BY NATHANIEL MILLS

Joe Lockard’s August 8 Academe Blog post criticizes, with multiple errors and missing contexts, a statement of the executive committee of the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities AAUP chapter. The chapter’s statement protests the role played by nonacademic groups in the UMN administration’s recent decision to block the hire of Raz Segal as faculty director of UMN’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Lockard calls the statement a “haughty, elitist, exclusionary, and dismissive” appropriation of academic freedom to assert “faculty privilege” over the public. His argument is, in fact, against the principle of academic freedom itself.

The facts in the “unhiring” of Raz Segal have been recounted in this op-ed, this article, by Segal himself, and elsewhere. To recap: on June 5, Segal, a Holocaust historian, was offered the position of CHGS director and member of the faculty after a search committee of faculty experts in the field, many of whom work closely with CHGS, vetted his qualifications. The university admitted that Segal was “enthusiastically recommended by the search committee for this important position,” and no committee members resigned in protest of Segal’s selection, despite Lockard’s erroneous assertion to the contrary (he’s confusing the search committee with the CHGS advisory board—more on that below).

It’s true, as Lockard writes, that the search committee did not include a member of the general public. However, the inclusion of such a member is not at all a firm precedent nor is it typical in hiring at UMN. But robust public feedback was welcomed in the search: over five thousand members of CHGS’s listserv were invited to attend finalist talks and give their input to the search committee.

When Segal was selected, some faculty, members of the public, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC) moved to block the hire, objecting to Segal’s description of Israel as an apartheid and settler-colonial state and his analysis of the ongoing assault on Gaza as genocidal in nature. Such a scholar, they argued, would be too toxic to the Jewish community of Minnesota and thus unable to effectively carry out CHGS’s public-facing work. All of Segal’s stances are shared by other scholars both in the field of genocide studies and across multiple other disciplines. Such perspectives are open to debate, but they clearly derive from what the AAUP terms “disciplinary competence” in those fields. They are, in other words, academically legitimate interpretations of the objects of study in question. Academic freedom protects the right of academics to elaborate such perspectives, whether in writing, research, teaching, or serving in “the governance of an educational institution” (such as directing CHGS).

Segal’s opponents misrepresented his stance on Israel and Palestine and defamed his qualifications, attempting to delegitimize both. Two faculty members of the CHGS advisory board resigned to protest his hire. One falsely claimed that Segal “blames Israel for the rape and murder of 1,200 civilians,” while the other falsely accused Segal of “justifying Hamas’ atrocities.” Another UMN faculty member characterized Segal’s appointment as part of a “pattern of antisemitism” at UMN. This rhetoric even reached our state government. At a June 25 Minnesota Senate hearing, Senator Ron Latz called Segal “a controversial outlier academic” whose hire was proof of antisemitic bias at UMN. Lockard follows suit, calling Segal’s analyses of Israel’s attack on Gaza “victim-blaming statements.”

This virulent campaign against a Jewish Israeli Holocaust expert, a descendent of Holocaust survivors, would be a particularly nasty episode in its own right. That it was successful in reversing Segal’s hire makes it an egregious undermining of UMN’s academic integrity: UMN interim president Jeff Ettinger revoked Segal’s offer of the CHGS directorship and his appointment to the faculty.

Ettinger’s move was unprecedented. UMN’s constitutional documents assign no role to the president in hires like Segal’s. Ettinger cast aside the standing procedures of the institution he was charged with stewarding to appease external critics. UMN’s AAUP chapter accordingly denounced this violation of Segal’s academic freedom and our faculty’s autonomy in determining scholarly qualification. UMN’s faculty senate passed votes of no confidence in our president and provost, specifically and solely for their interference in Segal’s appointment.

Opposition to Segal’s hire is in fact the “outlier” position. An open letter condemning his unhiring has received over a thousand signatures from academics around the world, including many Israeli academics. In a June 24 letter to President Ettinger, prominent scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies and directors of university centers in the field condemned the unhiring and “hateful and libelous media campaign” against Segal waged by external groups, writing that “no one person and no one organization represents all Jews anywhere, also not in the Twin Cities,” and no organization should have “power over a public university’s hiring process.”

While opponents of Segal posit a uniform “Jewish community” as alienated by Segal’s appointment, there is divergence of opinion on Israel, the Gaza conflict, and definitions of antisemitism and genocide within Jewish communities. That divergence was voiced at the June 25 Minnesota Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee hearing into alleged antisemitism at UMN: as Doug Rossinow writes, this hearing made clear that there is no universal consensus among Jewish groups and community members around these issues.

Criticisms of Segal overlook the fact that there are many other community constituencies and research projects supported by CHGS, such as Minnesota’s Indigenous communities, and not all of them oppose Segal’s positions. The public the center serves is diverse and represents a range of community interests.

UMN policy on academic freedom protects a faculty member’s work in “matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the University,” such as the directing of public-facing centers. If universities are to be sites of knowledge production rather than extensions of political interests, there cannot be a carve-out in academic freedom protections for certain political positions. It takes only a moment of consideration to see that giving extra-academic organizations and their members the ability to veto a university hire sets a disastrous precedent. Lockard may support this particular instance of the practice because he shares the views of Segal’s opponents, but I have a hard time believing that if, say, a qualified pro-Israeli faculty member was hired by our university, and then unhired following protest from Minnesota’s Muslim community groups, that Lockard would react similarly.

Finally, it’s disappointing that Lockard calls the AAUP statement “quasicolonial” and “antidemocratic.” CHGS studies the histories of many peoples who have suffered and continue to suffer under actual colonial and antidemocratic oppression. The principle that academic hires should be decided by faculty experts is not comparable. If Lockard supports the undermining of academic freedom when a scholar holds certain sociopolitical perspectives on the Israeli state and the situation in Gaza, he should make that case on its own merits, whatever they may be.

Nathaniel Mills is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, and member at large of the executive committee of the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities AAUP chapter.