New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Photo: Wikimedia

The New Jersey Institute of Technology faces a suit by a lecturer who claims his teaching contract was not renewed after school officials learned of his connections to the so-called “alt-right” movement.

In a suit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Jason Jorjani claims he lost his job based on false representations of his views.

The university, meanwhile, is denying any wrongdoing.

He says faculty members wrongly accused him, in a campuswide email and in the school paper, of using pseudoscience to support a racist ideology. In particular, he says they accused him of attempting to use details relating to human evolution to support eugenics and white supremacy. Jorjani also cites a statement from the faculty and staff in the school newspaper, which likens his views to the eugenic beliefs behind forced sterilization laws, Jim Crow legislation, restrictive immigration quotas, and the Holocaust.

Jorjani says in the suit that he was libeled by statements from NJIT and its faculty, because they charge him with moral repugnancy and being unfit to teach. The statements were made despite the fact that the defendants knew them to be false, or had reckless disregard for the truth, he alleges.

The suit doesn't make Jorjani's philosophies entirely clear but it said he has “formed alliances within the loose body of fellow citizens who associated with the political movement known as the alt right in order to widen the message of his philosophy, which he describes as an affirmation of the Indo-European Tradition.” In January 2017 he formed a group called the Alt Right Corp.

He also says in the complaint that he spoke briefly at a 2016 conference of a group known as the National Policy Institute. Articles in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times refer to the National Policy Institute as a white nationalist organization. He says he attended to promote books printed by his then-employer, Arktos Media. The Atlantic says Arktos is known as the “preeminent publisher of the alt-right.”

The suit brings claims for retaliation under the First Amendment against NJIT and its president, Joel Bloom; and defamation claims against Bloom, Dean Kevin Belfield of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at NJIT, and three faculty members.

Jorjani began teaching at NJIT in the fall of 2015, but his duties were interrupted at the start of the 2017-18 school year, according to the suit. He claims he was targeted by an “ideological watchdog,” Patrik Hermansson, who approached him pretending to be a student seeking information about suppression of right-wing thought in academia. Jorjani claims the student gained his confidence, then met with him in the summer of 2017 at an Irish pub in New York, where the two spoke for several hours and focused on race, immigration and politics, among other things. Part of the conversation was recounted in a Sept. 19, 2017, New York Times op-ed article on what it described as Hermansson's secret infiltration of the alt-right movement. The Times also posted a video from Hermansson's meeting with Jorjani in the pub, which the suit claims was “cut and spliced from many different parts of multiple conversations, then restitched together to falsely portray plaintiff's views as extreme or sensational.”

According to the suit, after Bloom and Belfield saw the New York Times op-ed and video, they promptly sent an email to faculty and staff calling Jorjani's statements “repugnant and antithetical to our institution's core values.” Five days later, on Sept. 25, 2017, NJIT placed Jorjani on paid leave, citing his statements in the Times piece and statements indicating association with organizations that he did not list on his outside activity disclosure form as required.

Bloom also ordered an investigation of Jorjani, and several faculty members denounced him in the campus newspaper, according to Jorjani's complaint. And on Feb. 13, 2018, NJIT notified Jorjani by letter that his employment contract would not be renewed beyond the current school year, he claims.

Jorjani says in his suit that NJIT violated his “academic freedom with gross hypocrisy; stifled plaintiff's free search for truth; retaliated against plaintiff for the exercise of free speech; and subjected plaintiff to institutional censorship and discipline for speaking and writing as a citizen.”

At one point in the video, he is seen telling Hermansson, “We will have a Europe in 2050 where the bank notes have Adolph Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that, like Napoleon, like Alexander. Not like some weird monster, who is unique in his own category. No, he's just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

In an nj.com interview that followed the Times coverage, Jorjani said he was describing in the video what might happen in the future, not what he hoped would happen.

Jorjani's lawyer, Frederick Kelly of Monroe, New York, didn't return a call about the case.

NJIT spokeswoman Denise Kelly said in a statement: “NJIT has not yet had an opportunity to review Dr. Jorjani's complaint. However, any and all claims of wrongdoing by the university or its representatives are untrue, and we intend to vigorously defend against any such claims.”