About that new University of Austin and free speech…

For The Guardian, I wrote this essay, in which I congratulate Bari Weiss and the other founders of a brave new university, the University of Austin. Surely, if they believe so strongly in academic freedom, a Palestine Studies department must not be far behind. Right?

To Bari Weiss and the founders of the new University of Austin,

I write to you today to offer my heartfelt congratulations on inaugurating a courageous new institution of higher learning, the University of Austin in Texas (UATX). As someone who has spent his career in the gilded halls of the academe (or, in my case, the ugly two-tone hallways of peeling paint found in my public institution), I have witnessed exactly the kind of destructive groupthink that your new president, Pano Kanelos, bravely writes about in his essay announcing this new and much-needed venture.

How refreshing it is to read President Kanelos describe how universities today are too often “not open and pluralistic” and how they “chill speech and ostracize those with unpopular viewpoints”. Many of us know exactly what he is describing, and for these reasons I cannot tell you how excited I am to welcome the University of Austin’s new Palestine studies department.

While it’s true that you have yet to announce a Palestine studies department, you surely are aware how ostracizing and damaging the mention of Palestinian rights or their struggle for liberation can be on American campuses. A few years ago, for example, one of the world’s most recognized philosophers, Judith Butler, came to my campus in Brooklyn with a highly respected Palestinian activist, Omar Barghouti, as part of a national speaking tour. They came to discuss their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS, as you know, is a global, non-violent initiative aimed at recognizing and restoring Palestinians rights.

Not only was my college then subject to extraordinary outside pressure to call off the event, but members of New York’s city council even threatened to withhold funding to the campus if the event proceeded. Sanity was restored only when that legendary fighter for the Palestinian revolution – of course, I’m talking about Mayor Michael Bloomberg – said: “If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.” (In the same news conference, he also stated his opposition to BDS.)

This is but one example, as all of you – proud protectors of freedom of speech and of academic freedom – obviously know. There are, sadly, so many more. Surely, you remember how Professor Norman Finkelstein, a fierce critic of Israeli repression against Palestinians and the son of Holocaust survivors who were imprisoned in Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto, was denied tenure at DePaul University after the Israel-aligned Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz aggressively lobbied the university to deny the younger professor his job.

The world-renowned Noam Chomsky called Finkelstein “an outstanding scholar”, saying: “It’s amazing that he hasn’t had full professorship a long time ago.” Meanwhile, Finkelstein hasn’t had permanent university employment since.

Or there is the case of Prof Steven Salaita. Days before he was to assume a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois, his offer of employment was rescinded due to objections raised over his tweets criticizing Israel after its bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014. He has since written eloquently about becoming a school bus driver after losing his tenured professor position.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but there are, well, oh so many other examples. The Associated Press, for instance, recently fired a young journalist, not for her work with the AP, but because of the principled tweets she wrote when she was a student at Stanford. Members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on different campuses across the country, including my own, have related how they have been subject to much higher levels of scrutiny by their campus administrations compared with other campus groups. At Fordham University in New York City, administrators even forbade students to form a Student for Justice in Palestine club, because, they claimed, it would be “polarizing”.

In fact, from 2014 to 2020, the organization Palestine Legal has documented 1,707 incidents of suppression of speech concerning Palestine in the USA, with the vast majority of them targeting students and scholars. These cases are clear violations not only of first amendment rights of expression but also of academic freedom.

Read the rest here.