On academic freedom in a time of genocide

In May 2024, Maura Finkelstein, a senior ethnographer and anthropologist at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was fired for her pro-Palestine advocacy at the college. Though many other academics, students and visiting scholars have been suspended or fired on account of their activism or remarks on Palestine (prior to and since 7 October 2023), Finkelstein became the first tenured professor in the US to be dismissed over her pro-Palestinian activism. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, efforts to stymie support for Palestine has only intensified, with students and scholars now being picked up by masked agents and held for deportation over their public positions on Palestine. Instead of protecting students, universities have implemented even further censorship on campuses. Panel discussions, debates and events on Palestine continue to be diluted or even canceled. Earlier this week, Finkelstein, who is also Jewish, was supposed to deliver a lecture titled ‘Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis’. The announcement of her lecture sent Zionists into a tailspin; the university was inundated with calls for the program to be abandoned. Finally, administrators asked Finkelstein if she would participate in a panel instead. Here are her remarks, published in their entirety.

Eid Kareem, everyone.

Thank you for being here and thank you to everyone who worked in service of some version of this event taking place, even if it is a shadow version.

This panel is called “Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis.”

There is no such thing as academic freedom.

As of today, at least seven students – almost all of whom are Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim – have been abducted by our secret police, known as ICE, and illegally detained as political prisoners because they rightfully protested our government’s support for Israel’s genocide of at least 750,000 Palestinian people in Gaza.

Those students are Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Umaymah Mohammed, Badar Khan Suri, Alireza Doroudi, and Leqaa Kordia. Not to mention graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, who was forced to flee and the world-renowned surgeon, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who was already deported, as well as graduate students Mamodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, who have been threatened with deportation.

And then there’s over three hundred international students have just had their visas revoked due to their constitutionally protected free speech.

There is no such thing as academic freedom when members of our community can be disappeared or deported for speech our government has deemed un-American.

We have already shown that the idea of academic freedom is meaningless when our academic institutions do not shut down, disrupt, and revolt against these horrific injustices.

We have already revealed that the idea of academic freedom is meaningless when our college and university administrators are more willing to capitulate with aspiring authoritarian leaders than fight for these vulnerable and brave members of our community.

Looking at our current moment, I would argue there’s no such thing as academic freedom. There never was.

There is no such thing as academic freedom when I was invited here to actually talk about academic freedom in depth and at length and, instead, the university caved to outside pressure, transformed my talk into a panel, and stationed police around the perimeter of the space we are in now.

There is no such thing as academic freedom when students here at Lehigh University who are visa or green card holders are not safe attending this event because of the real threat of surveillance, abduction, and disappearance.

There is no such thing as academic freedom when the feelings of discomfort experienced by some students are worth more than the actual lives of Palestinians in Gaza, more valuable than the safety of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students here in the United States.

There is no such thing as academic freedom when our university administrators are eroding faculty governance in order to penalize students, faculty, and staff who are speaking out against genocide.

Perhaps you are wondering, has there ever been academic freedom in US colleges and universities?

I would argue that at our institutions, we have to ask the question, freedom for whom? Who has the freedom to learn and work and teach here? We love a land acknowledgment but if we ever took Land Back seriously here in the so-called United States, we would have to account for the way colleges and universities have always been sites of extraction and land theft.

Wealth in the United States, whether through land, property, or money, has only been possible because of extraction, through both settler colonial land theft and enslaved labor.

We know that much of the establishment and growth of our institutions of higher ed were dependent on wealth accrued from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery, while the professoriates and administrations provided intellectual cover.

So again, freedom for whom?

Given this history, it’s no surprise that there’s never been actual academic freedom because our institutions of higher ed are wildly hierarchical and white supremacist.

Tenure-track and tenured faculty members at degree-granting institutions in the United States are disproportionately white.

White faculty members are especially overrepresented at the higher ranks, making up 79 percent of full professors and 74 percent of associate professors, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and reported by the AAUP in 2023.

And while racial minorities are underrepresented at all faculty ranks, they are particularly underrepresented among full professors: only 4 percent of full professors are Black, 4 percent are Latinx, and less than 1 percent are American Indian or Alaskan Native (assistant professors, by comparison, are 8 percent Black, 6 percent Latinx, and less than 1 percent American Indian or Alaskan Native). I don’t have statistics for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim faculty but I imagine it’s a miniscule percentage.

So again, who is defining the bounds of our freedom? And who is entitled to such protections?

There is no such thing as academic freedom when, over the past few decades, colleges and universities have relied more and more on “contingent” labor – adjuncts and lecturers who work on yearly contracts, without the protection of tenure.

While this contingent labor used to make up a small percentage of college and university faculty, beginning with the financial crisis of 2008, the number of available tenure track and tenured professorships plummeted.

Now, contingent faculty make up nearly 80% of the college and university workforce, with only 20% of faculty given the opportunity to work towards the protection of tenure. This proliferation of cheap and disposable labor reveals the hypocrisy of the idea of academic freedom. What does academic freedom mean when the majority of college and university workers are never entitled to such freedoms in the first place?

There is no such thing as academic freedom when our institutions rely on a funding model of patronage.

Most colleges and universities, even public universities, are more and more tuition driven and dependent on the support of wealthy donors. This financial model greatly limits academic freedom and free speech on our campuses, as administrations are more accountable to these wealthy donors than they are to the campus community of faculty, staff, and students.

Let alone notions of academic freedom.

Right now, these colleges and universities are under unbearable pressure both from donors and from the federal government, who are threatening to pull financial support if administrators do not silence those of us who – by speaking the truth – are making certain people uncomfortable.

So let me use the rest of my time to make some of you very uncomfortable.

Today is day 542 of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an acceleration of the Nakba, which has been ongoing for 76 years. Like the ongoing genocide here on Turtle Island, the genocide in Palestine never ends, it is a structure, not an event, and it merely moves in and out of visibility for those of us in the West.

We cannot know for sure how many Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza but we know, because of how hard it is to count the dead, that the official estimate is a gross undercount because of indirect deaths and those who are missing under the rubble.

According to a July 2024 article in The Lancet, at least 186,000 Palestinians had likely been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Almost nine months later, this is already too low because, according to The Lancet, “in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.”

With this calculation, the number is closer to 750,000, if not more. 750,000.

Israel has killed tens of thousands of university students, academics, writers, and artists.

All of Gaza’s 12 universities have been destroyed.

This mean that Israel is destroying both the physical infrastructure of higher education in Gaza, as well its intellectual infrastructure.

This year and a half of scholasticide is merely an accelerated form of destruction carried out by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, as education in Gaza has been under attack for decades.

Even so, our universities have said nothing about this scholastacide – this deliberate and calculated assault on learning. What does that say about our centers of learning here in the United States?

We are here to talk about academic freedom. This destruction is not just an assault on Palestinian lives, it’s an assault on Palestinian academic freedom.

What is academic freedom in the midst of a genocide?

What is the use of our training and our resources if we cannot use our position as intellectuals to condemn the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and call for Palestinian liberation?

What does academic freedom mean when I – and people like me – are seen as a threat for speaking the truth, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make some of you feel?

There is no such thing as academic freedom. There never was.

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