Despite having been cleared of wrongdoing for filing a legal application against the University of Cape Town over its resolutions on Israel, Professor Adam Mendelsohn remains deprived of his leadership position in his department.
He was suspended as head of the Department of Historical Studies at UCT last year after complaints were made against him by a number of colleagues, who claimed that he was unfit for the role after he had filed a legal application against the university over its resolutions on Israel.
An investigation commissioned by the university and undertaken by Mcaciso Stansfield Incorporated, a law firm, found that Mendelsohn’s suspension was engineered and motivated by colleagues who took issue with his position on the Gaza war. The report found that Mendelsohn had done nothing wrong, that the suspension should be lifted and that mediation should be undertaken to rebuild relationships.
The investigation concluded that there had been a clear ideological inflection to the dispute, and that a disagreement over policy “isn’t a justifiable basis to establish grounds of distrust in an employment relationship unless such views are unlawful or in breach of employment obligations.”
UCT has refused to share the full report with Mendelsohn, who then launched a legal bid to compel access.
Mendelsohn was quoted in The Jewish Report as saying that the University had declined to release the report prior to mediation. “My suspension should have come to an end, and I should therefore immediately again have become HOD when I was cleared of all charges. Any mediation process can take place thereafter. The current situation is unlawful,” he contended.
He has waited for six months to be reinstated.
There have also been allegations that the UCT leadership tried to interfere with the report.
According to an unidentified “stakeholder” quoted by the The Jewish Report: “The Dean of Humanities, Professor Shose Kessi, was first interviewed as a witness, and she later pressed for changes to the report, some of which the investigator refused, others which he accepted. More troubling [is that] when the investigator prepared an affidavit in the Mendelsohn litigation explaining what had occurred, UCT attempted to prevent him from filing it. Instead, the university’s attorneys drafted a substitute affidavit on his behalf and sought to have him use that in place of his own.”
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