[[link removed]]

ZIONIST MCCARTHYISM COMES FOR CUNY  
[[link removed]]


 

Liza Featherstone
July 28, 2025
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Not content to torment the Ivy League, Republicans are seeking
authoritarian control over working-class public universities like the
City University of New York. The latest salvo: allegedly firing four
adjuncts for their support of Palestine. _

CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez testifies in Washington
D.C.at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism, July 15, 2025. ,
Credit: Screengrab via C-SPAN // The City

 

Republicans’ ideological attack on higher education seemed limited
to elite Ivy League institutions at first, briefly dressing up an
authoritarian crackdown on left-wing ideas like Palestinian solidarity
and racial equality in the drag of anti-elitism. T
[[link removed]]hat’s
changing
[[link removed]].
Now they’re coming for public universities all over the country.

On Wednesday, the US Department of Education announced “civil
rights” investigations into the University of Nebraska Omaha, the
University of Michigan, and others. They’ve also been investigating
George Mason University and, last month, forced the University of
Virginia’s president to resign. Faculty, students, higher-education
unions, and the communities that depend on such institutions should be
ready to fight the tsunami of repression that’s coming.

The City University of New York (CUNY), one of the greatest
working-class higher-education institutions in America, is one of the
latest institutions to be targeted, recently facing the harassment of
a congressional hearing on “antisemitism” (a term that has become
a depraved kind of code for the defense of Palestinians, a people
currently enduring slow starvation with their children as part of a
broader campaign of genocide). CUNY leadership is coping with the
attack in the worst possible way: by repressing and punishing
pro-Palestinian activism.

On paper, CUNY protects academic freedom in its bylaws, which specify
that the university should be a “forum for the advocacy of all ideas
protected by the First Amendment,” and emphasizes a commitment to
the “principles of academic freedom.” Similar language appears in
CUNY’s contract with its faculty and staff union, the Professional
Staff Congress (PSC). But there have been times in CUNY’s history
when this value has been breached. In the 1950s, a rabidly
anti-Communist Brooklyn College president shut down the school
newspaper and encouraged state and federal investigations of
left-leaning faculty.

That McCarthyite atmosphere has returned to CUNY. Last month, CUNY
fired Corinna Mullin and three other faculty members who haven’t
chosen to be publicly identified. According to the union, all have
advocated for Palestinian rights.

The firings followed a script that is becoming predictable: of
universities capitulating easily to pressure from far-right
politicians and braying mobs when it comes to speech about Gaza.

Hiring and firing adjunct professors is, at CUNY, up to the department
chairs, and all the fired adjuncts had been rehired by their
departments. As James Davis, the president of the PSC, pointed out in
a letter to CUNY, in no case was the professor’s job performance
judged unsatisfactory, nor were there any complaints of misconduct
against any of the four.

Geert Dhondt, the chair of economics at John Jay College — one of
several departments in which Mullin taught — said her teaching
evaluations were “among the highest in the college.” Dhondt called
CUNY’s decision to override the departments “highly unusual, it
only happens when there is strong outside pressure.”

And indeed, there has been outside pressure. Mullin’s firing was
stoked by local far-right politicians. Republican City Councilwoman
Inna Vernikov and her Democratic colleague Kalman Yeger have been
calling for Mullin’s dismissal since last year, alleging that she
was involved in a violent April protest on campus. Mullin, through her
lawyer, has called it a peaceful protest and insisted that she did not
break any laws.

Vernikov herself is one to talk about violent campus protest; she was
arrested for bringing a gun to a Brooklyn College Palestine protest in
October 2023 yet has somehow managed to keep her job.

CUNY leadership has essentially admitted that this was a political
purge. At a congressional hearing this month on campus
“antisemitism,” Florida Republican Randy Fine asked about Mullin
by name, quoting her chanting, “Down with Zionist scum.” CUNY
chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez assured the far-right
congressman that she was “no longer employed by the university.”

It’s also significant that all the fired faculty are adjuncts,
part-time faculty who lack tenure or other job protections that some
full-time professors enjoy. In an interview with _Jacobin_ this
week, Mullin suggested that the firings were just the beginning of a
larger crackdown on anti-imperialist educators. The purge, she said,
makes “one thing brutally clear: academic freedom does not
meaningfully exist for contingent faculty. But we are not the
exception — we are the warning.”

The PSC is holding a protest demanding the reinstatement of the fired
professors at Brooklyn College on July 31.

It’s clear that the idea of academic freedom — the idea of
universities as institutions independent of the government, which can
nurture inquiry and debate free of interference — is more endangered
than it has been in the United States at any time since the McCarthy
era, thanks to the authoritarian Trump administration and a bipartisan
desperation to quash any discussion of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

None of CUNY’s compliance with this project will do the university
system any good. The entire academic project suffers when
administrators refuse to honor the principle of academic freedom. But
such compliance also doesn’t appease the fascists — it just shows
weakness.

During the hearings, unmoved by the sacrifice of a few adjunct
professors, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a far-right maniac who represents New
York State’s North Country region, called for Chancellor Rodríguez
to be fired. That he was, in the PSC’s telling, willing to indulge
the McCarthyism of the Stefaniks of the world by firing these adjuncts
may not even be enough to save his own job.

_[LIZA FEATHERSTONE is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance
journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle
for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart
[[link removed]].]_

_Jacobin‘s summer issue, “Speculation,” is out now. Follow this
link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print
quarterly. [[link removed]]_

* McCarthyism
[[link removed]]
* zionism
[[link removed]]
* CUNY
[[link removed]]
* City University of New York
[[link removed]]
* Congress
[[link removed]]
* GOP
[[link removed]]
* public universities
[[link removed]]
* Education
[[link removed]]
* higher education
[[link removed]]
* Palestine solidarity
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* starvation
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Student protests
[[link removed]]
* Jewish community
[[link removed]]
* repression
[[link removed]]
* Brooklyn College
[[link removed]]
* Republican Party
[[link removed]]
* Authoritarianism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]