Academic Freedom

January 14, 2023

Douglas Elmendorf

Dean of Faculty, Harvard Kennedy School

Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy

Dear Dean Elmendorf,

We are writing on behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom, a group of over two-hundred scholars from campuses across California, to condemn the decision by the dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to withdraw a fellowship offered to former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth based on accusations of alleged anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias. These accusations are clearly both inaccurate and highly partisan, and we are deeply concerned that Harvard would bow to political pressure from donors to violate the academic freedom of Mr. Roth and the Harvard community, and given Harvard’s unique position as a standard-bearer of scholarly consensus, of the public more broadly. Indeed, Human Rights Watch’s sources, methods, and rapportage are no different regarding Israel than for any other any other government or entity. It has been unremittingly critical of Arab governments, Iran, and armed Islamist groups. The idea that it is unfairly singling out Israel is ridiculous. Moreover, coming less than two years after the denial of tenure to Cornell West by the Divinity School, allegedly due to donor pressure, Mr. Roth’s case suggests an escalating pattern of interference by Israel partisans in Harvard’s academic affairs.       

Indeed, such a blatant violation of academic freedom has even broader implications, as it sends a signal to other wealthy donors that they can censure and punish anyone who criticizes or challenges their policies or power with impunity. More specifically, it is yet another example of how Palestinian scholars’ experiences and points of view continue to be marginalized and suppressed. Such silencing, moreover, bolsters the Israeli state’s oppression of Palestinians, making Palestinians and their struggle for freedom the primary victims of Harvard’s trampling of academic freedom.  Unlike Roth, however, they do not have the benefit of Human Rights Watch’s reputation and media reach. 

Despite myriad longstanding and unimpeachable evidence of Israel’s systematic abuses, the dean of the Kennedy School, Douglas Elmendorf, had no problem acknowledging that his decision was based on accusations of anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism as if they had a basis in fact, which they clearly do not (not only is Mr. Roth Jewish and the child of refugees from Nazi Germany, he and Human Rights Watch have been accused by Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations of being too soft on Israel). More broadly, the idea that anyone who criticizes systematic Israeli human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity can simply be dismissed as an anti-Semite is completely baseless, as even the slightest perusal of the evidence supporting these claims will demonstrate.

Should Harvard fail to make a course correction and repudiate this attack on its independence, we fear for the future.  Is it too much to ask you to adhere to a higher standard while our own federal government doggedly refuses to adjust its policies to reflect the preferences of the US public, which according to multiple polls favors an evenhanded approach to disputes between Israel and Palestine? Perhaps so. And perhaps Harvard’s capitulation simply confirms the old adage that a fish rots from its head, and sooner or later all critics of Israeli policies will be branded with the scarlet letter of anti-Semitism and banned from the few remaining academic spaces that are hospitable to them.   

We call on Harvard University and the Kennedy School to immediately:

• Reinstate the offer to Kenneth Roth to come to the Carr Center as a Senior Fellow. 

• Initiate a full external and impartial investigation of how and why his fellowship was rescinded, and of Dean Elmendorf’s communications with donors on this matter. 

• Recommit to fully implementing its longstanding but as yet unrealized commitment to bring Palestinian scholars and practitioners to the Kennedy School, and to strengthen the presence of marginalized voices at the Carr Center and across the School of Government. 

• Declare that neither the school nor the university will in the future allow donors or other outside political forces to impact or influence their awards, hiring, curricular or programming policies, and will take decisive and public steps towards that end. 

Sincerely,

Walid Afifi
Professor, Dept. of Communication
University of California at Santa Barbara

Eileen Boris

Hull Professor of Feminist Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara

Carole H. Browner

Research Professor, Anthropology and Gender Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

Edmund Burke, III
Emeritus Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Richard Falk, 

Albert G. Milnank Professor of International Law Emeritus

Princeton University

Gary Fields

Professor Department of Communication

University of California, San Diego

Nancy Gallagher

Professor Emerita of History

University of California, Santa Barbara

Jess Ghannam, PhD

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry

School of Medicine

University of California San Francisco

Bisnupriya Ghosh

Professor of English and Global Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara.

Larry Gross

Professor, School of Communication

Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

University of Southern California

Sondra Hale

Professor Emerita, Anthropology and Gender Studies

UCLA

Muriam Haleh Davis

Associate Professor of History

UCSC

Christine Hong

Chair, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

UC Santa Cruz

Ivan Huber, PhD

Prof Emeritus of Biology

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Mark LeVine

Professor of History

Director of Global Middle East Studies

UC Irvine

Ron Loewe

Professor of Anthropology

California State University, Long Beach

David Palumbo-Liu

Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor

Stanford U

Craig Reinarman, Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz

Rei Terada

Professor of Comparative Literature

Director of Critical Theory

UC Irvine

Vida Samiian

Professor and Dean Emerita

California State University, Fresno

Daniel A. Segal

Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and History

Pitzer College

Jaime Scholnick

Adjunct Instructor, Foundation Studies

Woodbury University, Burbank, CA.

Susan Slyomovics

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures

UCLA

Susan Wright

Research Scientist Emerita

University of Michigan

Stephen Zunes
Professor of Politics
University of San Francisco

September 5, 2022

To: President Lynn Mahoney, San Francisco State University

Cc: Chancellor Jolene Koester, CSU

From: California Scholars for Academic Freedom

We are writing on behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom, a group of over two-hundred scholars from campuses across California, to express deep concern regarding the SFSU administration’s repeated attempts to harass, marginalize, and silence Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, the founder and director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program (AMED), even during her year-long sabbatical leave.

It is clear that the administration is not only working in collusion with extreme right-wing Zionist hate groups such as the Lawfare Project, but is committed to destroying the integrity and autonomy of the AMED program and Dr. Abdulhadi’s intellectual work as a widely respected leader in the field of Arab and Palestinian Studies. We are alarmed by the administration’s multiple attacks on Professor Abdulhadi’s academic freedom, its undermining of her sabbatical leave, and what appears to be a deliberate and brazen attempt to thereby marginalize the AMED program. In particular:

• Initiating one tenure-track faculty search, counter to the ruling of the faculty panel which directed the university to hire two positions for AMED as was promised to Dr. Abdulhadi in her contract at the time of her hire. Moreover, by scheduling this search in 2022-23, the administration has forced Dr. Abdulhadi to either participate in the search during her sabbatical, thus sacrificing her much needed sabbatical to conduct full-time research, or forgo participating, thereby enabling the administration to hire whoever they want without the expertise of Dr. Abdulhadi during the search process. 
• Threatening Dr. Abdulhadi with disciplinary action for listing her academic affiliation with AMED in conjunction with two conferences on Teaching Palestine she is co-organizing and in which she is participating as an SFSU faculty member during her sabbatical.
• There is a long list of egregious issues such as altering the AMED website without Dr. Abdulhadi’s consent, delaying the approval of AMED courses for Fall 2022 and canceling all but three of them; refusing the approval of Spring 2023 courses; firing or retaliating against five qualified AMED faculty lecturers, to list only a few. 

As Cs4af discussed in our previous letter, and as reiterated in Dr. Abdulhadi’s June 2022 letter in response to President Mahoney, the decisions made by three Faculty Hearing Panels that deliberated and ruled on grievances filed by Dr. Abdulhadi against the university, which were overturned by Dr. Mahoney, must be implemented. These decisions include:

• Authorizing the two tenure-track faculty hires with searches to be conducted in 2023-24, when Dr. Abdulhadi returns from her sabbatical; and, providing her an appropriate budget and qualified staff for the AMED program, as asserted in her original job offer.
• Apologizing to Dr. Abdulhadi and her colleague Dr. Kinukawa for the harm inflicted upon them by SFSU when their open classroom was censored on September 23, 2020 and supporting the reprise of that event in 2023-24.

It is time for the administration to abide by the terms of Dr. Abdulhadi’s contract and stop harassing her and undermining her program. 

We look forward to your response,

Nancy Gallagher

Co-coordinator, Cs4af

Professor Emerita, Department of History

Chair of Middle East Studies Program

University of California, Santa Barbara

Vida Samiian

Co-coordinator, Cs4af

Professor and Dean Emerita

California State University, Fresno

Dan Segal, Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology & Professor of History

Co-coordinator, Cs4af

Pitzer College

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl
Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law, 

UCLA School of Law 

Hatem al-Bazian, Director, IRDP
Near Eastern Studies
Asian American Studies, UC Berkeley

Dr. Khalil Barhoum, 

Center for African Studies and Middle Eastern Languages

Stanford University

Paola Bachetta, Director

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

UC Berkeley

Edmund Burke, III

University of California, Santa Cruz

Huma Dar

Adjunct Professor

Critical Studies Program

California College of the Arts

Muriam Haleh Davis

Department of History

University of California, Santa Cruz

Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh

Department of English and Global Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara

Affiliate Faculty: Film & Media Studies; Comparative Literature; Feminist Studies

Gillian Hart

Professor Emerita

Department of Geography

University of California, Berkeley

Christine Hong, Associate Professor

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

UC Santa Cruz

Dr. Nubar Hovsepian

Associate Professor, Political Science

Chapman University

Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor 

Anthropology and Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies

University of California, Davis

Robin D. G. Kelly, PhD

History Department

University of California, Los Angeles

Jennifer L. Kelly, Ph.D., Associate Professor 
Feminist Studies Department
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department 
University of California, Santa Cruz

Dennis Kortheuer

History Department, Emeritus

California State University, Long Beach

Mark LeVine 

Professor of History

University of California, Irvine

Esther Lezra

Associate Professor

Department of Global Studies

UC Santa Barbara

Wendy Matsumura, Associate Professor

UC San Diego

Minoo Moallem, Professor

Gender and Women’s Studies Department

Director, Media Studies Program

University of California, Berkeley

Jamal Nassar, Dean Emeritus

College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

California State University, San Bernardino

James Quesada, PhD

Professor Emeritus 

Department of Anthropology 

San Francisco State University

Sherene Razack, PhD

Distinguished Professor

Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies

Department of Gender Studies

UCLA

Baki Tezcan, Professor of History

University of California, Davis

Howard Winant, Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Department of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

14 June 2022

Chancellor Byron D. Clift Breland

North Orange County Community College District

1830 W. Romneya Drive 

Anaheim, CA 92801 bbreland@nocccd.edu 

Dear Chancellor Breland:

We write on behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom (cs4af)^ in response to your May 26 email criticizing the statement by North Orange County Community College District’s Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) faculty and staff association that discussed the Israeli army’s killing, on May 11, of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.  

As an organization defined by an unwavering commitment to academic freedom, we are concerned that your May 26 email effectively withholds such protections from speech in support of human and political rights for Palestinians and, as a result, creates a hostile campus environment for Palestinian-identified faculty, students, staff, and their allies.

At cs4af, we know too well that Zionists and Zionist organizations, in their desperate efforts to shield the Israeli state from accountability for its ongoing and pervasive harms to the rights and lives of Palestinians, regularly lodge dishonest charges of ‘antisemitism’ at speech critical of the state. Unless these Zionist attacks on academic freedom are resisted on a principled basis, the result is a discriminatory Palestinian exception to speech rights and academic freedom protections.  

The danger this poses to academic institutions has been recognized this March in an important statement from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).  In that statement, the AAUP affirmed that criticisms of the Israeli state are not antisemitic and, very importantly, that when such charges are lodged against those fully protected criticisms, the charges themselves constitute a serious threat to “free speech and academic freedom.”  

Here one also should note that the world’s two leading human rights organizations—both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have recently released meticulously  documented reports concluding that the Israeli state is a regime of apartheid from the Jordan River to Mediterranean Sea.  If you have not yet read these reports, we urge you to do so.  What, in any case, must be affirmed is that honest discussion of the facts in these reports—as well as advocacy for human and political rights based on those facts—must not be subjected to sanctions, or any chilling, by the NOCCCD administration, as has occurred, in effect, as a result of the May 26 email.

The issue of departments or other units of higher educational institutions posting statements on an institutional website is, of course, a relatively new one. That said, even a quick scan of the NOCCD website makes clear that the district allows unquestionably analogous statements by other departments or units, and thus has stifled SWANA’s speech on a facially discriminatory basis, no doubt simply to avoid the controversy that comes from criticizing the Israeli state and supporting the human rights of Palestinians.  

Cs4af thus calls upon you to rescind that May 26 email and to restore the posting of the SWANA statement, on an immediate basis.  Failure to take these two remedial steps will leave academic freedom at NOCCCD greatly impaired and, on that basis, will expose your vitally important colleges and programs to continuing and escalating reputational harm. 

Respectfully, 

Rabab Abdulhadi

Director and Senior Scholar

Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies

San Francisco State University 

Carole H. Browner

Distinguished Research Professor 

Department of Anthropology

Department of Gender Studies

Center for Culture and Health

Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior

University of California, Los Angeles

Edmund Burke III

Professor Emeritus, History

University of California, Santa Cruz

Muriam Haleh Davis

Assistant Professor of History

University of California, Santa Cruz

Lara Deeb

Professor, Anthropology

Scripps College

Nancy Gallagher

Professor Emerita, History

University of California, Santa Barbara

Rose Marie Kuhn
Professor Emerita, French
California State University Fresno

Suad Joseph

Distinguished Research Professor

University of California, Davis

Dennis Kortheuer

History, Emeritus

California State University, Long Beach

Flagg Miller

Professor of Religious Studies
Chair of Religious Studies and the Graduate Program in the Study of Religion 

University of California, Davis

Sherene H. Razack

Distinguished Professor

Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies

Dept. of Gender Studies, UCLA

Craig Reinarman, 

Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies

University of California, Santa Cruz

Vida Samiian

Visiting Researcher, UCLA

Professor and Dean Emerita, CSU Fresno

Jaime Scholnick

Professor, Art

Los Angeles City College

Lila Sharif

Asian American Studies

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

Devra Weber

Associate Professor, History

University of California, Riverside

Susan Wright

Research Scientist Emerita

History of Science and International Relations

University of Michigan

Copies sent:

Irma Ramos, Vice Chancellor, Human Resources, NOCCCD iramos@nocccd.edu

President Gilbert Contreras, Fullerton College gcontreras@fullcoll.edu

President Valentina Purtell, North Orange Continuing Education vpurtell@NOCE.edu

President JoAnna Schilling, Cypress College jschilling@cypresscollege.edu

Board of Trustees, NOCCCD bot@nocccd.edu

Professor Jeanette Rodriguez-Salcedo, Senate President-Elect

Fullerton College

jrodriguez1@fullcoll.edu

Professor Jennifer Combs, Senate President

Fullerton College

jcombs@fullcoll.edu

Professor Damon De La Cruz, Senate President

Cypress College

ddelacruz@cypresscollege.edu