We are a group of faculty from various demographic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds who are trained in the methods and practice of social and personality psychology. Although there are no doubt many topics on which we disagree, we are united in this call to listen to, engage with, and protect our students as they protest the mass killings of Palestinian civilians—which the International Court of Justice of the United Nations determined “could amount to genocide.”
In this letter, we call on our scholarly organizations to do more to protect students and faculty engaged in peaceful protest, and more broadly to make our collective spaces more welcoming to Arab and Muslim community members and those allied with them. We believe that not enough is being done for our colleagues and that new policies and procedures are critically needed. This should include taking action regarding faculty who harass and endanger students engaging in protest or otherwise expressing their views on Palestine. Moreover, we urge our organizations to enact measures that assist students and faculty experiencing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice.
We have seen academic colleagues conflate peaceful and legitimate protest on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza with terrorism and observed colleagues and administrators characterize protests as antisemitic—even when those protests are co-organized and heavily attended by Jewish students and hold space for and celebrate Jewish religious rituals. This is not to say that we agree with everything all protestors say or deny individual instances of antisemitism. Nonetheless, we would remind our colleagues of one of social and personality psychology’s central lessons: that an entire group should not be stereotyped or essentialized based on the actions of a very few. We maintain that broad characterizations of these protests as antisemitic are false and, moreover, are being leveraged to silence protestors and erase Palestinian suffering. Disturbingly, some faculty have abdicated their responsibilities and abused their authority by engaging in blatantly anti-Arab and Islamophobic rhetoric, defaming pro-Palestinian students as supporting the atrocities of October 7th, and demeaning Jewish protestors in terms that are both antisemitic and minimize the Holocaust.
As faculty, especially in a field like social and personality psychology that is concerned with discrimination, racism, and collective action, we must be particularly vigilant in protecting our students when they engage in protest against injustice. To meet student protests with threats of (and actual) violence is counter to academic freedom and freedom of speech, which are basic rights in any democratic society. It also denies students something that they frequently tell us benefits their learning: the opportunity to extend and apply classroom lessons about social issues and collective action to the world. Student protests must be met with engagement with their ideas, demands, and questions—not with repression thereof.
We know, based on extensive reporting (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), first-person accounts, and our own experiences observing or participating, that student protests on college campuses across the country are peaceful. In contrast, the broad mischaracterizations of these protests as violent actively endanger our students and colleagues (including our Jewish students and colleagues) who as a result have been arrested, suspended, evicted from student housing, faced police brutality, doxxed, attacked with chemical substances, or experienced other forms of physical and psychological harm. We urge our professional organizations to sanction any members of our guild who have repeatedly incited violence against our students and other members of our community. Likewise, we are concerned about the continued silence that our professional organizations have shown to our Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab colleagues who have experienced harassment, bigotry, and abuse from members of our discipline (as described here for example), and ask that our professional organizations engage with this ongoing problem.
Our training in social and personality psychology is rooted in understanding the exact processes we see unfolding in this moment concerning violence, dehumanization, oppression, and moral disengagement—but also empathy, solidarity, and collective action. We have a duty and responsibility to protect our students as they extend this training beyond the classroom. To fail in that responsibility, or to actively work against that responsibility, is unacceptable.
To see the list of signatories, click here
