Jan 11, 2021
ADL calls on professor who used Nazi salute during Zoom conference to apologize, others demand he be fired.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
A University of Pennsylvania anthropology professor is in hot water after he used a Nazi salute and phrase during a Zoom conference with other academics, the independent student newspaper
The Daily Pennsylvanian reported Sunday.
Prof. Robert Schuyler of the university’s department of anthropology was one of several academics participating in a Zoom call during the Society for Historical Archaeology’s (SHA) annual conference when he was cut off by the moderator, Della Scott-Ireton, director of the University of West Florida Public Archaeology Network, who was trying to keep the discussion on the topic of the accessibility of documents for the SHA conference.
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Just after insurrectionists attempted to take over the Capitol last week, a professor of archaeology did the Nazi salute during a plenary session at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s virtual meeting.
“Sieg heil, you,” said Robert Schuyler, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, raising his hand in the Nazi salute, as seen in a clip of the incident circulating on social media.
Schuyler, who was in plenary’s virtual audience, targeted panelist Liz Quinlan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of York in Britain, after she declined to entertain questions from him about society membership rates. She deemed the questions unrelated to her comments on creating accessibility documents for the conference, according to a public account of what happened from independent bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove. Quinlan had not finished her remarks but Schuyler continued to interrupt her.
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Robert Schuyler (bottom right) interrupted Liz Quinlan (second from top left) and used a Nazi phrase and salute during the opening plenary of a virtual archaeology conference last week. Liz Quinlan
Public use of Nazi salute rocks archaeology conference
Jan. 11, 2021 , 3:30 PM
Attendees at last week’s annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) were shocked by a public, online altercation that included a past president of the organization using a Nazi salute and phrase during the conference’s opening plenary session.
Liz Quinlan, a doctoral student at the University of York, was thrilled to be an invited speaker at the plenary on Wednesday, 6 January. She served as the accessibility and inclusion coordinator of both the January 2020 conference, held in person in Boston, and this year’s virtual conference. As she was talking about her work, which included an LGBTQ+ guide to Boston in 2020 and a push to provide live closed captioning and tran
Robert Schuyler, who teaches anthropology and holds a position at the Penn Museum, held his arm in a Nazi salute and said “Sieg heil to you” after a speaker told him that the meeting, a Society for Historical Archaeology conference plenary session, was not the place for him to discuss a question he had raised about membership.
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A University of Pennsylvania professor caused outrage last week after he used a Nazi phrase and salute in response to being interrupted in a virtual conference.
Robert Schuyler, who teaches anthropology, said “Sieg Heil” and thrust his arm up in a Nazi-style salute when University of York PhD candidate Liz Quinlan cut him off in an attempt to redirect the conversation.
As seen in the video, Quinlan tells Schuyler “this is not the place” to discuss how COVID-19 has affected membership of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The professor then exclaims “Excuse me, I have freedom of speech, and you’re not going to tell this is not the place to bring this up!”