BY DANIEL SEGAL
It is the rare faculty member who today is unaware of the significant increase in attacks on speech rights and academic freedom protections on U.S. campuses over the past two years. A recently released joint report from the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) provides an important and illuminating framework for understanding this new and continuing extreme repression in U.S. higher education.
The report rightly notes that repression of speech about Palestine-Israel seen as critical of either the Israeli state or Zionism (including both plainly honest classroom speech and extramural advocacy of Palestinian freedom and equality) pre-dated both October 2023 and the re-election of Donald Trump. But in that earlier moment, this repression constituted a “Palestine exception” to broad faculty, institutional, and state support for both academic freedom and campus rights of speech and assembly.
In the last two years, by contrast, the repression of speech about Palestine-Israel has both increased and become an enabling precedent or pretext for an extraordinarily broad assault on campus rights of speech and assembly, academic freedom protections, and, ultimately, educational excellence at US colleges and universities. This assault has especially targeted, but has not been limited to, honest teaching about gender and race, as well as institutional support for gender and racial equity. Put simply, repression in the cause of Zionism—or better, the cause of compulsory Zionism—has served and is continuing to serve as a seductive lure, creating quiescence about and even overt support for a fulsome attack on both higher education’s institutional autonomy from the state and our vocation as teacher-scholars.
An important and compelling argument in the newly released AAUP-MESA report is that the key legal tool enabling and legitimating the repression of speech about Palestine-Israel dissenting from compulsory Zionism “has been civil rights law–specifically, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” This, in turn, has depended on longer-term political work in support of the Israeli state, preceding both Gaza and the second Trump administration, that has smeared, by definitional fiat, anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian rights as antisemitism or Jew hate. The most prominent vehicle for this Big Lie being the so-called IHRA “working definition” of antisemitism, which fosters the confounding of legitimate political speech and hate speech–criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state on the one hand and antisemitism on the other.
An important lesson we can draw from the new report is that our failure in higher education to defend, without giving any ground, pro-Palestinian speech has proven to be not just costly, but nothing less than an existential threat to open inquiry, debate, and educational excellence on our campuses. Abstract (or liberal) defenses of speech rights and academic freedom protections—those that do not acknowledge the socio-political vulnerability of specific content, notably support for Palestinian freedom and equality—have proven be inadequate to this moment precisely because they are so readily useable by right-wing projects to repress dissent and free and critical inquiry on our campuses.
My brief here is simple: read, discuss, and share as widely as you can this richly empirical and incisive report from the AAUP and MESA. Share it, first and foremost, with your colleagues and students, especially faculty colleagues who have been reticent about defending pro-Palestinian speech, and share it also, as a needed provocation, with the senior administrators and trustees of your own institution.
This AAUP-MESA report is a crucial resource for fighting back and re-claiming our universities and colleges.
Daniel Segal is the Jean M. Pitzer emeritus at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council.
Reading this one would think that there is no problem with antisemitism at US universities and that only innocents are being persecuted by the evil Jews— oops evil Zionists. This is a mirror image of the Trumper version of reality. The Trumpers are weaponizing the issue for their own agenda, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real problem with antisemitism.
Not only might Professor Segal’s readers think there is no problem with antisemitism on US campuses and that only innocents were persecuted by the evil Jews or Zionists, they might naively believe they could rely for a fair account of the I-P conflict, in particular the genocide perpetrated on 10/7/2023 by Hamas, on him and representatives of MESA and Jewish Voices for Peace.
The joint AAUP-MESA report that Prof Segal applauds begins, “(P)ro-Israel advocates have worked to redefine civil rights law to treat campus speech opposing Zionism…as a form of unlawful discrimination.” Can he point to any actual instances of such, that is schools, departments, organizations, or individuals who have been found to have unlawfully discriminated against those protected by Title VI on account of “campus speech opposing Zionism”? If he can point to any instances that clearly support their claim in this regard, then he should do so; if he can’t serve up any that do, and I don’t think he can, then he ought to admit he can’t, and take back the “compulsory Zionism” nonsense, too. (Who has ever been compelled against their free will to adopt Zionism as their personal creed?)
I find the article incredulous. Absolutely no mention of MESA and other “scholarly” organization boycotting all academia supporting Zionism and the Jews attachment to Israel, the scholarship supporting the fact that the accusations against Israel regarding apartheid and genocide are political and not fact based, nor any other university organization blackballing Jews who refuse to condemn Israel and Zionism.