University of Minnesota prof gets tenure, puts dickish regents on blast
Katharine Gerbner had good news and bad news last week.
The good, as expressed in (what else?!) a tweet, was that Gerbner, a Columbia- and Harvard-educated historian and published author, had earned tenure as a professor at the University of Minnesota. That means her job's more protected from termination.
And that means she felt more comfortable authoring the tweets that followed, which detailed Gerbner's infuriating-sounding experience in trying to get the U of M's Board of Regents to reckon with the school's racist past.
Gerbner knows a thing or two about the history of racism in this country: Her 2018 book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World explores the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and slave ownership in the United States. If you wanted someone's insight into historic discrimination and its echoes down through the generations, you could certainly do worse than Gerbner.
And her University of Minnesota History department colleagues ain't too shabby, either. Gerbner credits them with creating a "brilliant exhibit" on a dark period in school history: 1930 to 1942, when racists, anti-Semites, and eugenicists ranked among the school's highest-ranking professors and administrators.
Read more: http://www.citypages.com/news/university-of-minnesota-prof-gets-tenure-puts-dickish-regents-on-blast/509959171