BY DANIEL A. SEGAL
At Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University this semester, the university administration censored a campus event featuring Professor Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University (Abdulhadi is also a past recipient of the AAUP’s Georgina Smith Award). Organized by a student group—Cardozo on Israel and Palestine (CIP)—the event had been scheduled for March 1. One week before it was to have occurred, however, Yeshiva University’s president, Ari Berman, canceled the event without any communication with the CIP students. The room reservation and catering arrangements were similarly canceled, also without the students being notified.
In its statement opposing this censorship, the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) noted that the AAUP has long affirmed that “students should be allowed to invite and hear any person of their own choosing” and, furthermore, that “institutional control of campus facilities should not be used as a device of censorship” of student-organized events—as the Yeshiva administration clearly did in this case.
We can add that an administration’s censorship of a student-organized event due to the event’s political content also negatively impacts the academic freedom of the institution’s faculty, given that such censorship sends a clarion signal of the administration’s readiness to squelch the expression and hearing of political views it opposes. Simply put: any act of censorship on a campus has a chilling effect beyond the act of censorship itself.
It is important, moreover, to read President Berman’s email in support of his censorship of the CIP event in the context of the AAUP’s recent statement (issued after the incident at Cardozo), Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism. Berman states that the event with Professor Abdulhadi was canceled because “anti-Semitic vitriol” has no place “at this university.” Yet, crucially, Berman’s email offers no evidence—because there is none—that Professor Abdulhadi has ever articulated antisemitic views. Instead, this vicious smear against Professor Abdulhadi is hung on the assumption, slipped into President Berman’s statement, that criticisms of the Israeli state are per se expressions of “anti-Semitic vitriol.” This axiomatic conflation of legitimate political speech with antisemitic speech (that is, of legitimate political speech with hate speech) is precisely what the recent AAUP statement calls out and identifies as an all-too-common tactic to stifle “teaching about the history, policies, and actions of the state of Israel.”
President Berman’s email also invokes Professor Abdulhadi’s previous praise for Palestinian activists who have endorsed the use of violence in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Setting aside questions about the accuracy of Berman’s account of Abdulhadi’s views, it is important to note that if an absolute commitment to non-violence were indeed a criterion for who can speak at Cardozo, a vast range of other speakers would also need to be banned from the campus, including many defenders of the Israeli state who have previously been welcomed at Cardozo, including some invited and hosted specifically by CIP. And rather than continuing to proceed on so transparent a double-standard—facially motivated by enmity towards Palestinians—Berman should at a minimum respect his students, and allow them to hear and engage in dialogue with Professor Abdulhadi and assess for themselves the merits of her views.
It is, in short, time for Cardozo School of Law to end its Palestinian exception to academic freedom and campus speech rights: the event with Professor Abdulhadi must be rescheduled at the earliest possible date acceptable to both the CIP students and Professor Abdulhadi herself. In light of the administration’s continued refusal to allow Professor Abdulhadi to speak at Cardozo, the CIP students have asked that letters protesting this censorship be sent to Yeshiva’s president (president@yu.edu), with copies to both Cardozo’s Dean (leslie@yu.edu) and the CIP students themselves (cardozocip@gmail.com).
Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Pitzer College, the acting president of the Claremont Colleges AAUP, a member of the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and a co-organizer of TIAA-Divest!
Not just support for violence, support for terrorist attacks against civilians . And the Antisemitism charge is true, it’s not just criticism of Israel. BDS is based on lies and BDSers lie to promote their cause on a regular basis. That’s what we see here.
I think Segal is right to say that YU/Cardozo should not have canceled this event. However, to describe the objections to Abdulhadi as that she engages in “criticism of the Israeli state” is misleading. Abdulhadi described the refusal to permit Hillel to table at a “Know Your Rights” fair at SFSU as refusal “to allow a member of a privileged white group whose members feel entitled to be represented everywhere and anywhere.” Get it? These people put their long fingers into everything. Nor was it a workaday criticism of Israel when Abdulahadi reacted to SFSU’s then-president Wong affirming that ZIonists are welcome on SFSU’s campus as a “declaration of war against Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and all those who are committed to an indivisible sense of justice on and off campus.” She should not be prevented from speaking on these grounds,nor on the grounds of her praise for (and speaking invitations to) Leila Khaled, even if the PFLP-affiliated Khaled, who has called ISIS a Zionist-American organization, remains an enthusiast for what she calls resistance and other might call the deliberate killing of civilians. So, yes, Abdulhadi should not be prevented from speaking. But it was not the AAUP’s finest hour when it gave this person an award.
I would just add that Leila Khaled doesn’t just support terrorism (called “resistance”), she engaged in it having participated in 2 civilian aircraft hijackings. In the 2nd of these hijacking attempts she tried to set off a hand grenade in mid flight, something which would have killed a couple of hundred innocent civilians had it gone off–including a number of AAUP members. I suppose even Antisemitic terrorism supporters deserve to have their academic freedom defended, but let’s at least be honest about what is being defended.
What concern do you have about state violence and its supporters? Evidence and reason support the judgment that Henry Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of millions, specifically in Cambodia, and yet I know of no one who would say Hillary Clinton should be banned from speaking, even though she has several times praised Kissinger. How do you propose to provide a principled assessment of the violence you link to Leila Khaled and and the violence Henry Kissinger is responsible for? Or, for that matter, Barack Obama and drone warfare, as discussed in Samuel Moyn’s new book? And how can students be brought into a reasoned dialogue about these issues if we selectively censor some speakers, some positions–and are uncritical about and privilege the use of state power to murder millions? The above response seems less about debating the issues of campus academic freedom than a ruse for more anti-Palestinian propaganda.
I was opposing state violence long before Prof. Segal discovered the issue so attacking me on that is nonsensical. I’m not saying Abdulhadi’s talk should have been cancelled, but I am calling for an honest accounting of what the issues were–something that Prof. Segal did not provide and persists in obscuring. As to pointing out Abdulhadi’s support for terrorists and Antisemites, that’s not anti-Palestinian propaganda, it’s just pointing out why her talk was considered beyond the pale for Yeshiva University. Of course for Prof. Segal it seems to think that any pointing out Antisemitism and support for terrorism on the part of his associates is inherently unacceptable.
Let us ask the question: is the initial agreement in this response, that Cardozo School of Law was wrong to censor the talk, serious or just space-clearing for the subsequent repeating of the charges of antisemitism? Will you take the action urged at the end of the blog entry and email the president, the dean, and the students urging the censorship be rescinded? Let us know!
I agree that Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi’s talk at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law should not have been canceled by the administration, and that “students should be allowed to invite and hear any person of their own choosing.” But it is beyond ironic to cite USACBI in support of academic freedom. Just one more click on the USACBI website takes us from its statement on Prof. Abdulhadi to the organization’s own academic boycott guidelines, which urge “academics, academic associations/unions, and academic — as well as other — institutions around the world, where possible and as relevant, to boycott and/or work towards the cancellation or annulment of events . . . [that] promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy.” That is precisely the sort of content-based censorship that Prof. Segal otherwise claims to oppose.
Academic freedom means academic freedom for everyone. Prof. Abdulhadi should be able to express her support for Palestine wherever students want to listen to her. It is too bad that Prof. Segal and Prof. Abdulhadi do not believe in extending the same opportunities to those with whom they disagree.
Steve Lubet and I disagree about whether there are any conditions or circumstances that justify an institutional academic boycott: he thinks there are none, including presumably universities under the Nazi regime. I am not similarly an absolutist, as I think there are very narrow circumstances where institutional academic boycotts are the best course of action, in defense of academic freedom. We have debated that elsewhere and will continue to do so, I am sure. But for now, my response is to say that anyone who agrees that Yeshiva and Cardozo’s censorship is wrong should participate in the action called for at the end of the blog, by writing a letter to to YU president and copying in the Cardozo dean and the CIP students.
It took Prof. Segal only three moves to validate Godwin’s Law — “as an online discussion grows longer, regardless of topic or scope, the probability of a comparison to Nazis approaches 1” — but the so-called institutional boycott is a red herring. The USACBI boycott guidelines also call for the “cancellation of events” that promote the “normaliztion” of Israel, evidently without regard to institutional sponsorship. That is academically indistinguishable from Berman’s cancellation of Prof. Abdulhadi’s lecture that, in Berman’s view, would normalize airplane hijacking.
Segal is right that we have debated this before, but he has never repudiated, or even acknowledged, USACBI’s call for content-based censorship of events. If I am wrong about that, I suggest that he can write his own letter to, well, anyone.