On September 23, 2020, San Francisco State University (SFSU) administrators collaborated with corporate tech giants Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube to shut down a virtual Open Classroom entitled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.”

This virtual Open Classroom, co-organized by Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, founding director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program, and Professor Tomomi Kinukawa, lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies Department, was to feature Palestinian resistance icon Leila Khaled in conversation with Palestinian, Black, Jewish, and South African academics and former political prisoners Rula Abu Dahou, Ronnie Kasrils, Sekou Odinga, and Laura Whitehorn.

However, after a coordinated and intense outside campaign by Zionist and right-wing pressure groups calling to cancel the Open Classroom, first Zoom and then the university refused to allow the webinar to run. When organizers changed virtual venues and began livestreaming on YouTube instead, coordinated protests from Zionists and Right-wing agitators petitioning YouTube succeeded in shutting down that videostream as well. Almost simultaneously, previous references and invitations to the webinar were deleted from hundreds of people’s Facebook pages and Instagram accounts.

In response to this coordinated censorship campaign, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney stated that while “the University does not believe that the class panel discussion violates Zoom’s terms of service or the law,” she nevertheless also concedes that “Zoom is a private company that has the right to set its own terms of service in its contracts with users.”  In other words, President Mahoney would take no action to defend her faculty from these attacks on their academic freedom.  

Profs. Abdulhadi and Kinukawa therefore each filed grievances, via their union, against the university for failing to protect their academic freedom. The first grievance was upheld by the 3-member faculty panel that heard their claim. Specifically, the panel found that:

San Francisco State University has inflicted harm upon Dr. Abdulhadi (and co-instructor, Dr. Kinukawa) and that her academic freedom was, in fact, violated….We assert that...the university caused direct harm in the form of (1) mental health stress, and (2) a relinquishing of the university’s responsibility to uphold academic freedom.

By way of remedy, the faculty panel ordered SFSU to:

issue a public apology to Prof. Abdulhadi for failing to uphold her academic freedom;
issue a public letter voicing support for faculty members’ academic freedom; and
provide a platform for re-scheduling the original, censored webinar without interference.

SFSU President Mahoney rejected the panel’s finding and remedies, however, which means that the matter will now go to mandatory arbitration.  The second grievance was heard on March 18th and April 12, 2022, and it is possible that the same fate–upholding by the faculty panel, rejection by SFSU President Mahoney–will befall it.
This incident is an unprecedented public-private collaboration in the silencing of academic freedom, Palestinian voices, and social justice movements. It is emblematic of the corporate takeover of universities and the influence of Zionist and Right-wing organizations and individuals, along with the power of capital, to set the agenda for what can and cannot be said or taught in a public university.  It is further evidence of what has come to be called “the Palestine exception” to campus life, political speech, and academic freedom.  

Indeed, what is happening at SFSU is emblematic of a nationwide phenomenon of right-wing targeting of higher education. For example, on the basis of dubious misreadings and bad faith understanding, the Right has generated a moral panic around “critical race theory,” by which they really mean any pedagogical challenge to white supremacy.  In so doing, they  have succeeded in pressuring states across the country to legislate against the teaching of not just antiracism, but also, and more correctly understood, a longstanding, well-respected area of academic scholarship in public schools and universities.  Meanwhile, Campus Reform and Turning Point USA  are only two of the most high-profile members of a vast network of well-funded Right-wing organizations -- including projects such as Canary Mission, which aim specifically to target scholarship and student activism on Palestine -- whose sole reason for existence is to create conditions of fear and intimidation, redolent of McCarthyism, in order to eliminate specific faculty, specific sets of research and curriculum, and, ultimately, the university as a whole an institution of knowledge production.

As faculty members, as anti-racists, and as anti-Zionists, we are aghast at the compromised and unprincipled actions of President Mahoney, her collaboration with corporate tech giants to erode academic freedom, and her complicity with outside Right-wing organizations who seek to determine classroom curricula at SFSU.  In such bleak and uncertain times, it is essential that faculty be able to rely on their university administrators to protect them from disingenuous and aggressive outside attacks on their ideas and scholarship.

We therefore hereby demand that President Mahoney and SFSU immediately implement the remedies specified by the faculty panels that heard Profs. Abdulhadi’s and Kinukawi’s grievances regarding academic freedom.

Moreover, as President Mahoney’s behavior and decision-making in this case render her unfit for her position as President of a public institution of higher learning who is charged, among other things, with the protection of her faculty and their academic freedom, and we also demand her immediate resignation.