The contentious Columbia Teachers College professor canned for plagiarism amid an investigation into a noose hung on her office door backed off charges of racism yesterday – and instead accused the school of playing vicious politics.
“So much of it is political, it is sick,” said Madonna Constantine. “Let them make it a racial issue. It’s all about alliances.”
“All of this is very fishy,” the ejected educator said. “I don’t know what to think in terms of motivation. I think the climate is political.”
Constantine, a tenured professor of psychology and education with a focus on racial issues, was fired on June 12 after an outside panel ruled she had plagiarized other work in her articles.
At the time, Constantine said she felt “systematically targeted.”
“As one of the only two tenured black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted,” she said.
The firing caps off a rocky series of events at the school that came to a head last October when Constantine said she discovered the noose dangling from the handle of her office door as the school’s investigation raged. Police opened a criminal probe but have yet to identify a suspect.
But Constantine insisted yesterday she was innocent – and that it was she who had been plagiarized.
Her attorney, Paul Giacomo, displayed a briefing in which he claimed that in all the instances she was accused of copying the ideas of others, her work had actually appeared first.
“They are trying to whitewash and get rid of this toxic situation,” Giacomo said. “They were trying to eliminate the situation by eliminating Dr. Constantine.”
He said his client had until July 15 to decide whether she would appeal the firing to a faculty committee.
If she does not, he said, she will be paid through the end of the year. If Constantine does appeal, she will no longer be paid.
“Basically, she is being blackmailed,” he said.