There were varying accounts of what Martin then said, but he later confessed, if he did not boast, that he called the young woman ‘a bigot and a racist’. According to her, he included ‘f***ing bitch’ as he ‘towered over her’. Although the campus police were called, no formal complaint was made. However, it was not Martin’s style to let things rest, still less apologise. During the professor’s ensuing polemics, Michelle Plantec received no support from the college, whose rules she supposed herself to be honouring, suffered a nervous breakdown, and quit Wellesley to pursue her medical studies elsewhere.

Here’s the kicker: Martin was black, and Plantec, like Lefkowitz, Jewish. Wouldn’t you know it? Some people never learn. Lefkowitz was already notorious for denying that Socrates was black (as one of her students insisted) and for not agreeing that Cleopatra should have been played by a black actress, even though all the Ptolemies were of Macedonian descent. When things got nasty, Lefkowitz’s colleagues might have been expected to endorse her views at least about the unlikelihood of Aristotle being a klepto-sopher, but at least one held back on the grounds that the issue was not ‘in her field’. Common decency ain’t that common any more.

Lefkowitz was finally vindicated only when Martin’s suit was thrown out and his reputation with it. This did not inhibit him from continuing to endorse the Nation of Islam’s evidence-free creed that the Jews were the prime movers of the slave trade (the ‘black Holocaust’) or from saying, very loud, that Jews were ‘totally incapable of telling the truth’. As for the author of Not Out of Africa, the ‘hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating, homosexual, Dikeda Left-o-witch’ was said to be propounding ‘a rationalisation for the re-enslavement of the African people’. When a black academic, Marcellus Andrews, called Martin ‘a racist Pied Piper’, he underlined the cowardice of most of Lefkowitz’s colleagues. This silly, grim farce is recounted with a scholar’s footnoted reticence, but imagine if Joe Heller or Mel Brooks, or both, could have a hand in its revision.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP