ThoughtCrime: 03/01/90
Professor Dismissed for Openness to Revisionism
Donald D. Hiner, an assistant professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue
University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), was dismissed on March 1 for informing
his students that here are two sides to the Holocaust story. Hiner, 51,
had been suspended on February 14 after a student who had taped one of his
lectures in a survey course on modern Western history went to the press
and academic authorities at IUPUI with the terrible news that the instructor
advocated a critical examination of various components of the the orthodox
Holocaust story. Two weeks of press witch-hunting, and the intervention
of professional thoughtpolice from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,
sealed Hiner's fate.
Hiner was exposing his students to standard revisionist arguments on
the Holocaust as well as the more orthodox views. Hiner was accused of holding
out the possibility that most concentration camp victims died of disease,
and that the evidence adduced by proponents of the extermination theory
was less than overwhelming.
Unfortunately for Professor Hiner, a doctoral candidate in European history
at Indiana University who holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University
of Iowa and has done two years post-graduate study at the University of
Tuebingen in Germany, he was not tenured, and was thus an easy victim to
the academic auto-da-fe staged by the press, the Wiesenthal Center,
and IUPUI liberal arts dean John Barlow and history department chairman
William Schneider.
After the tape was brought to Hiner's superiors, his lectures were subject
to observation by the history department. Hiner was also advised to revise
his course syllabus by decreasing coverage of World War II and its aftermath.
Wiesenthal Center director Gerald Margolis told the press that Hiner
had "trivialized" the Holocaust, thereby committing "a sacrilege." Hiner
was first suspended and then fired for having presented material, "not relevant
to the content of the course and which lacks scholarly substance."
Adapted from IHR Newsletter #72, April 1990 - Institute for Historical
Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death."
George Orwell
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