Fired. Or suspended until a limited employment contract expired. Delisted from the university’s website, with no public explanation. Facing criminal charges. Possible deportation. Or back at work, after seeing charges dropped and investigations ended.
These have been among the varied fates – so far – of multiple faculty and graduate student workers who’ve faced controversies since 7 October 2023, for their actual or alleged speech or protest participation regarding Israel and Palestine.
From social media posts to online articles, from teaching to rally speeches and physically trying to block police from reaching student demonstrators, dozens of scholars have become part of a national test of how accommodating the American tradition of academic freedom will be to those who take controversial stands about the widening Middle East conflagration.
Almost immediately after the war started last October, public disputes erupted over some academics who expressed support for Hamas’s attack. Israel said most of the roughly 1,200 killed in the strike were civilians, and Hamas kidnapped about 250 more people. Exultations of that day’s violence struck many in the public as cruel.
By December, Congress was summoning elite university presidents to Washington to testify about how they responded to anti-war protests and reports of antisemitism on their campuses and to answer questions about professors’ writings and media interviews. Classroom conduct, normally out of the public eye, also became fodder for public discussions and investigations. Then came the spring, when riot gear-clad police faced faculty standing in the way of them clearing protest encampments. These were professors defending their students, not Hamas.
Since last autumn, academic freedom organisations have raised concerns that colleges and universities, under pressure from politicians, donors and others, were cracking down on faculty expression to an extent that could chill classroom and public discussions of the Middle East conflict and other issues. Inside Higher Ed learned that higher education institutions responded in divergent ways to a range of situations, from a firing over an optional assignment that mentioned genocide and Gaza to allowing professors to return to teaching after they seemingly celebrated the violence of 7 October.
While multiple non-tenured faculty have lost their jobs in the last year, a tenured faculty member said last month that she was fired over an anti-Zionist social media post. Graham Piro, faculty legal defence fund fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said firing a tenured professor seemed to be an “unfortunate culmination of a year where universities were pretty aggressive about pursuing investigations, suspensions [and] disciplinary actions against faculty members who voiced opinions about Israel and Palestine”.
Mr Piro said that, based on the cases made public, institutions seemingly generally took action “in one direction” – against faculty who sympathised with Palestinians or Hamas or who criticised Israel. There were notable exceptions. In May, Arizona State University’s president said a postdoctoral research scholar “will never teach here again” after he allegedly followed a young woman in a hijab on a sidewalk and confronted and insulted her.
Currently, faculty are complaining of new policy restrictions on expressive activity at their universities. They say accusations of antisemitism are being weaponised to undermine a pro-Palestine protest movement that includes many Jewish demonstrators. And some say their own colleagues in the professoriate turned against them over their speech.
Inside Higher Ed spoke to a dozen faculty members and reached out to their current or former institutions for comment. Most of these universities declined to comment or provided limited information. The stories of these faculty and others are below.
Campus resource collection: What can universities do to protect academic freedom?
Incidents
Where do things stand, a year in? Institutions were simultaneously faced with myriad admitted or alleged controversial comments and with obligations to respect the First Amendment and/or their own promises of academic freedom to their employees. Outcomes have varied.
At New York’s Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a tenured professor returned to work this autumn after being suspended for an online article in which she lauded Hamas’s attack, writing that “the images from 7 October of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating”. At Cornell University, an associate professor who also called the attack “exhilarating” has now returned to teaching.
However, a Cornell instructor and grad student said the institution was threatening to effectively deport him for helping to disrupt a career fair that included weapons manufacturers. The university alleges that protesters broke through two lines of police defending the event. The grad student followed them.
At Indiana University at Bloomington, two professors who were arrested in the spring after they stood between student protesters and police trying to clear an encampment – all while snipers looked on from rooftops – saw charges against them dropped after the Monroe County prosecuting attorney chose not to file them. But they continue to purposefully violate the university’s new ban on expressive activity past 11pm by holding late-night protest vigils, and the university hasn’t said how it will ultimately respond.
“They’ve literally fenced off the historic free-speech grounds,” said Ben Robinson, one of the professors. He said the university had “created a palpable fear” that chilled expression.
At Northwestern University, an assistant professor said that the charges he faced for standing between cops and students were dropped but were immediately followed by a university investigation that was ongoing, at the same time Northwestern was considering his tenure application. This comes after a Republican called him a “goon” at a May congressional hearing and demanded to know whether he was still teaching.
At Atlanta’s Emory University, three professors are still facing charges from April – ranging from disorderly conduct to simple battery against a police officer – for what they said were their attempts to stop police from harming students as the officers cleared an encampment there. One professor was pushed to the pavement. Also arrested were English and Indigenous studies professor Emil’ Keme and philosophy department chair and university senate president-elect Noëlle McAfee.
“It’s incredibly alienating to work for a place that would just as soon see me in jail,” Professor McAfee told Inside Higher Ed. She said police cracking down on peaceful protests “feels like fascism”.
An Emory University senate committee faulted the institution for apparently firing an assistant professor and doctor for allegedly posting online in the days after 7 October: “They got walls, we got gliders. Glory to all resistance fighters.”
That committee has also criticised Emory for reportedly investigating a doctoral student for a Democracy Now! interview in which the student accused an Emory School of Medicine faculty member of “aiding and abetting a genocide”.
At Columbia University, another interview on that same left-leaning radio and television newscast appears to be at the centre of the investigation of a long-time professor whom congressional Republicans also targeted at an April hearing. Columbia’s former president already told lawmakers that one visiting professor “will never teach at Columbia again”.
Meanwhile, Sang Hea Kil, a San José State University justice studies professor who advised the local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, said the institution kept renewing her paid suspension every 30 days. Although the institution would not explain why Professor Kil was suspended, it came after a hectic February protest in which her SJP students tried to shout down the speech from a guest professor. Meanwhile, the Jewish professor with whom she has repeatedly butted heads, and who tried to record the protest, said he also remained suspended and under investigation after a video showed him briefly grabbing the arm of a protester who tried to block him.
The adjunct whom DePaul University swiftly fired for giving an optional course assignment – it mentioned the deaths in Gaza and asked students to explain “the impact of genocide/ethnic cleansing on the health/biology of the people it impacts” – won her appeal, DePaul said. But the quarter during which the adjunct taught has already ended and the university hasn’t rehired her.
Back at work is an assistant professor whom Texas Tech University suspended after he allegedly posted on X that Hamas’s 7 October attack wasn’t terrorism, according to the conservative Texas Scorecard website. It also alleged that he posted, among other things, “fuck Israel and its supporters!” and “fuck everyone who says it’s not a genocide!” and “fuck academia!”
Not back at work: a Stanford University lecturer accused of singling out Jewish students while teaching about Palestine in the days after 7 October. He’s still suing the university after being removed from the classroom and not getting his contract renewed.
Also suing his own institution is Danny Shaw, a now-former John Jay College of Criminal Justice adjunct who said he was fired after 18 years at the New York City body. He said he guessed it was over calling Zionism a “genocidal disease”. The college didn’t comment. Dr Shaw said the FBI also seized his personal devices.
“It’s a regime of fear, and I underestimated how full of fear everyday Americans are,” Dr Shaw said. “I can’t believe the amount of people who turned their backs on me.”
The University of California, Davis, still lists in its directory the assistant professor and undergraduate faculty adviser who allegedly posted on X last October that “Zionist journalists” had “houses w addresses, kids in school” and should “fear us” – followed by emojis of a knife, a hatchet and blood. But she remains wiped from other parts of the UC Davis website and university spokespeople won’t provide updated information on her employment status.
And it’s Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that might have become the first institution to fire a tenured professor over his or her speech or teaching on the conflict. Maura Finkelstein, who is Jewish, had reposted on Instagram a quote that Zionists shouldn’t be welcomed “in your spaces” and that people shouldn’t “normalize Zionists taking up space”. The Education Department investigated multiple student and staff complaints against Professor Finkelstein and released a letter and resolution agreement with the college last week, in which the department demanded the results of the investigation into Professor Finkelstein.
The American Anthropological Association issued a statement last Friday saying it was “horrified” by what happened to Professor Finkelstein, an anthropologist. It said her termination “is reverberating through academic institutions throughout the US, and rightfully so, as it raises serious concerns about academic freedom everywhere”.
“The pattern of recent events in the United States indicate a gathering storm that threatens the academic freedom of anthropologists and other academics,” the association said.
‘Red herring’
A few of the dozen faculty who spoke to Inside Higher Ed provided unique perspectives on how what they’ve faced represented what was happening nationwide.
Steven Thrasher is the Northwestern assistant journalism professor who tried to block police from breaking up an encampment in April and said he was now “both fighting for my job and also applying for tenure”. Over the summer, Northwestern suspended Dr Thrasher from teaching, he said.
Charles F. Whitaker, dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, wrote in an 8 July email provided by Dr Thrasher’s lawyer that there had already been complaints about Dr Thrasher’s conduct inside and outside the classroom and his “intemperate social media outbursts”. With complaints continuing, Professor Whitaker said, he was beginning disciplinary proceedings.
Among the allegations the dean listed: Dr Thrasher had made sexist comments to students (which the letter didn’t specify), significantly changed his course from what the course description promised and made statements about journalism standards that were “antithetical to our profession”. This included a “reductive” statement from Dr Thrasher that he did not teach his students to be “objective” journalists, Professor Whitaker said.
“All of this is a red herring,” Dr Thrasher said. He said his punishment was about his speaking up for Palestine and making an example of him. A Northwestern spokesperson said the university did not comment on personnel matters.
Dr Thrasher said he heard no classroom-based complaints against him until after the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce wrote to the university’s president on 7 June. That letter criticised the president for refusing to answer questions in his earlier testimony to the committee – including whether Dr Thrasher was still teaching students after he “scuffled with and obstructed Northwestern University Police Department officers”.
“All of this stuff is making people afraid not just on Israel and Palestine, but also afraid of whatever they could teach,” Dr Thrasher said. Dr Thrasher, who’s black and gay, pointed to other black, queer or international scholars on visas who were being “prosecuted” and “persecuted” for pro-Palestine speech.
Jodi Dean, the tenured politics professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges suspended after her April article in Verso called the Hamas attack “exhilarating”, said the president of her joint institutions condemned what she wrote before a full faculty meeting and in an email to thousands of people – including students, parents, employees and alumni.
“Really, it was shocking,” said Professor Dean, who had worked at the colleges for 30 years.
In an email, a spokesperson for the colleges said Professor Dean had “made comments in a public lecture on campus and elsewhere that could have constituted a violation of Title VI”, the federal anti-discrimination law that prohibits, among other things, antisemitism at federally funded colleges and schools. In a July message to campus, the college’s president said Professor Dean could return to teaching after an outside investigation concluded that, although her statements harmed community members, they didn’t “rise to the level of harassment or discrimination under the law or our policies”.
“I’m reinstated, but I was not welcomed,” Professor Dean said. She noted that tenure gave her more protection than other scholars and the increasing national share of faculty who weren’t on the tenure track “hinders critical thinking and critical expression, because people’s job conditions are so much more tenuous, so much more precarious”.
Annelise Orleck, a tenured history professor and co-chair of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies programme at Dartmouth College, said she thought university administrators were more willing to bring in police and enact violence on students, faculty and older people. During the spring, college leaders called in law enforcement to clear encampments, a crackdown that alarmed First Amendment advocates. Professor Orleck, who is 65, experienced that violence herself.
On 1 May, Professor Orleck said, she went to a campus protest encampment to make sure nothing bad was happening to students. There, Professor Orleck said she witnessed a “surreal sight”: floodlights, armoured vehicles and SWAT teams as the Hanover, New Hampshire, police prepared to break up the encampment. So she joined a group of older female faculty – most of them Jewish, like herself – who stood between the officers and protesters, she said.
Someone then slammed her from behind, she said. “I could feel the body armour.”
“I flew a few inches” and landed in a heap, Professor Orleck said. She said police took her phone and she got angry and demanded it back.
“That’s where the videos that went viral began,” she said. Those videos show police pushing her to the ground and briefly dragging her.
She was arrested and temporarily banned from parts of campus, including the central College Green. For weeks, she said, she cut through fraternity house backyards and parking lots to get to class to continue teaching. A Dartmouth spokesperson said the university never intended for the police – whom Dartmouth called to clear the encampment – to arrest Professor Orleck. A prosecutor did not press the trespassing charge and the university hasn’t pursued discipline.
Like Professor Orleck, Barbara Dennis said she wanted to defend student protesters at Indiana University at Bloomington. She said she was arrested for trying to stop police from reaching the students.
“Why would a teacher let a person with a gun get close to their students?” Professor Dennis said. “The minute we pit free speech against safety, we’re not really understanding what free speech is.”
Professor Dennis is still purposefully violating the university’s policy limiting expressive activities past 11pm. She fears the university will discipline her. But she’s also leaving next year.
“The stress has been really hard,” Professor Dennis said. “There’s a lot of trauma associated with being arrested, with weapons like that, with having snipers on the roof – it’s very traumatic and this university sort of continues pushing into it as if it was the right thing.”
Professor Dennis, 65, said she had been planning to work there for about five more years. She had tenure.
“I’ve loved working at IU; it’s been such a great place,” she said. “I don’t want my last five years to be working with this president and this administration.”
With Muhlenberg College firing a tenured professor, and with the Middle East war expanding into more countries, this past year might have been only the overture to greater crackdowns on expression about Israel and Palestine.
“Now there’s the beginnings of an all-out war in the Middle East and students are being muzzled,” said Professor McAfee, one of the arrested Emory professors. She said she did not want to see more arrests. “I just hold my breath that it doesn’t explode again.”
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed