Academic freedom and the crisis of campus Gaza protests

Two decisions on opposite sides of the United States last week underlined different ways in which the limits of academic freedom are being tested in the campus encampment crisis unfolding across the country during protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank.

On 16 May, for the first time in its 270-year history, Columbia University’s largest academic unit, the faculty of arts and sciences, took the extraordinary step of voting ‘No Confidence’ in the university’s president, Nemat Shafik.

The resolution, which followed Shafik’s call, on 30 April, for the New York Police Department to clear pro-Palestinian protesters from Hamilton Hall and to dismantle the encampment that had been established on 17 April, charged that these actions were a “violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance”.

Meanwhile a day later, but on the other side of the country, Sonoma State University (SSU) President Mike Lee resigned just days after being put on administrative leave for “insubordination” by Mildred García, who as chancellor of the California State University, the state’s public university system that, in addition to SSU includes 22 other state universities, was Lee’s immediate superior. García took this step in response to the agreement he negotiated with pro-Palestinian protesters to take down their encampment.

According to SSU History Professor Stephen Bittner, who directs SSU’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide (CSHG), the agreement violates academic freedom for a number of reasons, including because Lee agreed to an academic boycott – the first of its kind in the nation – of Israeli scholars and other scholars with links to Israel without any input from the faculty.

“This betrays the core function of the university,” said Bittner, and violates academic freedom as well as the shared governance system because such a policy is the purview of faculty curriculum committees.

As these two examples show, at the heart of many of the debates American academics have been dealing with since Israel’s invasion of Gaza that followed Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israel, and, especially after encampments by pro-Palestinian protesters started appearing in mid-April, is the cherished idea of ‘academic freedom’.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) stated in 1967 that academic freedom “is a special concern of the First Amendment [to the US Constitution], which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”. But the SCOTUS has never equated academic freedom with the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from passing laws that “abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances”.

As Steven Brint, distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and an expert on academic freedom, says, both public and private universities give “wide latitude to student protests”.

As defined by a series of US Supreme Court decisions, academic freedom rests on four pillars: the university decides who can come there, the university decides who can teach there, the university decides what is taught, and the university decides how the subject matter will be taught.

According to Brint: “Academic freedom doesn’t seem to be well understood.”

He explains that as defined by the American Association of University Professors, it covers three areas: teaching, researching and external speech.

“For teaching and research professors have complete freedom from external control (in theory) within the domain of their professional expertise.”

To illuminate the link between academic freedom and professional expertise, he asks the rhetorical question: “What does the Department of English have to say from a professional expertise point-of-view about the current events and the war in the Middle East?”

Freedom in extramural speech, even outside a professor’s professional competency, has tended to be interpreted by the courts as a species of First Amendment rights, Brint says.

‘Violation’ of founding norms

The first item in the ‘No Confidence’ motion against Shafik, which was supported by 80% of the voting faculty, focuses on her testimony on 17 April before the House of Representatives Education and Workforce Committee, in which she “promised to fire faculty, thereby violating the norms, practices, policies and protections (based on academic freedom) upon which a university is founded”.

At this meeting, tagged “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” Representative Tim Walberg (Michigan) asked about Professor Joseph Massad’s statements that the Hamas’ attack on Israel was “awesome,” “astonishing” and “incredible”.

Shafik told the committee that she was “appalled” by his comments and that Massad, a tenured professor in the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, “had been spoken to”.

Shafik responded to Walberg’s hypothetical question of how she would vote if Massad were up for tenure by saying she would not vote for him.

When asked about Professor Mohamed Abdou, who was a visiting professor in Columbia’s Middle East Institute and who on 11 October praised Hamas on Facebook, Shafik told the committee: “I share with you your repugnance at those remarks” and that Abduo was grading papers and would not be hired again.

According to the censure resolution, Shafik’s discussion of Massad, Abdou and law professor Katherine Franke – whom one representative quoted as saying: “All Israeli students who have served in the [Israeli Defense Forces] are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus” – “constitute clear violations of the AAUP’s principles of tenure and academic freedom” as well as the university’s own statement that university policy “should not be set by, or in deference to, entities external to the institution”.

‘Violation of faculty autonomy’

Professor Reinhart Martin, who teaches in Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and is the newly elected president of the university’s AAUP chapter characterised Shafik’s testimony as “pure capitulation that absolutely violates the autonomy of the faculty”.

Martin said: “She pretty much indicated that individuals with this kind of sensibility would not be hired again . . .. that the decision of a search or tenure committee could be arbitrarily rejected on ideological grounds.”

Martin also underlined that it was important that 80% of the voting faculty supported the ‘No Confidence’ motion, although it has no legal effect, and that it came from what he called the “heart of the university, the faculty of arts and sciences”.

To explain his view of the significance, Martin reached back two centuries to the writings of Immanual Kant and his belief that the ‘Lower Faculty’, as it was then called, embodied a different ethos than did law faculties or, Martin added, even his architecture faculty.

For, unlike these faculties that have ties to business and other extramural institutions, the arts and sciences faculty is made up, in the Kantian sense, of disinterested experts who are “in the best position to advise critically the administration, the sovereign in those days” and today the university administration.

For his part, Brint told University World News: “It’s pretty outrageous for a president to short circuit the faculty [on hiring and tenure decisions] and to declare, in advance, what’s going to happen outside of faculty weighing in, and in such a public forum.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate under any circumstances. But that’s about as public as you can get. I don’t remember a case where a university president was in Congress and seemed to violate the academic freedom rights of the faculty in such a public way.”

The resolution also charges that Shafik violated academic freedom by calling on the police and notes that Shafik violated the principles of shared governance by “ignoring the opinions of the faculty and students on the Senate Executive Committee who unanimously rejected” the idea.

Freedom of speech or academic freedom?

At the risk of splitting hairs, Brint explained that the decision to call in the police to end the encampment was more a question of First Amendment rights than academic freedom.

“It’s not clear that student protesters would fit under that rubric. And many of the faculty who support the student protesters probably don’t either because they’re not experts in Middle Eastern politics.

“But the students obviously have First Amendment rights. They have the right to assemble, they have the right to protest. Those rights are circumscribed, to some degree, by the restrictions on time, place and [the] manner of protests which might apply,” he told University World News.

Freedom to collaborate

Bittner began our discussion by saying that up until he heard about the agreement Lee struck with the protesters he supported SSU’s president, who resigned on 17 May. By agreeing to an academic boycott of Israel, Lee undercut academic freedom and undermined the CSHG, he argued.

“I think that scholars and students have to be free to follow their intellectual passions, their research, wherever it takes them – even if that is to Israeli universities and to Israeli scholars. This idea is sacrosanct in my view,” Bittner said.

“And more broadly, I just don’t believe that it is healthy to shun people we disagree with. So I think that’s probably a basic philosophical difference that divides me from a lot of people in the Students for Justice for Palestine [who established the encampment] and a lot of faculty who’ve been coordinating with the SJP,” he added.

While SSU does not have institutional ties with Israeli universities, Bittner’s CSHG, which is 40 years old and is one of the oldest Holocaust studies programs in the United States, routinely invites Israeli scholars and scholars with ties to Israel to give lectures.

In addition to these scholars, the CSHG hosts expert speakers on other genocides. Last year both the Rwandan ambassador to the UK and the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations spoke, while this year speakers addressed topics as diverse as “Japanese War Atrocities, Historians and Public Memories”, “Genocide and Human Trafficking in History”, and “Authoritarianism and Genocide in the Age of Climate Change.”

It is by chance that the Nakba (‘the Catastrophe’), the word used by Palestinians to denote the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 and their claim to having been dispossessed from their land, was not part of this year’s lecture series, as it has been in previous years.

“I couldn’t credibly take the position on academic freedom and then say, well, we’re never going to talk about the Palestinian crisis,” Bittner said before adding: “Next year there will surely be Palestinian speakers.”

Formal procedures short circuited

Bittner is also critical of Lee’s agreement to establish a Palestinian Studies Department, though not because he is against building up the Middle Eastern curriculum.

Rather, by agreeing to it, Lee violated academic freedom by short circuiting the formal procedure for establishing or abolishing departments which, under the precepts of shared governance, puts the onus on faculty experts. Bittner further explained that SSU has gone from 10,000 students before COVID to 6,000, and so uses “different metrics that faculty and administrators have agreed upon for academic reorganisation”.

He told University World News: “And so it was shocking to learn that we have suddenly committed to a new academic program in Palestinian [ethnic] studies without really any consultation – it was a concession that the administrators made to the protesters. It’s wildly inappropriate for students to play that kind of role in the formation of curriculum.”

He added further: “The decision to build the new program and ethnic [Palestinian] studies is highly problematic. Ethnic studies has a fairly tight definition according to California law. It is defined as Asian American, African American, Indigenous American and Latino American studies.”

• On Thursday 23 May, the Arts Faculty Council, the governing body of the largest faculty of the University of Alberta, Canada, voted ‘No Confidence’ in the university’s president, Bill Flanagan, over his decision to call in the police on 11 May to forcibly dismantle an encampment set up two days earlier.