CCNY

[Pasted from Wikipedia]

The Philosophy Department, at the end of the 1939-1940 academic year, invited the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell to become a professor at CCNY. Members of the Catholic Church protested Russell’s appointment. A woman named Jean Kay filed suit against the Board of Higher Education to block Russell’s appointment on the grounds that his views on marriage and sex would adversely affect her daughter’s virtue, although her daughter was not a CCNY student. Russell wrote “a typical American witch-hunt was instituted against me.” Kay won the suit, but the Board declined to appeal after considering the political pressure exerted.

Russell took revenge in the preface of the first edition of his book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, which was published by the Unwin Brothers in the UK (the preface was not included in the U.S. editions). In a long précis that detailed Russell’s accomplishments including medals awarded by Columbia University and the Royal Society and faculty appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, UCLA, Harvard, the Sorbonne, Peking (the name used in that era), the LSE, Chicago, and so forth, Russell added, “Judicially pronounced unworthy to be Professor of Philosophy at the College of the City of New York.”

OH SNAP!