Brooklyn College on Monday reversed an earlier decision not to hire an adjunct professor to teach a seminar on Middle East politics, a decision that the professor and others called politically motivated.

In a statement issued Monday evening, Karen L. Gould, the college’s president, said she had endorsed a recommendation from the political science department that the adjunct, Kristofer Petersen-Overton, teach the class this spring.

On his Web site, Mr. Petersen-Overton, who is a student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, called the decision “a victory for academic freedom and an outcome I think we can all be proud of.”

The college’s initial decision not to accept the political science department’s recommendation to hire Mr. Petersen-Overton came under scrutiny because it came shortly after Dov Hikind, a Democratic state assemblyman from Brooklyn, expressed concern to the college president and the chancellor of CUNY about the “slanted nature” of Mr. Petersen-Overton’s works, saying that his views on the conflict in the Middle East were one-sided and anti-Israeli....