“Rights undefended are rights surrendered. Unopposed and acquiesced in, usurpation is legitimized by default.”—Fayez Sayegh, Ph.D., Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965, p. 46)
Faculty identify university administrators as a threat to academic freedom for two reasons. First, university administrators, especially at publicly-funded state schools like the City University of New York (CUNY), operate as overseers and architects of neoliberal systems of austerity, which employ increasing numbers of poorly-paid adjunct laborers who do not enjoy protections of academic freedom under tenure. Since administrators can fire adjunct faculty without much if any oversight, it’s hard to argue they enjoy any significant measure of academic freedom.
Second, faculty are becoming increasingly aware of how university administrators are more aggressively suppressing pro-Palestine organizing and scholarship on campuses. This is exemplified in a range of recent actions, from doxxing and demonizing pro-Palestine faculty and failing to defend faculty who are falsely accused of anti-Semitism in congressional hearings, to scrubbing tenure-line job ads for Palestine studies on the grounds that they use “offensive and inappropriate language”, firing faculty for their pro-Palestine organizing and research, and suspending student leaders of pro-Palestine organizing.
There is an important case to be made that these two factors are mutually reinforcing elements in the generation of suppression on US university campuses, that the corporate neoliberal management of the university system easily succumbs to Zionist pressure through astroturfed Zionist campus organizations that offer “cash-strapped” administrators the tools and motivation to “fight anti-Semitism” by suppressing pro-Palestine organizing and scholarship. But I want to argue that there is another significant source of threat to academic freedom on university campuses, which administrators and external forces rely on.
That threat is us, the faculty at public universities in the United States — primarily tenured faculty, who have the greatest degree of protections under academic freedom. Our compliance in the face of increasingly severe repression of pro-Palestine activism and scholarship is complicity in the usurpation of academic freedom.
Academic Freedom Undefended is a Right Surrendered
The crux of my argument for this claim is Fayez Sayegh’s observation that “Rights undefended are rights surrendered.” Sayegh made this claim in a specific context: the Zionist colonial assault on the indigenous people of Palestine. Yet I think that a similar logic of inaction as complicity in the loss of rights also extends to the attack on academic freedom today—a kind of right that the leadership of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union of faculty and staff at CUNY, calls a “professional right” and that CUNY claims to protect (see policy 1.02).
Since tenured professors enjoy the greatest degree of protections under academic freedom, it is not difficult to see how silence in the face of direct and explicit attacks on it is complicity in its usurpation. But there are certain implications of this connection of which we should take note, before turning to the theme of suppression of pro-Palestine organizing and tenured faculty’s inaction on this as a further threat to academic freedom.
First, responding to an attack on academic freedom requires that we use the very tools that academic freedom (and freedom of speech under the First Amendment) protects. Defending academic freedom against attacks on it requires us to act as if we have it. And this is risky business.
Second, since we cannot do the work of teaching and research in the university without academic freedom, acting in its defense is a risk that we must take. The impoverishments we and our culture face in not acting are simply unacceptable.
Connecting Suppression of Palestine Activism to Threats to Academic Freedom
While many tenured faculty that I’ve spoken with admit these points, they still fail to see the connection between attacks on pro-Palestine activism and threats to academic freedom (especially when it comes to student-led activism on campus). They fail to bring the same level of urgency to the issue of Palestine as they do to academic freedom. But the connection can be made clear on two bases:
- The suppression of speech and activism on Palestine is the front line in the assault on academic freedom today.
- As an imperial power, the forms of colonial violence that the United States is enabling in Palestine, specifically on Palestinian universities and academics, will (to use Aimé Césair’s phrase) “boomerang back” onto U.S. universities.
Palestine as the Front Line of Attack on Academic Freedom
Yousef Munayyer, in his essay “Closing Spaces Beyond Borders: Israel’s Transnational Repression Network”, tells a recent history of Israeli governmental actions in building a transnational network of actors involved in suppressing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in support of Palestinian liberation. This history reveals the intimate connections between suppression of Palestine-activism and attacks on academic freedom. Advocacy and participation in BDS is protected under the First Amendment. When Zionist legislative attempts at ending the BDS movement in the US, despite being passed in many states, were still limited in their efficacy by conflicting with the First Amendment, a new strategy emerged: targeting speech critical of Israel and Zionism as “antisemitic.” Thus, anti-BDS strategy shifted from playing defense in the form of preventing BDS by outlawing it to playing offense in the form of creating and helping institute new policies on university campuses that would make advocacy for BDS and criticism of Israel illegitimate. The key to this strategy is the false conflation of Zionism and Judaism, as embodied in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. This false identification would make “Zionist” a legally protected identity (a policy that NYU, Columbia, and Harvard have already adopted).
In short, in order to circumvent the limitations on anti-BDS lawfare created by the First Amendment, the Israeli anti-BDS strategy has reinforced itself with an anti-antisemitism rhetorical frame, a strategy that explicitly targets our freedoms of speech and freedoms to do critical research on Israel and Zionism.
This history helps us see how suppression of Palestine activism and scholarship on campuses is (but is not only) an issue of academic freedom. For it shows that the real targets of the anti-antisemitism campaigns on campuses are actually the First Amendment rights and academic freedoms of students and faculty.
To fail to recognize this suppression of Palestine activism and scholarship on campus as the front line in the attacks on academic freedom today sets a dangerous precedent. These limitations of freedom of speech and thought on campuses will only begin in relation to criticism of Israel and Zionism. The modes of suppression applied against pro-Palestine activism will be taken up as blueprints for limiting other civil liberties related to freedom of speech, thought, and information.
Thus, while the battle over pro-Palestine activism on campuses is one front of the assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech among many, its position as an assault on academic freedom that attracts support from across the political spectrum in the United States and that (so far) many tenured faculty seem content to ignore makes it uniquely significant for those concerned with protecting academic freedom. To ignore the suppression of pro-Palestine activism and scholarship on campuses is to be complicit in ceding crucial ground in the battle against fascist usurpation of academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Suppression of Pro-Palestine Activism as the Boomeranging Back of U.S. & Israeli Colonial Violence onto University Campuses
The concept of the imperial boomerang effect derives from Amié Césair. In his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism he argued that forms of violence and oppression committed by colonial powers against colonized peoples inevitably boomerang back to the metropole. They manifest first in the marginalized parts of the citizenry, but eventually “the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” Think about what we see already in the United States today: university students kidnapped and spirited away to ICE detention centers, new immigrant prisons being erected in Texas military bases and the swamps of Florida, the horrific radio ads (playing on your favorite pop station in the grocery store) from the Department of Homeland Security that threaten immigrants to deport themselves.
With these phenomena in mind, we academics should attend carefully to how US dollars, weapons, and intelligence capabilities are being used in Gaza, where all the universities have been destroyed, academics murdered by the IOF, and schools have been out of session for most of the genocide. The violence there will boomerang back onto US campuses. The US is a colonial power, the world’s most dangerous. And the genocide in Gaza today is ours. The disturbing acts of repression we already see on university campuses and more broadly in the United States are portents of the colonial boomerang returning in full force. Indeed, the Trump administration has already provided the Department of Homeland Security and ICE the money to create the largest federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history. So, the pieces for military repression and violence on campuses, under the guise of a crackdown on immigration, are falling into place.
But even if the avalanche of violence that the United States and Israel have poured on Palestinian professors and students does not boomerang back onto U.S. university campuses fully, we should nonetheless be wary of the other side of Césair’s boomerang. This is the psycho-social side that
dehumanizes even the most civilized man […] who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.
This self-dehumanization through complicity with dehumanizing violence against others, I fear, has already crept into the daily habits of many of us, comfortably ensconced with tenure in our academic abodes. But this is not new for U.S. academics, who have participated in a long history of such complicity with violence against the indigenous peoples of what is now called America, African slaves and their ancestors, immigrants, and the working-class and poor.
We should be inspired, in this regard, by our student activists. For it is precisely this self-dehumanization through complicity to dehumanizing violence that, in my experience with pro-Palestine student activists, motivates them to resist. They act with the hope that they will be joined on the front -lines of resistance to oppression by their professors. For they are inspired by our zeal for social justice, liberation, wisdom, and peace in our classrooms. They want to see it on the streets too.
Conclusion and Call to Action: We must center Palestine!
If we are to defend academic freedom against the attacks on it today, we cannot sideline Palestine. Rather, we must see the role of Palestine in the attacks of academic freedom as it is: as the front line of attack in a broader strategy to undermine academic freedom and freedom of speech under the First Amendment; and as the geographic region from which the real and psychic violence exacted by US and Israeli colonial powers on Palestinians will boomerang back onto us.
At CUNY, I have seen many statements issued by faculty senates and other faculty-groups that fail to make one or both of these connections between Palestine and academic freedom. And this is dangerous. For it severely weakens the effectiveness of our efforts to protect academic freedom.
There are two things that we all, but especially the tenured faculty at CUNY, can do to defend our academic freedom right now. Generally, we must disrupt CUNY administration’s assumption that we will respond to their recent aggressions against academic freedom with complicity and polite statements condemning their actions, but otherwise doing nothing and saying nothing about Palestine. But these two specific actions are good places to start.
First, we must come to the defense of Hadeeqa Arzoo Malick. She was suspended recently for her leadership role in organizing an impromptu protest against Governor Kathy Hochul’s visit to City College of New York (CCNY). Hochul decided to visit CCNY the day after she and Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez forced Hunter College to scrub an ad for two tenure-line Palestine studies jobs from their website. Their reason was that the language of “genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality” in relation to Palestine was “divisive, polarizing and inappropriate.” This was a clear attack on academic freedom. CCNY President and erstwhile anti-apartheid activist Vince Boudreau was complicit in this attack by allowing Hochul to try to visit campus the day after her attack; but the students were not. They know that rights undefended are rights surrendered. And now CCNY is trying to silence them for defending academic freedom. We should stand with the students, who are already standing for us.
Second, we need to call for the reinstatement of the “fired four” CUNY adjuncts, who have, by all appearances, been targeted for their pro-Palestineorganizing and scholarship. Here too the conjuncture of attacks on pro-Palestine organizing and attacks on academic freedom is obvious. And so, we need to let CUNY administration know that we see these disciplinary firings for what they are: an instance in the broader campaign to silence and derail organizing in support of Palestinian liberation by usurping our academic freedom and freedom of speech.
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