Today, March 13, 2025, the Middle East Studies Association released the following important statement. To go directly to the statement on the site, click here. The second Trump administration has ushered in an existential threat to academic freedom and higher education in the United States. The current campaign targeting universities is an extension of earlier…
Thursday 13 March, 1pm EST on Zoom BDS, International Law, and the Struggle for Rights and Representation on US Campuses Workshop Introduction and moderator: Karim Mattar (CAHE) Speakers: Omar Barghouti (Palestinian BDS National Committee) and Radhika Sainath (Palestine Legal) Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/pyyCqnJvT1ain-vG4sJ5mg Please join CAHE on Thursday 13 March, 1pm EST for our BDS, International Law, and the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) is mobilizing again this year for another Day of Action on April 17. Last year, more than 100 campuses participated in the Day of Action, holding events, rallies, viewing parties for the teach-in, and meetings to strategize. To bring campuses together simultaneously, CAHE…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, TIM GIBSON, AND JAMES FINKELSTEIN This blog post is the second in a series on the transformation of George Mason University’s board. Read part I here. From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism In recent years, George Mason University’s Board of Visitors (BOV) has dramatically transformed from conservative oversight to extreme partisan…
BY JAMES FINKELSTEIN, BETHANY LETIECQ, AND TIM GIBSON From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism Republican governors in Virginia have long appointed conservatives to university governing boards, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than at George Mason University. This trend began in July 1996, when Governor George Allen appointed Edwin Feulner, co-founder and president…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH As readers are no doubt aware, the problem of undemocratic professional associations is coming more and more to the fore as members attempt to hold their scholarly and professional associations accountable in some way over the genocide in Gaza and its concomitant scholasticide. A veritable new and necessary genre has emerged:…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Yesterday, the Department of Education announced investigations into Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, explaining that “widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported” at these five institutions. Given the confusion that reigns in and over higher education today, it’s worth trying…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH Please consider signing this open letter to the NYU administration. The text is below. Click the preceding link to access the form itself so you can add your name. On December 12, the NYU administration invited the NYPD to arrest two faculty members who were supporting students involved in a nonviolent protest…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Saree Makdisi, UCLA professor and author of Palestine Inside Out and Tolerance is a Wasteland, for the documentary film The Palestine Exception. “The knowledge is out there,” Makdisi told me. “The genie is not going back in the bottle. In fact, the bottle is broken.…