “We were talking about things we as chemists might do for peace,” he recalls, and about how “if you get to know people as human beings, it makes a difference. There was very little opportunity [in the Middle East] for that. And they need to get together on scientific issues too: water, the environment, education. Zafra took the idea and ran with it.”
According to Bellows, Columbia administrators will argue that Lerman’s tenure should be revoked at a faculty committee meeting scheduled for November 30. Bellows declined to discuss the alleged cause for revoking tenure except to say that the grounds, involving the use of a grant, “have not been very specific,” and that whatever Lerman did had been approved by Columbia’s administration “at the highest level.”
Sue Basko—a founder of Friends of the Three Arts Club, which hopes to restore the building to its original use—has asked 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly to apply for a change in the zoning law, pronto. As things stand, Basko says, “anybody can turn their backyard into a cemetery or their house into a columbarium.”
