A popular faculty member at Temple University is receiving widespread support among other academics across the country after his annual teaching contract was not renewed.
Dr. Anthony Monteiro, an expert on W.E.B. Du Bois, has taught in Temple’s African American Studies Department for the past nine years as a full-time, non-tenured instructor. But he says that he was recently notified that the university has ended his employment and alleges that it is retaliation for his outspokenness and his critique of Dr. Teresa Soufas, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts.
“This is nothing less than a retaliatory and revenge firing,” said Monteiro who spoke at a press conference in Philadelphia last week demanding his immediate reinstatement. “It is her getting back at me for my standing up to her bullying, pointing fingers at Black men, her authoritarian attempt to take over African American Studies and my taking the struggles for the life and integrity of our department to the Black community — those to whom we are ultimately accountable.”
Tensions between Monteiro and Soufas had been brewing for some time. Last November, he accused the dean of unfairly denying him of the opportunity to chair a doctoral dissertation committee after he publicly criticized her for placing the department into receivership two years ago and appointing Dr. Jayne Drake — a White scholar of American literature — as the interim chair.
“I think it’s a direct response to the battle we waged in the spring to get Dr. Molefi Kete Asante as the chair of the department over her objections,” Monteiro said at the time. “But it required a public airing of the situation in the department and that went way beyond anything she can personally tolerate.”
But Asante — who also has publicly clashed with Soufas in the past but was appointed chair by her after the department unanimously recommend him to the post last year — told Diverse last November that Monteiro’s allegations were simply not true.
