BY ELLEN SCHRECKER

As the tragic conflict unfolds in Israel and Gaza, the AAUP may now face attempts to fire pro-Palestinian professors that could make earlier academic purges look like a tea party. I know whereof I speak. I have studied academic freedom and higher education for over forty years and traced the AAUP’s failure to stand up effectively against McCarthyism in my 1986 book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Most recently, my article “Political Repression and the AAUP from 1915 to the Present” appeared in the latest issue of Academe, revisiting the AAUP’s past in light of the current attacks on academic freedom. In a forthcoming collection of essays—The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right’s Attack on Academic Freedom—that Valerie Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, and I co-edited, the current culture wars’ attacks on universities are also explored. Those situations were bad; the current one is worse.

We are already hearing demands for the scalps of academics who are passionately committed to the Palestinian cause and extremely hostile to Israel. Even though the First Amendment should protect them from any run-ins with the law, it is already clear that it will not shield them from death threats and doxing. Whether their institutions will protect their academic freedom in the face of the heightened emotions produced by the horrific violence of the past two weeks in Israel and Gaza or fire them is by no means clear.

Petitions from both sides litter the internet. Demonstrations occur at brand-name institutions—Harvard, Penn, Cornell, and Columbia among them. Critics of Israel call for more attention to its oppression of Palestinians, while its supporters demand action against those who, they claim, condone the attack by Hamas. And at some institutions, the most fervent advocates of the Palestinian cause are being investigated, if not yet sanctioned.

Such reprisals against impassioned opponents of Israel have occurred for years. Despite most universities’ stated adherence to the principles of academic freedom, some administrations have capitulated to demands for ousting their campuses’ main champions of the Palestinian cause. Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure in 2007 by the president of DePaul University because of external pressures against his opposition to the occupation of Palestine. And Steven Salaita was deprived of the job he was hired for by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of some outrageous tweets during Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza.

What differentiates the current situation is that the calls for action today are directed not only against critics of Israel but also against the leaders of such prestigious universities as Harvard and Penn. Conservative donors and trustees—many (though not all) Jewish—threaten to close their checkbooks because their alma mater’s administrations did not cancel pro-Palestinian activities on their campuses or excoriate Hamas sufficiently. In response, university presidents accused of being too even-handed in their remarks about the conflict have been releasing increasingly apologetic statements that highlight their opposition to antisemitism and their disgust at their controversial professors’ alleged enthusiasm for terrorism.

Even if individual professors are not dismissed or sanctioned, official statements deploring their faculty members’ opposition to Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians demonize a perfectly legitimate political movement. They lend implicit support to an impending blacklist that has been further strengthened by the widespread adoption of a Holocaust remembrance organization’s highly controversial definition of antisemitism that conflates it with criticism of Israel.

Perhaps we would not be seeing so much equivocal language coming from the presidential suites of America’s leading universities if they weren’t already vulnerable to attacks on other fronts—especially from the self-conscious and massively funded decades-long campaign by a network of right-wing billionaires and free-market ideologues that seeks to devalue mainstream academic expertise. As the work of scholars like Nancy MacLean and Isaac Kamola reveals, this network has heavily subsidized propaganda from right-wing think tanks, journalists, and academic programs that portray the nation’s elite universities as dominated by leftist professors and out-of-control students of color, while at the same time proffering its own libertarian doctrines and policy recommendations to politicians and the media. And it has been very successful—especially as universities take unpopular actions to respond to the neoliberal regime’s defunding of public higher education over the past fifty years.

We are now more than three years into the current iteration of these right-wing culture wars initiated by Donald Trump and such political operatives and politicians as Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis to divert attention from their own undemocratic values and practices by attacking the supposed misdeeds of “woke” educators who try to teach the truth about America’s present problems and its less than perfect past. The educational gag orders that recently swept through so many red-state legislatures, as well as the book bans that have pulled thousands of volumes off the shelves of schools and public libraries over the past few years, are chilling signs that the suppression of free thought that characterizes authoritarian regimes now infects our body politic.

The current culture wars and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis are connected. The donors and their political allies who call for firing critics of Israel and punishing the universities that supposedly coddle them use tropes that the culture warriors invented. In particular, they latch onto the Far Right’s Orwellian weaponization of free speech by amplifying a few campus incidents involving right-wing speakers and provocateurs who try to make those institutions’ administrators seem hostile to free expression. Though a serious misrepresentation of reality, the allegation that elite universities suppress conservatism has become so widely accepted that the right-wing philanthropists and their allies now employ it to bolster their equally exaggerated charges that institutions like Penn and Harvard are intolerant toward supporters of Israel on campus, as if those institutions did not restrict and often cancel pro-Palestinian speakers and events.

If we are to preserve academic freedom, it will require a major effort on the part of everyone involved in higher education. The AAUP can play a central role here. As the only organization specifically devoted to the protection of academic freedom, it must speak out clearly about the current crisis, mobilize its members at every level, and then join coalitions with other organizations and individuals to convince the rest of the American public that academic freedom matters.

Our most important task may be to stand up for the value of higher education. We must reorient the current conversation about the university to show how essential higher education and the academic freedom that reinforces it is to our democratic polity. We must explain that an institution of higher learning provides its graduates not only with economic advantages but also with the intellectual tools to govern themselves and make independent decisions about how they want to live and what sort of world they want to live in.

A former editor of Academe and current member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University who has written extensively about McCarthyism, higher education, and political repression. Her forthcoming book, The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, coedited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, will be published by Beacon Press in the spring.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.