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These New Attacks on Academic Freedom May Be Just the Beginning
While U.S. faculty have long been outspoken on controversial issues, these attacks on academic freedom are the worst in nearly 60 years.
May 19, 2024
During the wave of campus protests opposing the U.S.-backed war on Gaza and calling for divestment from Israel, students weren’t the only demonstrators to face arrest—supportive faculty members were also caught up in the crackdown.
At Columbia University, where president Minouche Shafik was pressed to resign by members of Congress for being too lenient toward the protesters, the university’s School of Public Health censured a South African faculty member from teaching about the health impacts of settler-colonialism. Shafik has also placed professors who have used terms like “settler colonialism” or “apartheid” in the context of Israel under investigation for alleged anti-Jewish discrimination, and removed professors from teaching assignments in response to complaints by rightwing students.
When Shafik testified before Congress in mid-April, she announced that Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad had been removed as chair of the university’s Academic Review Committee following claims by Republicans that he had said Hamas’s murder of Jews was “awesome, astonishing, astounding, and incredible”—even though he never said anything of the sort. She also failed to correct false claims by Republican committee members regarding Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke, stating that she and Massad were under investigation for discriminatory remarks.
As Irene Mulvey, national president of the American Association of University Professors, toldThe New York Times, “We are witnessing a new era of McCarthyism where a House committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater. President Shafik’s public naming of professors under investigation to placate a hostile committee sets a dangerous precedent for academic freedom and has echoes of the cowardice often displayed during the McCarthy era.”
And Columbia isn’t the only university where faculty feel as though their academic freedoms are being steadily revoked.
Indiana University faculty have overwhelmingly endorsed a vote of no confidence in their president, provost, and vice-provost for suspending a tenured political science professor for a full year from teaching or advising—without the normal review process—after he hosted a talk by an Israeli-American peace activist that the university tried to ban.
Columbia isn’t the only university where faculty feel as though their academic freedoms are being steadily revoked.
Jodi Dean, a tenured professor at Hobart & William Smith College and a noted political theorist, has been suspended from teaching duties as a result of writing a blog post supportive of the Hamas attack. Although there had been no complaints from students about their interactions with Dean, the college’s president claimed that she had led students to feel “threatened in or outside of the classroom.” While her essay was widely condemned, even by pro-Palestinian faculty, there has been no such disciplinary action against professors who have defended the far greater violence against civilians by U.S.-backed Israeli forces.
At Texas Tech University, Jairo Fúnez-Flores, an assistant professor of curriculum studies and teacher education, had criticized U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine on social media and was suspended after unsubstantiated claims of antisemitism appeared on a rightwing website. Similarly, at New York University, a popular adjunct who is critical of Israel was suspended due to complaints that were not revealed to him or the public. At University of Arizona College of Education, an assistant professor and community liaison were placed on leave for leading a discussion about civilian casualties in Gaza. An adjunct professor in American cultural studies at Washington University was “relieved of all job duties” and “prohibited from being on any part of the University campus” after taking part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration campus in which he and other peaceful protesters were arrested.
Graduate student instructors and teaching assistants have been particularly vulnerable and, in several instances, have been removed for simply noting the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Administrations have been interfering with curriculum as well. At Albany Law School, a professor was ordered to unpublish a law review article by a prominent U.S. legal scholar and a legal briefing issued by a respected U.S. civil rights organization related to Israel-Palestine.
Unfortunately, the Biden Administration, rather than fighting this crackdown on academic freedom, has been supporting it. The Department of Education has opened a Title VI investigation into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because a Black professor in the Department of Communication said in a class that “Israel and the United States do not give a shit about international law or war crimes.” Such criticism of U.S. policy, according to the Biden Administration, may constitute discrimination against Jews.
Biden also launched an investigation against a George Washington University psychology professor for alleged antisemitism for critical comments about Israel just days after an independent investigation found no evidence to support the charges.
Faculty, however, are fighting back, particularly in defense of their students. At Columbia, Barnard, the University of Texas, and elsewhere, there have been walkouts and work stoppages. Faculty senates have condemned administrations for their violations of academic freedom, issued no confidence resolutions against their administrations, and have provided support—such as food deliveries—for students in their encampments.
Scores of faculty members have also been arrested, risking their careers and even physical safety.
At Indiana University, four professors were detained trying to protect students engaged in peaceful protests in a recognized free speech zone on campus, and have since been banned from campus for one year. At Washington University, historian Steve Tamari was brutally beaten by police while supporting peaceful demonstrators and was hospitalized with multiple broken ribs and a broken hand. Even faculty observers who were not participating in the protests themselves have become targets, such as at Emory University, where Economics professor Caroline Frohlin was body slammed during her arrest and Noelle McAfee, chair of Emory’s philosophy department chair, was also arrested. At Dartmouth, Annelise Orlick, the sixty-five-year-old head of the Jewish Studies program, was twice pushed to the ground while being arrested and initially banned from campus for six months, although that was later rescinded.
While U.S. faculty have long been outspoken on controversial issues, these attacks on academic freedom are the worst in nearly sixty years. While they are in part related to pressure from rightwing Zionist groups and donors, these actions can best be understood in light of the broader attack by the right against higher education as a whole.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, for example, has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s antisemitic comments and associations, and touted the Great Replacement Theory and other antisemitic tropes; she is now leading the charge against antiwar and pro-Palestinian faculty for alleged antisemitism. The attacks that led to the forced resignation of Harvard University president Claudine Gay were orchestrated not by Zionist groups, but by figures like conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who was also behind the assault on critical race theory.
The crackdown is having an impact. A survey of Middle East Studies faculty revealed that “82 percent of all U.S.-based respondents, including almost all assistant professors (98 percent), said that they self-censor when they speak professionally about the Israeli-Palestinian issue.”
While the right may be taking advantage of concerns of antisemitism, this disturbing trend should not be seen in isolation. What’s happening on campuses may only be the beginning.
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DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," one lawyer said.
May 02, 2024
Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.
"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."
"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.
"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.
Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.
The Interceptrevealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.
OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according toThe Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."
CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."
The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.
After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses," Mitchell added, "he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests."
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Violent Arrest of Emory Professor Spotlights Brutality of Police Crackdown on Campus Protests
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy," said one foreign policy expert. "And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now."
Apr 26, 2024
Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin approached several police officers who were holding a student down on the ground on Thursday and demanded an explanation—but by the end of the day videos of her own arrest became some of the most widely circulated images of the rapidly spreading anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S.
As she knelt down to ask the university officers, "What are you doing?" another law enforcement agent grabbed her arm and pushed her away before repeatedly ordering her to "get on the ground."
"Stop it!" Fohlin yelled before the officer pushed her to the ground and called for more police to help subdue her.
Fohlin then screamed, "Oh my God!" as the police pushed her down and told the police that she was a professor at the university as they held her on the ground.
Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools, with more than 400 peoplebeing detained so far.
The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."
"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."
Foreign policy expert Trita Parsi suggested that Fohlin's arrest was among the on-campus incidents that have strained the Democratic Party's argument that "democracy is on the ballot in November."
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy. And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now," said Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, sharing a video of police tasing an Emory student who was already being held down on the ground.
Emil' Keme, a professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory, toldDemocracy Now! on Friday that the scene on campus resembled "a war zone," especially after university and Atlanta police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.
"I started feeling the tear gas, and I held arms with some people," he said. "We were being pushed back out of the encampment. And the student I was holding arms with, she was then arrested and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and I was being arrested."
Writer Abdullah Shihipar said Emory president Gregory Fenves—and all university administrators who have allowed the arrest of students who have peacefully protested, including several who have unilaterally altered school codes in order to ban protests—should resign.
"It has been a disgusting and embarrassing week for higher education," said Shihipar.
The crackdown on Emory students and faculty came a day after Texas state troopers descended on the University of Texas at Austin campus, some on horseback, and clamped down on a student walkout there, arresting more than 50 protesters.
Also on Thursday, students at Indiana University and Ohio State University (OSU)—where more than 30 and a dozen students were arrested, respectively—reported seeing snipers stationed on the rooftops of campus buildings, which an Ohio State representative denied.
The Biden administration has not directly addressed the protests or their demands since Monday, when President Joe Biden suggested the nationwide student uprising is "antisemitic."
"The use of state violence against peaceful protestors is unacceptable," said Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War. "Police batons deployed against students calling for peace in Gaza are not a source of safety on campus, nor are they a bulwark against antisemitism. They hurt people, impinge on fundamental liberties, and serve an extreme right-wing agenda that threatens Jews, Muslims, and the right to protest across the country. University leaders and government officials must take steps to protect students exercising their right to protest, not enlist police to attack them."
"Antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry are on the rise and serious issues nationwide, including on college campuses," continued Haghdoosti. "The people endangered by these scourges deserve better than to be the targets of cynical political ploys or to be used as excuses for violent repression. No one is made safer by police violence, and politicians who say otherwise are only attempting to sow division for their own reprehensible ends. What we need from our leaders right now is to de-escalate, permit protests, and not allow state violence against people exercising their fundamental rights."
Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said Thursday that the protests spreading across the U.S. and internationally are a sign that "the Gaza crisis is truly becoming a global crisis of the freedom of expression."
"Legitimate speech must be protected," Khan said Thursday, "but, unfortunately, there is a hysteria that is taking hold in the U.S."
"We must not mix [antisemitism] up with criticism of Israel as a political entity, as a state," she added. "Criticizing Israel is perfectly legitimate under international law."
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