Across the US, students and faculty are continuing to resist repressive measures by university administrations intended to stifle or even criminalize speech in support of Palestinian rights, as the genocide in Gaza continues.
Along with elite US institutions calling riot cops on their own students who have been holding sit-in protests, or attempting to prevent students from holding protests altogether, some universities have tried to categorize the political ideology of Zionism as a protected identity class in order to define anti-Zionist speech as racist hate speech.
“As long as I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been teaching about Palestine – it’s always been either central or integrated into the work that I do,” Maura Finkelstein told The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
Finkelstein, a scholar of anthropology and a writer, taught at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania for nine years.
She had been teaching a course on the anthropology of Palestine, a class that she says had been approved by the college.
But even though she was tenured, she was fired in May 2024 over her social media posts in support of Palestinian rights and against the political ideology of Zionism – a move that has been seen as a warning to other anti-genocide professors.
The firing followed months of targeted harassment by Israel lobby groups and individuals who pressured the university to fire Finkelstein, accusing her of “Jew hatred” over her anti-Zionist principles. Finkelstein is Jewish.
The Intercept reported that Finkelstein “was the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators – as well as local news outlets and politicians – demanding the professor’s removal.”
The college administration told Finkelstein that “numerous families of students had called to express concern about her position,” The Intercept notes. “A Change.org petition started in late October by unnamed ‘Muhlenberg College alumni and supporters’ called for Finkelstein’s firing over allegedly ‘pro-Hamas’ rhetoric; it gained over 8,000 signatures.”
Finkelstein told The Electronic Intifada that one of her social media posts – a repost to her personal account of a statement about refusing to normalize Zionism by the Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi – instigated condemnation by a Muhlenberg student who had never attended her class.
“Because the student identified as a Zionist, and because the student believed that Zionism and Judaism were the same, [the student claimed that] I was violating the equal opportunity non-discrimination policy that would essentially be denying the student access to an education,” Finkelstein said.
She explained that even though the student did not know her, “the student assumed from the social media posts that they would not be safe in my class. It went through a three-and-a-half-months-long investigation, it went through various faculty, staff and administrative panels, and I was told that I was terminated for cause, which is immediately no access to severance.”
“Perfect collision”
Finkelstein says that according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), she is the first tenured professor to be fired since October 2023 over support for Palestinian rights.
“Of course, there were cases in the past,” she notes, citing professor Steven Salaita’s firing by the University of Illinois in 2014, as well as “countless adjuncts, visiting assistant professors, lecturers, other contingent faculty who have lost their contracts, who’ve lost their jobs without the same kind of foundation that would cause outrage.”
There is a fear, she says, for academics who are being sanctioned now “that if they go public with the story, they’ll never work in higher ed [education] again. And I think that that’s a real threat.”
With her own case, Finkelstein explains, it crystallizes at least two of the big crises in higher education right now.
One crisis is the “constant erosion of federal funding, of federal support [that] has created these institutions so that they’re completely, or almost completely, dependent on tuition and donor support,” which creates a financial model that “isn’t actually about education, this is about the accumulation of resources,” she says.
The second is that administrators are in a position where they “don’t know what Judaism is. They don’t know what Zionism is. They probably actually don’t know much about the decisions they’re making. What they do know is [that] if they alienate their financial base, they will collapse.”
Finkelstein says that she understands why some professors are scared to speak up in defense of Palestine and potentially lose their jobs. But, she adds, her colleagues should not self-censor.
“We all need to be talking about Palestine. We all need to be teaching about Palestine because, in an ideal world, they can’t fire us all.”
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