https://theintercept.com/2024/09/26/tenured-professor-fired-palestine-israel-zionism/

MEET THE FIRST TENURED PROFESSOR TO BE FIRED FOR PRO-PALESTINE SPEECH

Maura Finkelstein was terminated by Muhlenberg College for an Instagram repost.

Natasha Lennard

September 26 2024, 5:00 a.m.

Share

In this March 2, 2011 photo, shown is a sign at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pa. The college is named for a patriarch of the American Lutheran church, but is also one of the hottest campuses in the country for Jewish students. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

A sign at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pa., on March 2, 2011. Photo: Matt Rourke/AP

MAURA FINKELSTEIN NEVER hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.”

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching.”

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.

For Finkelstein’s repost of Kanazi’s words, the college determined that their employee of nine years had violated its equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies.

“The College at all times follows its mission, policies and procedures with respect to matters arising under our Equal Opportunity and Nondiscrimination Policy and the Faculty Handbook,” said Todd Lineburger, Muhlenberg’s vice president for communications. “Per those policies and procedures, the College does not comment on confidential matters.”

“The First Case”

In this time of extraordinary repression in academia, Finkelstein appears to be the first professor to be dismissed from a tenured job over anti-Zionist speech. Her dismissal sets a grim new precedent against a backdrop of right-wing attacks on higher education nationwide. As The Intercept has reported, numerous professors without the protection of tenure have faced the loss of work in apparent retaliation for speaking out against Israel’s genocidal war and apartheid regime. Hundreds of students have faced and continue to face grave disciplinary consequences for participating in Gaza solidarity encampments and protests.

Related

University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs Over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza

In the last 11 months, other tenured professors have been suspended and investigated for making strong criticisms of Israel and Zionism in their extramural speech — statements made outside the classroom. In 2014, in the closest precursor to Finkelstein’s case, Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita sued the University of Illinois for firing him two weeks before he was to begin teaching in a tenured position. The move came after his tweets criticizing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza drew right-wing media censure. The university settled with Salaita for $845,000 after public records requests revealed that the administration had been responding to pressure from wealthy donors to fire him.

Until Finkelstein, however, no other tenured professor has reported losing their long-held job for speech or expression relating to Israel–Palestine, let alone sharing a social media post.

“This is the first case that we’ve seen,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit organization that advocates for faculty rights and academic freedom and seeks to hold higher education institutions accountable when standards are violated. “The apparent violations of her academic freedom are quite egregious, especially because they appear to primarily involve her posts on social media, what we would call her extramural speech.”

Levy said, “We are taking this case seriously.”

Repression and workplace retaliation are not somehow worse in Finkelstein’s case by virtue of her tenured position; all academic workers should enjoy the freedom that tenured faculty get. Yet the firing of a tenured professor over an anti-Zionist Instagram repost signals the extent to which institutions of higher education are willing to betray their own purported standards to bend to intellectually dishonest, conservative pro-Israel narratives.

Pressure Campaign

Muhlenberg’s decision to dismiss Finkelstein did not begin and end with the Kanazi Instagram story, which she posted in mid-January. It followed monthslong efforts aimed at pressuring the college to remove the professor, with online crusades primarily led by anonymous Muhlenberg alumni.

Finkelstein was the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators — as well as local news outlets and politicians — demanding the professor’s removal and accusing her of “Jew hatred.” Finkelstein said she was told by college leadership that numerous families of students had called to express concern about her position. A Change.org petition started in late October by unnamed “Muhlenberg College Alumni and Supporters” called for Finkelstein’s firing over allegedly “pro-Hamas” rhetoric; it gained over 8,000 signatures.

“I think that the pressure from donors and alums was so intense that I became a huge liability,” Finkelstein said.

“I think that the pressure from donors and alums was so intense that I became a huge liability.”

The examples of Finkelstein’s allegedly “dangerous” speech listed on the petition include an email the professor sent to Muhlenberg students, staff, and faculty on October 10, in which she called the October 7 attacks “devastating” and wrote, “We must mourn all civilian deaths.” The focus of Finkelstein’s email, however, was to alert the college community that Israel was already bombing Gaza with “airstrikes of unprecedented intensity” and had threatened to cut off basic resources to the imperiled territory.

“For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s acts of revenge will likely result in absolute annihilation,” Finkelstein wrote. “Muhlenberg can be a hard space to talk openly about and grieve Palestine and Palestinians. Please know that there are safe spaces on campus – feel free to reach out to me if you need to.”

A screenshot of the email featured in the Change.org petition as a purported example of the threat Finkelstein posed to Jewish students.

The petition also featured screenshots of posts from Finkelstein’s personal social media accounts, none of which name Muhlenberg College. The posts decry Israel as an occupying force and accuse the state of genocide, a claim deemed plausible by the International Court of Justice. None of Finkelstein’s posts are directed at Jewish people — students or otherwise — for being Jewish.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5601923&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310690",#48135284)