SAN JOSE – A controversial anthropology professor at San Jose State, who contended she was a victim of a “woke activist mob” for opposing the repatriation of Native American remains and posing in a photo with an ancient skull, has agreed to leave the university next year.
Prof. Elizabeth Weiss and the university reached a settlement that allows her to retire with full benefits at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, after she claimed in a lawsuit that the university retaliated against her and violated her First Amendment rights when it locked her out of the collection of skeletal remains.
Weiss and the university “have reached an agreement in which she has voluntarily submitted her resignation effective May 29, 2024, and will dismiss her lawsuit,” the university said in a statement.
Instead of completing her tenure on the San Jose campus, however, she will be in New York City as a fellow at the Heterodox Academy’s Center for Academic Pluralism, according to her lawyer David Hoffa from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm representing individual liberty cases. The legal journal Law360 first reported the settlement on Friday.
Weiss, a professor at San Jose State since 2004, caused a fury in the academic world, igniting a debate pitting academic freedom against cultural sensitivity.
She had claimed she was the target of cancel culture after tweeting the photo of herself returning to campus after COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2021, holding a skull with her bare hands and writing: “So happy to be back with some old friends.”
She had already been the subject of criticism over her recently published book — “Repatriation and Erasing the Past” — when 870 academics from Stanford to Oxford denounced it as “explicitly racist ideology.”
In the midst of the backlash, San Jose State University Provost Vincent Del Casino Jr., posted a letter to faculty saying the image of Weiss holding the skull “evoked shock and disgust” and asked, “in what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends?’”
The university subsequently closed off the collection to Weiss, as well as everyone else.
Val Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band who serves as the tribal liaison to the UC system in its efforts to comply with repatriation laws, said he is pleased that Weiss will be leaving the university.
“It’s a very callous person who believes that they (the remains) are the property of the university and because she is on the faculty that she has the preferred standing to the tribes themselves,” Lopez said Monday. “It’s so darn arrogant and such a hard colonial perspective on conquering and dominating indigenous peoples and it’s just absolutely wrong.”
Weiss did not respond to an email request for comment Monday or a request through her lawyer, but she previously told the Bay Area News Group that “science is more important than sensitivities.”
The skull was part of the collection of Native American remains from the Muwekma Ohlone tribe unearthed in the East Bay between 1962 and 1968 by San Jose State anthropologists. The bones date back as far as 2000 B.C. with some from the 1770s. Native Americans are working with federal and state officials to return remains to the tribes, believing that although their unearthed ancestors are already doomed to “wander the earth without peace” because their bones were disturbed, Lopez said, reburying them will at least honor them.
Weiss had hoped her lawsuit would pressure the university to reopen the collection to her, but it never did. During settlement negotiations, she was able to continue speaking about her views opposing repatriation in the classroom as well as host speakers from other universities — what Hoffa considered two victories for academic freedom.
Still, if she didn’t agree to leave the university, Weiss feared she might be fired instead and lose her retirement benefits, Hoffa said. Weiss earns an annual salary of nearly $92,300 a year, plus benefits.
“She felt that at this time in the current climate with some of the restrictions on the studying of skeletal remains and other things that are in the works regarding repatriation that her opportunities at the university may not have been as great as she was hoping,” Hoffa said in an interview Monday. “So by retiring at this time, she’ll be able to get her retirement and then she’ll pursue other more fruitful opportunities.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com