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IS THIS THE END OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM?  
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Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah
April 5, 2024
New York Times
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_ Students and faculty members in solidarity with the Palestinian
people have found the campus environment alarmingly constrained. _

Harvard student demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in the
Israel-Hamas war., Photo by Frank S. Zhou

 

​At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry
reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library.
At that time, about 26,000 Palestinians had already been killed in
Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of
bearing witness.

The last poem read aloud was titled “If I Must Die.”
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was written, hauntingly, by a Palestinian poet and academic named
Refaat Alareer who was killed weeks earlier by an Israeli airstrike.
The poem ends: “If I must die, let it bring hope — let it be a
tale.”

Soon after those lines were recited, the university
administration shut the reading down
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Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called
into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently
“disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.

We have both taught at N.Y.U. for over a decade and believe we are in
a moment of unparalleled repression. Over the past six months, since
the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, we have seen the university
administration fail to adequately protect dissent on campus, actively
squelching it instead. We believe what we are witnessing in response
to student, staff and faculty opposition to the war violates the very
foundations of academic freedom.

While N.Y.U. says that it remains committed to free expression on
campus and that its rules about and approach to protest activity
haven’t changed, students and faculty members
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solidarity with the Palestinian people have found the campus
environment alarmingly constrained.

About a week after Hamas’s attacks in October, the Grand Staircase
in the Kimmel student center, a storied site of student protests
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closed indefinitely; it has yet to reopen
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A graduate student employee was reprimanded for putting up fliers in
support of Palestinians on the student’s office door and ultimately
took them down; that person is not the only N.Y.U. student to face
some form of disciplinary consequence for pro-Palestinian speech or
action. A resolution calling for the university to reaffirm
protection of pro-Palestinian speech
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civic activity on campus, passed by the elected Student Government
Assembly in December, has apparently been stuck in a procedural black
hole
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The New York Police Department has become a pervasive
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on campus, with over 6,000 hours of officer presence added after the
war broke out. Hundreds of faculty members have signed onto an open
letter
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the university’s “culture of fear about campus speech and
activism.”

Such draconian interventions are direct threats to academic freedom.

At universities across the country, any criticism of Israel’s
policies, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, organized calls
for a cease-fire or even pedagogy on the recent history of the land
have all emerged as perilous speech. In a letter to university
presidents in November, the A.C.L.U. expressed concern
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“impermissible chilling of free speech and association on campus”
in relation to pro-Palestinian student groups and views; since then,
the atmosphere at colleges has become downright McCarthyite
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The donors, trustees, administrators and third parties who oppose
pro-Palestinian speech seem to equate any criticism of the State of
Israel
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an occupying power
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law and one accused of committing war crimes
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with antisemitism. To them, the norms of free speech are inherently
problematic, and a broad definition of antisemitism is a tool for
censorship
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Outside funding has poured into horrifying doxxing
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harassment campaigns. Pro-Israel surveillance groups like Canary
Mission
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CAMERA relentlessly target individuals and groups deemed antisemitic
or critical of Israel. Ominous threats
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faculty and students for just expressing their opinions or living out
their values.

To be clear, we abhor all expressions of antisemitism
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wholeheartedly reject any role for antisemitism on our campuses.
Equally, we believe that conflating criticism of Israel or Zionism
with antisemitism is dangerous. Equating the criticism of any nation
with inherent racism endangers basic democratic freedoms on and off
campus. As the A.C.L.U. wrote in its November statement, a university
“cannot fulfill its mission as a forum for vigorous debate” if it
polices the views of faculty members and students, however much any of
us may disagree with them or find them offensive.

In a wave of crackdowns
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pro-Palestinian speech nationwide, students have had scholarships
revoked, job offers pulled and student groups suspended. At Columbia,
protesters have reported being sprayed
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what they said was skunk, a chemical weapon used by the Israeli
military; at Northwestern, two Black students faced criminal charges
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later dropped, for publishing a pro-Palestinian newspaper parody; at
Cornell, students were arrested during a peaceful protest
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In a shocking episode of violence last fall, three Palestinian
students
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two of them wearing kaffiyehs, were shot
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walking near the University of Vermont.

Many more cases
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student repression on campuses are unfolding.

Academic freedom, as defined by the American Association of University
Professors in the mid-20th century
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provides protection for the pursuit of knowledge by faculty members,
whose job is to educate, learn and research both inside and outside
the academy. Not only does this resonate with the
Constitution’s free speech protections
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international human rights law also affirms the centrality of
academic freedom
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the right to education and the institutional autonomy of educational
institutions.

Across the United States, attacks on free speech are on the rise
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In recent years, right-wing groups opposed to the teaching of
critical race theory [[link removed]] have tried to
undermine these principles through measures including restrictions on
the discussion of history and structural racism in curriculums,
heightened scrutiny of lectures and courses that are seen to promote
dissent and disciplinary procedures against academics who work on
these topics.

What people may not realize is that speech critical of Israel’s
occupation and apartheid policies has long been censored, posing
persistent challenges to those of us who uphold academic freedom. Well
before Oct. 7, speech and action at N.Y.U. in support of Palestinians
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scrutiny.

Our students are heeding Refaat Alareer’s call to bear witness. They
are speaking out — writing statements, organizing protests and
responding to a plausible threat of genocide
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idealism and conviction. As faculty members, we believe that college
should be a time when students are encouraged to ask big questions
about justice and the future of humanity and to pursue answers however
disquieting to the powerful.

Universities must be places where students have access to specialized
knowledge that shapes contemporary debates, where faculty members are
encouraged to be public intellectuals, even when, or perhaps
especially when, they are expressing dissenting opinions speaking
truth to power. Classrooms must allow for contextual learning, where
rapidly mutating current events are put into a longer historical
timeline.

This is a high-stakes moment. A century ago, attacks on open
discussion of European antisemitism, the criminalization of dissent
and the denial of Jewish histories of oppression and dispossession
helped create the conditions for the Holocaust. One crucial “never
again” lesson from that period is that the thought police can be
dangerous. They can render vulnerable communities targets of
oppression. They can convince the world that some lives are not as
valuable as others, justifying mass slaughter.

It is no wonder that students across the country are protesting
an unpopular
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brutal war that, besides Israel, only the United States is capable of
stopping. It is extraordinary that the very institutions that ought to
safeguard their exercise of free speech are instead escalating
surveillance and policing, working on ever more restrictive student
conduct rules
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essentially risking the death of academic freedom.

From the Vietnam War to apartheid South Africa, universities have been
important places for open discussion and disagreement about government
policies, the historical record, structural racism and settler
colonialism. They have also long served as sites of protest. If the
university cannot serve as an arena for such freedoms, the
possibilities of democratic life inside and outside the university
gates are not only impoverished but under threat of extinction.

_Dr. Chakravartty is a professor of media, communication and culture
at New York University, where Dr. Nesiah is a professor of practice in
human rights and international law._

 

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Palestinian rights
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* Student protests
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* Free Speech
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