By Jason Reza Jorjani
To the Philosophy Faculty and Graduate Students of Stony Brook University,
On December 5th the Leiter Report, the leading blog in academic philosophy (famous for its departmental rankings), featured a post by Brian Leiter himself libelously describing me as a “NeoNazi” and identifying the New Jersey Institute ofN Technology as my workplace and the State University of New York at Stony Brook as the institution that granted me a PhD. I am still on the Stony Brook Philosophy Department graduate student list serve (you forgot to unsubscribe me when I graduated), so I regularly receive student representative notes from faculty meetings. In a meeting held on December 7th, an unidentified person (the only unidentified person in the transcript) asserts that a PhD alumnus “is involved with the Aryan White Supremacist movement” and announces that there will be a review of my dissertation research preceding a possible public statement disavowing me. The claimant concluded after watching “a couple” of my videos (I currently have 23, in English and Persian, on my YouTube playlist that “they are appropriately described as Aryan White Supremacist.” While I am not named in these notes, I am eventually named by a current graduate student later in the email thread that begins with an upload of the faculty meeting notes, where the statement “many people are concerned” also suggests that I have already been widely slandered and defamed. Here are…