An Article from 1997 Which Throws Some Light on Neusner's Departure from Brown University (and his Move to South Florida)

World Class Scholar/World Class Pain

Barry Klein, St. Petersburg Times, Jun 29, 1997

Jacob Neusner never backs away from a fight. Truth be told, he picks a lot of them, though he'll deny it if you ask him. Some people, he says, just don't understand what he's saying. Some don't like hearing the truth.

Take all that screaming at Brown University. Was it his fault the people there couldn't handle his published critique of everything the university stood for? Or that it became national news, making Brown a poster child for elitist, overpriced schools?

And what was the big deal in New Zealand? Okay, so he called that nation's students passive and unprepared, and its culture intolerant and provincial - in interview after interview. Was that really worth a national uproar?

Jacob Neusner is a world-class scholar of Judaic studies, a prolific author and one of the most honored professors ever to teach at the University of South Florida. But former colleagues call him a bully. Friends say he can be blunt, demanding and deliberately provocative. Neusner describes himself as a "certified reactionary."

He fights, he says, because fighting is an act of purification. Argument, Neusner believes, forces dialogue, which strips away opinion and false assumption.

Sometimes, he says, truths get revealed. Sometimes, there is just more argument. Neusner, 64, will take it either way.

"Most people in this world make very little contribution because they try to avoid conflict," says Neusner, USF's Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies. "I think conflict is healthy. It's how you learn." Take no prisoners

Many people say they admire Neusner, but few say they can explain him. One reason is his brilliance: Great minds are rarely simple.

Neusner holds nine honorary degrees and has lectured in seven languages. He is credited with essentially creating the modern field of Judaic studies.

His record of publication is astonishing: Since 1960, he has written 738 books, or an average of more than one a month.

But genius is only one reason Neusner is a legend in American academia. He is at least as well-known for his take-no-prisoners approach to intellectual combat.

Even friends are wary of tangling with him.

"Having Jack for a friend is like having a pet lion," says Alan Zuckerman, a Brown University professor and former colleague. "He's fascinating, but he can bite your head off."

Neusner has earned his greatest notoriety from his harsh critiques of higher education. Many professors, he says, are lazy and undemanding. Many administrators, he says, have abandoned standards to make their universities more attractive to students.

But his work in Judaic studies is where the real blood was shed. For centuries, it had been a parochial subject, studied under Jewish auspices for Jewish purposes. The emphasis was on interpreting the meaning of religious documents, which were treated as literal truth.

Neusner had a different emphasis. He believed in opening the study of Judaism to anyone by treating it as an example of how religions work - over time, on cultures, in literature.

"This is an Enlightenment ideal of learning, and it's the university ideal of learning," he says.

It was not, however, the traditionalists' ideal, and Neusner was made to pay. His thesis that there is more than one Judaism, depending on time and cultural context, was attacked by what he calls "ethnic scholars," who pounced on any error they could find. He was vilified at important seminars on Judaic studies - once by a former teacher - and snubbed at conferences.

Neusner says none of it mattered: "They certainly didn't stop me."

Religion scholars say they owe Neusner a huge debt of gratitude.

"He was a pioneer," says Harold Stahmer, professor emeritus of religion at the University of Florida. "He put the rigorous study of Judaism on the map for universities and colleges."

Such accolades make one question impossible to avoid: What is a scholar as renowned as Neusner doing at USF, a school he sometimes refers to as "No-Name University?"

Mostly, he's enjoying himself. He teaches one religion class a semester and writes a lot. He says he likes his colleagues and admires their work.

USF administrators say they are happy to have him.

"He combines the best attributes of scholarship and teaching," says USF President Betty Castor. "He's outspoken, and sometimes because people hear from him frequently, they may get irritated. But I don't. Much more often than not, I agree with him."

Still, if you spend enough time with Neusner, you start to wonder whether truth-telling is the real reason for his many controversies. It's hard not to think he needs the occasional dust-up, if just to keep his juices flowing.

Some years ago, Neusner was invited to Jerusalem to deliver the keynote address at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Zion, a prominent scholarly journal. His thesis, which he submitted to organizers beforehand, was that almost everything the journal had ever published was worthless.

His invitation was quickly withdrawn.

Neusner had the speech published anyway. Then he had it published twice more - at the five- and 10-year anniversaries of his rejection. Brilliance and ego

Neusner hardly looks the firebrand at home, a comfortable, two-story house in St. Petersburg's Old Northeast that he shares with Suzanne, his wife of 33 years, and Koby, their yellow Labrador. Most days, he dresses in shorts, dress socks and an open-neck shirt. He is not always successful at combing what's left of his curly gray hair.

Neusner doesn't worry too much about appearances because there are so many other things to think about. His next book. The encyclopedia he is editing. A religion conference he is setting up for USF.

On a recent afternoon, he talked about higher education. It was classic Neusner - perceptive, witty and very blunt:

On what happens when professors get tenure: "They get very quiet. They come to the office and do the minimal work. They go out for coffee and read the paper. It's like seeing a plague, where you see people plopping and dying all around you."

On the dumbing down of universities: "We are responsible for lowering the expectations of the high schools and then on down. Why? Because the professors have asked less, accepted less, so the high schools can get away with less."

On what he would do as university president: "I would walk around the campus a great deal, smile at people and say wise things. A president is supposed to demonstrate vision. If they do that, they won't have to worry about fund raising. Money follows vision."

Friends and colleagues say Neusner's style is the product of several factors: brilliance, of course, but also ego, arrogance and a noticeable disregard for other people's feelings.

"He does not suffer people he regards as fools very lightly," says Stahmer, the professor emeritus at UF and a teacher of Neusner's at Columbia.

"He enjoys being the center of attention," says Zuckerman, his colleague at Brown.

William Scott Green, who has known Neusner for 30 years, says his friend can seem harsh because he doesn't care whether people agree with him.

"He likes to be challenged. He needs to be challenged," says Green, dean of the liberal arts college at the University of Rochester. "That's the mark of a critical intellect."

Philip Bray has a different interpretation of Neusner's style. A retired professor emeritus at Brown, Bray has clashed with Neusner several times and considers him a bully.

"He becomes very intense and very personal and I think rather vicious in his attacks," Bray says. "When he doesn't get what he wants, he attacks. And it's usually very personal, negative and unpleasant."

Although he is frequently interviewed - Neusner was quoted last year in publications ranging from Newsweek to the Weekly Planet - his biggest controversies have stemmed from his own writings.

In 1987, he wrote a column stating that America is a better place for Jews than Israel. That thesis was heresy to many Jews, who believe you can never attack the idea of Israel as a spiritual center. Even worse, he wrote the column for the Washington Post, where gentiles could read it.

"People missed the point and took it as a violent rejection of the norm," he says. "They got very upset. I don't think it was such a naughty thing to say."

The New Zealand controversy kicked up after he gave a journalist a report he had written on his experiences teaching there in 1994. It grew even hotter when he criticized the country's "cold intolerance of difference" in a magazine article he wrote a few months after returning to the United States.

He did, however, decline to stoke the issue even further by appearing on New Zealand's version of 60 Minutes.

"It was time to end it," he says. "I had a job back here."

Neusner says he doesn't enjoy controversy, although he considers it inevitable. He speaks out, he says, because he can. For most of his career, he has had tenure, which amounts to lifetime job security.

"As long as I don't want anything from anybody," he says, "they can't do anything to me." Making a mark

Neusner's love for Judaism grew in unlikely soil: the suburb of West Hartford, Conn., a predominantly Christian community. His mother, he says, was a "self-hating Jew" who was afraid her religion would make her seem less American. His father was not a religious man, Neusner says, but was fluent in Yiddish and active in Zionist causes.

Neusner says his father, a newspaper editor who boxed in his youth, was the single biggest influence in his life. He encouraged family discussions on a wide variety of topics and taught his son how to write at his newspaper, the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.

Neusner considers himself a classic third-generation American Jew. What the second generation tries to forget, he says, the third generation wants to remember. Although comfortable in his assimilated environment, Neusner was interested in all the things that made him different from his friends.

For his 16th birthday, he asked his parents for Hebrew lessons. At age 18, he decided to go to Harvard. Although he knew Judaism would be the focus of his life, he wanted to make his mark in mainstream America. Harvard, he was told, was the place to begin.

But Harvard was not a pleasant experience for Neusner. He was bored by his classes and disappointed with most of his teachers. He earned his history degree - and a Phi Beta Kappa key - in just three years, then spent a year abroad at Oxford. He moved to New York to complete his religious education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he earned a master's in Hebrew Letters, and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in religion.

By then, the Neusner style was beginning to emerge. So were the fights. While still a rabbinical student, Neusner insisted on publishing, submitting numerous articles to Jewish magazines and journals. His professors at the seminary couldn't believe his audacity. At the end of his first year, they considered expelling him.

They didn't, but the school warned him to stop.

He didn't.

"I would never allow that," he says. "My story is my writing. You read, and you learn whatever there is worthwhile to know about me. It's the only way because that's where I live." `Feel like King Kong...'

Although he professes disdain for what people say about him, Neusner can be sensitive on one subject: his mind-boggling productivity.

For this story, he made a point of counting all the books he has written. He eliminated anything that wasn't a separate book, such as translations, second editions and books that have been only proposed to publishers. That still left 738 books, or about 200 more than were written by Isaac Asimov, the late science fiction writer famous for his enormous body of work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently called Neusner the most prolific scholar working today. No one who visits the Neusner home would doubt it. Books fill entire walls.

Neusner does most of his research and writing at home, in a small study on the second floor. On a typical day, he wakes at 5 a.m. and is working by 6. He continues for at least three hours. "In the morning, I feel like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building," he says. "I can do anything."

He writes, and frequently rewrites, on a computer that has huge amounts of the Rabbinic literature in its memory. He generally stops midday to exercise at a fitness center. Then he has lunch, takes a nap and writes for several more hours.

He learned to write quickly at his father's newspaper. The key, he says, is finding the right beginning.

"The opening sentence is everything," he says. "If I've got a good hook, whoosh! Everything just goes."

Many of Neusner's books are technical treatises incomprehensible to anyone outside his field. But he also has written textbooks, encyclopedia articles, a guide to students on how to get the most out of a university experience, even a children's book. He recently co-wrote a very personal book on his years as a university professor with Noam, his youngest son.

"He was not controlling at all," says Noam Neusner, a former Tampa Tribune reporter who now works at Bloomberg News in Chicago. "It was an enjoyable experience."

When people learn he is Jacob Neusner's son, Noam says, they often ask what it was like to grow up with such an intimidating presence.

"They're surprised to learn it was exceptionally normal," he says. "We didn't spend dinner speaking in foreign languages just for the fun of it."

There were some aspects of life in the Neusner home that were unusual. While he was a professor at Brown, Neusner regularly invited students and professors home for dinner and discussion.

"I had no idea that it might seem odd for a child to talk to adults on a regular basis," Noam says.

And then there is his father's television habit. "He watches a lot of junk TV," Noam says. "He's seen every episode of Murder, She Wrote at least four times."

That's an exaggeration, says Neusner, who admits to a fondness for Wings, Seinfeld and Golden Girls. "I only watched every episode three times," he says. "By then, you start to memorize the dialogue."

Neusner spends a lot of time on the phone. Sometimes he just likes to gossip, but he also serves as mentor to many of his former students.

Since 1960, he has taught at 18 colleges and universities on four continents. He began his career at Columbia, spent a year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, then did lengthier stints at Brandeis University, Dartmouth College and Brown. He has been a visiting professor in Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden and Finland.

While at Brown, where he spent two tumultuous decades, Neusner directed the dissertations of 21 students, all of whom earned doctorates. He says many are now tenured professors. Several hold named chairs.

"In the academy, we're referred to as the `Sons of Neusner,' " says William Scott Green, the University of Rochester dean and a student of Neusner's at Dartmouth.

Neusner, he says, is a very demanding teacher.

"He's direct and he's blunt, both in his criticism and his praise," Green says. "He sets very high standards."

When Neusner was at Brown, stories circulated about his reducing students to tears. Neusner denies that but says he believes in pushing students for their best work.

"A good teacher always asks for more than the students can do," he says. "You shouldn't ask so much that they can't get there, and that's where I can make a mistake that someone else might not.

"I can be very impatient." Abandonment of standards

Neusner arrived at Brown University in 1968. It was a period of great tumult in higher education, especially at many of the elite schools. Students took over administration buildings, disrupted classes and - in Neusner's opinion - thoroughly co-opted faculty and administrators.

Many academics praise the changes that occurred in those years. They note the diversification of faculty along ethnic and gender lines. They point to the introduction of new courses, even new disciplines, designed to make curricula more relevant.

Neusner agrees that diversity helped the professorate. But from his perch as "University Professor" at Brown, an honored position at an Ivy League school that revels in its allegiance to the New Curricula, Neusner saw little else he considered beneficial.

Since the 1960s, Brown students have been allowed to structure their own course of study. If they don't get an A or a B in a class, they don't have to accept the grade. Even the possibility of failure, university officials say, lessens a student's appetite for intellectual exploration.

Neusner hated that approach to education. In 1981, his 13th year at Brown, he decided to make his disgust clear. His vehicle was a column in the Brown student newspaper, which he titled "A Commencement Address You'll Never Hear."

Here's some of what he wrote:

"We the faculty take no pride in our educational achievements with you. . . . For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded. When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When you were late to class, we ignored it. When your work came in beyond deadline, we pretended not to care.

"Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. . . . Despite your fantasies, it was not that we wanted to be liked by you. It was that we did not want to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense, smiles and easy Bs."

The reaction was fierce.

Wrote one student: "We will leave (here) rejoicing that we need no longer tolerate teachers below the standards of Harvard and Yale. . . . Remember, we'll be richer, more famous and more successful than you'll ever be."

Neusner, who continued to make his argument in newspaper interviews and on such TV shows as Today and Donahue, says the incident isolated him from many colleagues at Brown.

He stayed there for several more years, teaching, writing and refining his critique of the university where he worked and higher education in general. But at Brown, at least, fewer people were listening.

In January 1990, Frank Borkowski, USF's president at the time, offered Neusner the position of Distinguished Research Professor. Borkowski was working hard to attract big names to USF, and in religious studies, Neusner was the biggest name there was.

Borkowski's timing was perfect. Neusner had decided to leave Brown as soon as the last of his four children was on his own. That time was now. Like getting married

One of the things Neusner likes best about USF is what he calls its lack of pretension.

"The cynicism that is so corrupting in the northeastern universities isn't here," he says. "The struggle for position and preference isn't here. The people are much straighter with you."

Though Neusner says he felt comfortable at USF from the beginning, his colleagues needed time to get used to him.

"It was sort of like getting married," says Darrell Fasching, chairman of the religious studies department where Neusner teaches. "We had to learn to recognize moods, to live with occasional moments of bad temper."

But the transition is over, he says, and the dividends are rolling in. "We have gone from being a rather sleepy department to one that's very visible in the field," Fasching says. "That's because of his reputation and his work bringing important conferences to USF."

As a Distinguished Research Professor, Neusner is paid $105,000 annually. (He declines to say how much he earns from his books, except to say, "It's a living.") He teaches one class a semester and continues to write.

His taste for combat certainly hasn't lessened.

Not long ago, Neusner fired off a response to a review of the book he co-wrote with Noam. The letter was a lengthy, point-by-point disputation of the review, even though the review's main thesis was that Neusner's attackers had been wrong to silence him throughout his career.

In other words, Neusner attacked his defender.

"Oh, he meant well," Neusner says, "but he was wrong. Nobody has ever silenced me." Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.