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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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For Turning Our Campus Into a Mini-Police State, Indiana University's President Must Go
We needed a leader who would protect students, the values of liberalism, and this institution of learning. Instead, Pamela Whitten called in armed troopers—including those with sniper rifles—on peaceful protesters.
Apr 30, 2024
Author's note: The following is the text of a speech delivered on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington on April 29, 2024 during a rally that called for the termination of Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and Provost Rahul Shrivastav after they brought heavily armed Indiana State Troopers—including snipers—onto the campus to violently repress peaceful protests. Over three days, on two separate occasions, the troopers violently dispersed crowds peacefully assembled in a free speech zone, pulling down a few harmless tents, and violently arresting over 50 students and faculty members, each of whom was banned from campus for at least a year, on threat of prosecution for felony trespass.
The Whitten administration must go.
On April 16, at a special General Meeting called by the Bloomington Faculty Council, the Bloomington faculty passed a vote of no confidence in President Whitten by a vote of 827-29—that's 93%. For Provost Shrivastav—who was installed by her and cannot be judged apart from her—the vote for no confidence was only 91%.
Both the meeting and the overwhelming vote of no confidence were unprecedented in my 37 years as an IU faculty member.
Barely a few minutes had passed before Whitten sent out an email bemoaning the challenges facing higher education and promising to “listen and learn,” and to “weigh the guidance from faculty council and the participation of the campus community through shared governance to achieve our collective vision of a thriving campus.”
A few minutes later, Quinn Buckner, the retired mediocre professional basketball player who now chairs IU’s Board of Trustees, declared: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees.”
President Whitten and Chair Buckner—surely peers when it comes to professional distinction and educational vision, or the lack thereof—may believe in each other.
But it must frankly be said: the faculty vote of no confidence in Whitten and her underlings did not signify a loss of confidence but a lack of confidence.
The Whitten administration was hired by a Board that overruled its own appointed search committee and that made no effort to consult with faculty. Whitten’s appointment was never authorized or even seriously considered by the faculty; Whitten has done nothing to earn the confidence of the faculty; and so Whitten has never had the confidence of the faculty.
But in recent months what had been a simple lack became something more—a strong and determined opposition by a broad range of faculty—across the intellectual, disciplinary, and political spectrum—who have come to consider the attitudes and the actions of the administration as not simply incompetent or confused or intellectually suspect or morally derelict or politically objectionable but downright dangerous.
For many of us, things began to crystallize when the Whitten administration made IUB the first major research university in the United States to suspend a tenured faculty member for doing what MAGA Rep. Jim Banks and other right-wing legislators declared verboten: serving as a supportive faculty advisor of the student-run Palestine Solidarity Committee. The administration then followed up by peremptorily and rudely canceling the long-planned major art exhibit of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby.
Across the country, pro-Palestinian rallies on campuses have generated controversy, and across the country, a political unholy alliance of far-right, Christian nationalist politicians—and, I am sorry to say, organizations like the ADL, AIPAC, and Hillel—have responded to the controversy by demanding that the protests be shut down on the specious grounds of “opposing antisemitism” and “protecting students.”
The presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and Cornell were called before MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s House Education and Workforce Committee to abase themselves, failed to be sufficiently humbled, and were denounced and subsequently cashiered. When Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik’s turn came, she bent the knee, promised to crack down on her campus, and then returned to upper Manhattan to do just that. Poor Pam Whitten has not—yet—merited an audience with Stefanik. And so she found her own way to get the validation she desires from those who matter most to her—call in the snipers.
The protest and encampment here are not perfect—no protest is. I do not personally agree with everything that is being said and done by the protesters. But the protests are peaceful, small by comparison to elsewhere, and off the beaten path, in a free speech zone, disrupting nothing. They are being conducted by students who sincerely care about a genuine human rights crisis and oppose war crimes and have every right to act on these concerns as they have done.
At the same time, the protests furnished the perfect opportunity for the Whitten administration to prove its mettle and to demonstrate its superiority to the leadership of the Ivy Leagues, which have apparently been insufficiently repressive.
Whereas those college presidents actually articulated ideas, however confused or craven, Whitten articulates no ideas.
Whereas those presidents typically used campus police or city police to suppress their students, Whitten brought in heavily armed and armored State Troopers, many in camouflaged battle gear, to suppress IU’s students and faculty, and to brutally arrest over 50 of them—of us. Last week there were armed snipers on the IMU roof, and scores of machine-gun toting troops taking control of the campus—at the behest of the very administration that punished or canceled other entirely peaceful events on the grounds of “public safety.”
It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.
It represents a clear and present danger to the safety of everyone on campus within range of the weapons; an equally clear and present danger to our constitutionally protected civil liberties; and a profound danger to the intellectual freedom and education that is at the heart of any serious university.
It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.
Last week Whitten turned the IUB campus into Putin’s Russia or Lukashenko’s Belarus or the Birmingham, Alabama ruled by so-called “Commissioner of Public Safety” Bull Connor in the 1960’s. All that was missing was the water cannons and the police dogs. Can these be next?
No, this is not about differences over 21st century educational policy. It is not about the challenges of administering a complex institution. It is not primarily about university procedures—and their blatant violation. At this point, it is not even about the requirements of free speech on campus.
It is about the decision to turn the campus into a mini-police state.
The Whitten administration has crossed many lines. That is why we voted no confidence. But the line that was crossed last week both culminates and exceeds all the others. And there is no going back.
Earlier last week we were invited by the Provost through the Dean to share ideas about how to move forward as a campus.
This is what I sent to our admirable and brave College Dean, and to the administration:
We are being asked to share suggestions regarding President Whitten and Provost Shrivastav, with the assurance that our comments will be kept confidential and anonymized.
The fact that this assurance has been given is symptomatic of the current situation on the campus: many colleagues feel afraid to say what they think, and for a very simple reason: the higher administration has recently behaved without regard for due process or principles of academic freedom, most notably in the suspension of our colleague, Professor Abdulkader Sinno.
What can the President and the Provost do?
They can very publicly state that they understand that they have lost the confidence of the faculty and also understand why, with specific reference to the things that have been widely discussed.
They can then immediately reverse their awful suspension of Professor Sinno; do whatever is necessary to reschedule the Samia Halaby exhibition; and publicly apologize for failing to offer the public support for Dr. Caitlin Bernard that she has long deserved.
They can then immediately open honest lines of communication with the BFC and with the leaders of the no confidence vote about ways of achieving some measure of confidence from the faculty.
Or they can look in the mirror, realize that they cannot credibly lead a university without the confidence of the faculty, and resign. Perhaps in their next positions they can do a better job of gaining and maintaining faculty confidence.
Alternatively, they can ignore all of the above suggestions, and pretend that they are serious academic leaders who can do whatever they want without regard to the collective voice of the faculty that has already been resoundingly expressed. This would appear to be the choice they have made. They can at least feel proud that Quinn Buckner, a formerly mediocre basketball player who is now a mediocre basketball announcer, thinks they are doing a great job.
That was then.
This is now.
I was mistaken last week. For there was another option: call in the troops.
Why?
Why?
Well, it seems clear that President Whitten fancies herself a leader. Not a thought leader. Not an educational leader.
A leader in the nationwide effort to be tough on the “crime” of speaking out.
A law and order university president.
The Spiro T. Agnew of American higher education.
And so she moved to attack almost everything that higher education stands for—with the exception of the economic boosterism and sports cheerleading that was the hallmark of her leadership until she decided to suspend academic freedom and call in the troops.
Whitten has proven that when the calls for crackdown come, she will crack down.
She will not resign. If she had any self-respect as an educational leader, the vote of no confidence would have led her to do anything but call in the troops.
And so she called in the troops. And by doing so, she showed utter contempt for the faculty who do the teaching here at this university and the students who are here to learn and grow and assume the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.
We need to take back our university.
We need to persuade the Trustees—to demonstrate to them—that this administration can no longer govern, for it no longer has credibility, not simply here but throughout the country and the world. We must mobilize every one of our academic and professional and institutional connections to expose what this administration has done and how cynically it treats the things we value most.
A trustee is one to whom something of value is entrusted.
We need to try to get these Trustees to honor their trust to the teachers, students, staff, and graduate workers who together do the work of teaching and learning.
We need to use every legal means to defend our students, and ourselves, from repression and retribution.
And we need to simultaneously do the hard work of reinvigorating serious public discourse—about academic freedom, civic responsibility, and the value of serious disagreement about politics—on our campus.
There’s more. Bloomington is a college town. It has a proud history of social and political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. What this administration has done and is doing is a travesty of this entire community and everyone who is proud to live and work here.
Finally: what has been done here is part of a broad effort to attack higher education and political liberalism in the U.S. What we saw on Dunn Meadow last week when the troops descended is a microcosm of what a second Trump administration will mean, on our campuses, in our cities, at our borders. All of us—including the students whose rights we now proudly defend—should think hard about this.
There is much time to discuss and debate such things.
Now is the time to say and say again: the Whitten administration must go.
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Prevarication on Pro-Palestinian Voices at Indiana University
If "security" is the reason that pro-Palestinian voices are being silence on campus, the question must be asked: whose security?
Jan 29, 2024
Indiana University President Whitten and her administration have recently suspended Abdulkader Sinno, the tenured faculty advisor of the Palestine Solidarity Committee student group, and then canceled a long-planned Ezkenazi Museum exhibit featuring the work of acclaimed artist Samia Halaby, a Palestinian intellectual who has been very critical of the current Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
These measures were taken shortly after Rep. Jim Banks’s very public demand that Whitten crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism on campus. It begs credulity to consider this a coincidence. And it seems to many, myself included, that the suspension and the cancellation were Whitten’s way of answering Banks’s demands, and of demonstrating that she will not equivocate in the manner of those Ivy League presidents who refused to simply declare that they would ban certain forms of pro-Palestinian speech.
The administration, to the extent that it has made any effort to explain these measures, insists that they are justified by the university’s obligation to provide “security” and guarantee “public safety” for controversial campus activities, and that pro-Palestinian events, being controversial, require special security measures.
But if “security” is the administration’s concern, a number of questions immediately present themselves.
The most obvious question is the simplest one: if current controversies related to Israel-Palestine are so heated that they place people on campus in jeopardy, why is it only the pro-Palestinian events that require special security attention?
Why haven’t pro-Israeli or even all Jewish events on campus received the same level of attention and scrutiny? Provost Shrivastav declared last week at the Bloomington Faculty Council that even a slight chance of danger would lead him to cancel events at risk. But no non-Palestinian events have been canceled.
Perhaps the administration doubts that there are serious risks to pro-Israeli or Jewish campus events? I hope there are good reasons for such doubt. But if there are such reasons, then what’s all the commotion being made, by Jim Banks, and the American Jewish Affairs Committee of Indiana, and President Whitten herself, about the need to “get serious” about antisemitism? Either there is real danger, in which case the logic applied to the pro-Palestinian events should apply to the Jewish events too, or there is not.
In the absence of greater clarity, another question arises: what’s all the commotion about the security threats at pro-Palestinian events anyway? Who is so threatening?
The clear implication of IU’s cancelations is that people who are against Palestinian events might disrupt the events and harm event participants. Which people? In the U.S. today, there is only one group of people that is very publicly identified with opposition to pro-Palestinian events: a large segment of the Jewish community, including many Hillel and AIPAC-affiliated Jewish students, the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, and the American Jewish Affairs Committee of Indiana (the latter has been very loud in its demands that pro-Palestinian advocacy be restricted).
Does the administration mean to imply that those pro-Zionist Jews who oppose Palestinian advocacy are so dangerous and disruptive on campus that Palestinian events need special security precautions to protect event participants from these disrupters?
And if so, on what evidence? To insinuate such a thing without evidence would mean that the administration considers Zionism inherently dangerous. Such thinking would have to be considered anti-Zionist and, according to the administration’s own publicly stated logic, antisemitic, even if unwittingly so. Could that possibly be?
Alternatively, perhaps the administration has evidence of actual threats to pro-Palestinian events ?
According to the New York Times, pro-Palestinian student demonstrators at Columbia University this week were sprayed with a foul-smelling and toxic liquid, allegedly by aggressive counter-protesters who called the protesters “terrorists.” Many students were injured, police reports were filed, and university officials notified. Days later, according to the Columbia Spectator, the Interim University Provost banned “alleged perpetrators” from campus following “what appear to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes” against the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some of whom were Jewish.
Is it the possibility of a similar attack taking place here that has led the IU administration to cancel Sinno and Halaby?
However you cut it, there is a striking disconnect between the “security” claims being used to justify the administration’s cancellations, and the idea that it is campus antisemitism that must be opposed. For if only pro-Palestinian events are threatened, then perhaps it is anti-Palestinian bigotry that is the real problem? Or does the administration believe the pro-Palestinian students will disrupt the very events they are organizing?
Such questions abound.
There is, of course, another possibility: that the appeal to “public safety” doesn’t add up because it is merely an excuse, and the real reason the administration has shut down pro-Palestinian events is not because they are uniquely vulnerable but because they are uniquely objectionable to those the administration wishes to please. In other words, it has shut down pro-Palestinian events because they are pro-Palestinian.
It would surely sound vulgar–and illegal—to say this publicly.
So the administration instead says it is restricting the events because they endanger “safety.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “prevarication” as “Avoidance of straightforward statement of the truth; equivocation, evasiveness, misrepresentation; deceit; an instance of this.”
Is there any better word to describe what is going on right now at Indiana University?
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