Harassment of students In October 1991, a Wellesley student, Michelle Plantec, while on hall duty, claimed that she saw Martin wandering in a female dorm in a restricted area, in violation of a rule requiring male guests to be escorted. When she asked him about his escort, Martin, she claims, responded using profanity, accused her of racism and bigotry, and positioned himself so as to physically intimidate her. Martin denied all these claims, and declared that a group of women "accosted him rudely, despite circumstances that in his view made the legitimacy of his presence obvious." In an interview with a campus newspaper, Plantec said: "I stopped him and said, 'Excuse me, sir, who are you with?' He looked at me and said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'What Wellesley student are you with?' and at that point he exploded and called me a fucking bitch, a racist, and a bigot, among other things...after all this, he went back into his meeting and said the only reason I had stopped him was because he was black." Martin, in the same interview, agreed that there was an angry exchange, but denied that he used profanity. He also said he asked permission from the dormitory desk before going to the restroom. "Coming out of the restroom, I was rudely accosted by a group of women who were coming up the stairs behind me...I tried to ignore them for a short space of time...and eventually, when we got to the top of the stairs I became very annoyed, and expressed my annoyance to the people who were behind me." Lefkowitz controversy, Wellesley course controversy, and lawsuit Mary Lefkowitz was a classics professor at Wellesley, who taught courses on ancient Greek culture. In a 1992 article for The New Republic, she challenged what she felt were ahistorical Afrocentric claims, such as the claim that Greek philosophy was plagiarized from African sources. Following publication of the New Republic piece, she and Martin became engaged in a heated disagreement, with Martin criticizing her in his department's Africana Studies Newsletter, and she criticizing him in The Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and elsewhere. As this controversy progressed, Lefkowitz discovered that students in Martin's class were assigned a book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, compiled by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. The book's thesis