We write as a group of educators to denounce the increasingly repressive climate on our campuses across the US. As educators invested in developing and upholding constructive learning environments, critical engagements with knowledge building, and transformative pedagogical discussions, we refuse to adhere to the censorship, policing, and the circumventing of our academic work and mission as educators. 

On December 14, upper-level administrators at Syracuse University surveilled, harassed, and intimidated SU undergrads peacefully gathering for a study-in in support of Palestine. Charging students with bullying and harassment, the administrators threatened students with academic sanctions for carrying signs that included the Arabic word intifada, calling in armed campus police to curtail the assembled students. They claimed that the word intifada, which in Arabic means uprising, “has been deemed by SU to be threatening” and that it can be “reasonably interpreted” as a “call to the genocide of Jewish people.” We assert that the “interpretation” of the word intifada as “a call for the genocide of Jewish people” is baseless and dangerous. Intentionally criminalizing the Arabic language implies that the language itself, and therefore Arabic speakers generally, are inherently violent and genocidal. Furthermore, such “interpretations” are based on reactionary, political, and often anti-intellectual administrative assumptions about these words and their meanings. We will not cede our expertise to administrators who broadly and selectively interpret terms, ideas, and concepts as they please, in the service of their political and economic gains and military investments. While administrators claim to be acting in the interest of students who feel threatened and endangered by such words, their actions prioritize the interests of a specific political ideology over their commitment to education, learning, and safety.  

The events at Syracuse University unfold against a national backdrop of political interference in classrooms and research. Universities are being enlisted to concede to the US state’s blanket political and military support of yet another war in the Middle East. In the last two and a half months, university administrators across the US have implemented a variety of regulatory measures, in violation of academic freedom, to repress pro-Palestinian student and faculty activism and to control the narrative about the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Such repressive measures include but are not restricted to: arbitrary cancellations of teach-ins and other events on Palestine, including the cancellation of a teach-in at Syracuse U on October 31; the disbanding and suspension of pro-Palestinian student groups such as SJP and JVP at Columbia U, Brandeis U, and George Washington U; threats made by university administrators to bring in the FBI to campus and curtail peaceful student protestors at Syracuse U; the subjection of graduate students at UC Irvine to disciplinary action for speaking up on Palestine; intimidating visits made by the FBI to student and community members in Syracuse and elsewhere; and calling the police on unarmed students participating in peaceful acts of protest; all while student and faculty calls for university support against physical intimidation, harassment, and doxxing have gone unheard and sidelined across different campuses. And, as we have noted above, administrators’ repressive tactics have now extended to policing language used by pro-Palestinian student supporters. 

These efforts are directly shaped by a national context in which politicians and university administrators have weaponized the law, policies, and the discourse of “safety” for ideological purposes. This includes the congressional hearings against university presidents from Harvard, UPenn, and MIT. Conducted under the guise of protecting Jewish students from a reported rise in anti-Semitism across university campuses, these public spectacles are part and parcel of a calculated and strategic campaign to disorient, muddle, and distract from what is happening on the ground in Gaza and international calls for an immediate ceasefire. University administrators are emboldened by a series of bipartisan congressional actions, including the resolution condemning anti-Semitism on college campuses and the testimony from three high-profile university presidents over anti-Semitism, as well as the passing of house resolution 894, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Against this backdrop, the Department of Education is today launching an ongoing investigation into twenty colleges and universities “as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s continued efforts to take aggressive action to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment on college campuses.” Understood in tandem with one another, these actions create a climate of fear in which critique of the state of Israel is censored and foreclosed. 

The effects of this climate are now in full force on university campuses where, facing pressures from government officials, politicians, and donors, university administrators anoint themselves the defenders of student safety from largely imaginary and invented “calls to genocide” that gloss over real and rising rates of anti-Semitism and Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian attacks, including the shooting of three Palestinian university students last month in Vermont and the hit-and-run of a Muslim student at Stanford University. Perhaps more dangerously still, these obfuscating tactics gain more momentum and force as Israel’s actions against Palestinians become more brutally and boldly violent–and thus even harder to conceal or defend.    

This climate, and its brutal effects, are not limited to those who are critical of the Israeli state. It has been fostered by a continued assault on critical studies of race and gender; it has been fomented by book bans in schools and prisons; it has been cemented in Supreme Court decisions to refuse affirmative action. The widespread surveillance, repression, and policing of students, faculty, and staff who are critical of Israel are of a piece with other institutional and sociopolitical campaigns. Collectively, these campaigns seek to further marginalize and oppress communities who oppose the United States’ imperialist, white supremacist, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous ideological agendas. These realities are connected. They are part of the same climate and this climate is affecting educators across the country. 

As educators, we are alarmed at the usurpation of our universities by this blatantly ideological and anti-intellectual climate of repression and fear. As educators, our role is to center nuanced approaches to understanding history, to contextualize contemporary events, and to question dominant discourse. Rather than cower and shy away from topics that rupture our collective sense of comfort, complacency, and distance, our role is to create courageous learning spaces where we ask tough questions and articulate nondominant ideas and viewpoints. 

As educators, we know that intellectual discomfort and unsafety are not the same. Our job is to teach, and therefore, to challenge. Reverting to reactionary measures that forsake the role of educators to administrators not only endangers those who are repressed by these measures, but also threatens the educational tenets of the university as a whole. We thus object to the political weaponization of limited notions of safety and the conflation of intellectual discomfort with physical injury or emotional harm. Political and administrative actions that ban and criminalize particular words and languages, or those who speak or stand up for them and what they represent, are not investments in our students, their safety, or their education. 

As educators, we refuse to forsake our commitment to education and will not abdicate the university or our roles in it to governmental and administrative attacks and fear mongering. 

We therefore demand that: 

1. The intellectual work of interpretation, informed critique, and scholarly analysis be led by faculty experts in relevant fields. We refuse administrative efforts to control, limit, and sanction academic discourse. 
   
2. University administrators cease from weaponizing notions of safety and using policing tactics to target, intimidate, and harass students, staff, and faculty.  
   
3. Universities maintain their commitments to academic freedom, including the principle that discussion and open debate are central to free academic inquiry.
   
4.  Administrators refrain from perpetuating a “Palestinian exception to free speech.” 
   

As signatories, we center these demands in our collective pursuit of just knowledges and educational practices across our university communities and intellectual commitments. We will not forsake our obligation to teach. We will not bow to administrative pressures, harassment, and intimidation. We believe that what we say, what we write, and what we teach matters and is worth defending. 

This statement is authored and circulated by members of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine-Syracuse University chapter (FJPSU). We invite all educators at US academic institutions and beyond to sign.