Shilpa Jindia , August 2, 2024

Freedom from Dissent

The independence of public universities is under attack Indiana University. | Wikimedia Commons

Abdulkader Sinno thought nothing of a request from the Palestine Solidarity Committee, one of several student groups he advised at Indiana University, to reserve a room for a public event last November. The students had organized a talk with an Israeli peace activist; all Sinno had to do was fill out a form. Little did he know that, one month later, this routine box-checking exercise would lead to his suspension from the university and herald a coming crackdown on public higher education.

As Israel waged its genocidal campaign on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack, protests engulfed college campuses across the country, with students demanding an end to the war, as well as for university endowments to divest from Israel. Almost without exception, university administrators bungled the response, unleashing brutal violence and punitive sanctions against overwhelmingly peaceful protests: encampments were torn apart by cops in riot gear while students were arrested en masse. Many faculty who joined the movement were viciously assaulted by police. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans dragged a number of high-profile university presidents, including Columbia’s Minouche Shafik and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, before committees to chastise them for failing to silence pro-Palestine voices in their respective fiefdoms.

While mainstream media focused on students at Columbia and Harvard, the fallout from the Gaza campus protests at public universities garnered substantially less attention. As students helped sustain the movement for Palestinian human rights in the face of unrepentant hostility, conservative politicians seized on accounts of increased antisemitism as an opportunity to advance a decades-long campaign to erode academic freedom and ultimately dismantle public higher education altogether. In both red and blue states, university administrations are lending a hand to the effort, cracking down on free speech in the name of making their campuses “safe.”

Like many other schools, student activism divided the flagship campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. Though one of the largest universities in the country, Bloomington is a cozy college town, one with a defiant hippie streak largely at odds with Indiana’s dyed-in-the-wool conservatism. Students cheer on Big Ten athletics and the Little 500 annual bike race alike. When I was an undergraduate there in the 2000s, my friends and I would often cast a wary glance at signs for nearby Martinsville, allegedly once a sundown town and Ku Klux Klan stronghold. The university’s liberal reputation largely descends from student protests against the Vietnam War, forever marking the school as a blue oasis in a red desert.

While the close-knit town searched for answers following the October 7 siege, the university failed to deliver. Pamela Whitten, IU’s president, issued a tepid statement three days after the Hamas attack without recognizing the affected on either side. After widespread criticism, Whitten released a second statement lamenting only “the pain and fear that is affecting our Jewish community on our campus.” By that point, Israel’s furious reprisal had already killed more than 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza.

The following month, the Palestine Solidarity Committee organized a talk with Miko Peled, an Israeli American peace activist raised in Jerusalem who is a longstanding critic of the two-state solution. Two days before the event, Sinno received an email from the university provost instructing him to cancel the reservation. He notified the student group, who tried to reserve the room another way but were denied. They went ahead with the talk anyway, which Sinno described as friendly and courteous. “People were calm and engaged. Peled was compelling.” He spoke to an audience of approximately seventy-five people about the need for a single state in which Israelis and Palestinians live as equal citizens. Peled also thanked the Palestine Solidarity Committee for hosting the talk despite the bureaucratic debacle, urging continued conversation about Palestine. “This [event] is part of the resistance,” he said. “This is standing shoulder to shoulder with the people in Palestine who are resisting every single moment of every single day of their lives.” 

The day after the talk, which Sinno attended, he received another email notifying him that an investigation into his involvement was underway for “misrepresent[ing] the sponsorship and security needs of the event.” The letter lambasted him for “insubordinate and extremely alarming” conduct. A month later, Sinno, a tenured political science professor, was suspended from all teaching and supervision duties through the end of summer 2024. He views the suspension as retaliation for his criticism of the administration’s handling of its immediate response to October 7: Sinno had written to Whitten and the university provost, warning them that their second statement alienated the university’s Arab and Muslim students and risked their safety. He heard nothing back. A few days later, Sinno claims that a white woman in downtown Bloomington tried to run down two Muslim students wearing hijabs. He wrote to Whitten again, urging her to “make a courageous statement to feel the empathy of everybody, not just one side of the conflict.” Again, he was ignored. “Honestly, I think all this that happened to me, those sanctions, the violation of IU policies, is just revenge for those emails,” he mused over the phone. “They just want to show a plucky professor who’s boss and that nothing will protect him.”

The investigation into Professor Sinno, which his colleagues allege violated numerous university procedures, signals a new status quo hostile to the independence academics have traditionally enjoyed at the university. Whitten, who became president in 2021, has been a major force behind the shift. As the former president of Kennesaw State University, part of the University System of Georgia, she helped launch the first systematic state effort to “eviscerate” the tenure process, in the words of the American Association of University Professors. Perhaps because of this profile, IU’s presidential search committee initially did not even consider her when they were looking to replace outgoing president Michael A. McRobbie. But the board of trustees rejected the committee’s recommended finalists and instead selected Whitten as an outside candidate, a fact only publicized after IU law professor Steve Sanders launched an investigation into the university’s appointment process following the strange procedural deviation. Whitten, once touted by one board member as the “Beyoncé of higher education,” arrived promising to spend $30 million hiring more diverse faculty, but she quickly attracted criticism for taking sides against unionizing graduate students.

Whitten’s actions since October 7 have only deepened the sense of crisis at IU. After suspending Sinno, the administration canceled a career retrospective of Palestinian American artist and alumna Samia Halaby. When an encampment blossomed on IU’s campus in April, the administration, at Whitten’s behest, changed overnight a longstanding free speech policy to ban tents and structures. Then, as police in riot gear stormed the encampments, the university made national—and international—headlines when photos emerged of snipers perched on rooftops. “No one will forget that for years,” Sinno told me. “What parent wants to send their kids to a university where a sniper aims a gun at them?”

Later that month, over eight hundred members of the faculty—an overwhelming majority—voted no confidence in Whitten and her right hand, the university vice provost. Yet Whitten’s job remains safe. The board of trustees still awarded Whitten the maximum bonus allowed last year, bringing her annual salary close to a staggering $850,000. The board also recently voted to reestablish a chancellor role that will help insulate Whitten, which Sinno calls “a trick move to extend her tenure” that will “waste millions of badly needed dollars every year on a new senior administrator, their offices, and their staff.”

But the university faces a more existential threat to its academic freedom. A new law passed in the spring by the Republican supermajority in the state legislature effectively abolishes tenure by subjecting tenured faculty to review every five years and requiring institutions to adopt disciplinary actions once unthinkable. Under the new review process, other faculty can be denied promotion or tenure if they do not “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and ‘ideological diversity.’”

Indiana state senator Spencer Deery invoked these ideas when he introduced the bill, calling for the creation of a safe space for conservative students whose trust has declined in higher education. “The current system fails to adequately recruit, retain, and cultivate conservative scholars who are then empowered to foster robust, unretaliated debate,” Deery wrote in an op-ed following widespread criticism of the bill by faculty across Indiana. While IU has faced similar legislation in the past, Sinno says previous university presidents were able to fend off threats to the university’s independence. Whitten, however, put up little fight, only issuing a statement against the bill after it passed the Indiana Senate.

This is only the latest in decades of conservative efforts to hinder public higher education in Indiana and across the country. In recent years, Republican-controlled legislatures have shifted tactics, moving from cutting state funding to controlling curricula and faculty with an eye toward rooting out “woke” propaganda. A blueprint for this new strategy can be found in the right-wing takeover of the progressive New College of Florida. In early 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the thirteen-member board of trustees, including Christopher Rufo, who singlehandedly manufactured the boogeyman of critical race theory. The new board then eliminated New College’s diversity offices and pushed out adjacent personnel. After October 7, DeSantis ordered all state universities to ban the student group Students for Justice in Palestine from campus.

Back in Indiana, Republican state representative Jim Banks published an op-ed defending Whitten’s handling of the protests in May, warning “out-of-touch ideologues” that “IU belongs to Indiana.” He urged his state to follow the lead of Florida and Virginia, which have “taken on politically hostile, activist public universities.” But conservative states aren’t the only ones interfering in the affairs of public universities. The charged atmosphere following October 7 has also turned blue states against the faculty and students of the public institutions under their care. Look no further than the City University of New York system.

Like Columbia’s protests, CUNY’s encampments also emerged from a long history of student activism that includes, as the historian Coco Tomás Reed recounts, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who turned the college into a “hotbed of antifascism” in the 1930s, and black and brown students who fought to decolonize the school’s curriculum and maintain its open admissions policy in the 1960s. As Tomás points out, the peak of CUNY’s activist era fell between Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 and the fall of Saigon in 1975, before the city’s bankruptcy ended the dream of free public higher education. Student activists drew on this history in the wake of October 7 when, in April, a student encampment sprang up at City College of New York, building on months of protests across CUNY’s other campuses. Police swiftly broke them up, and many students—largely from working-class, first-generation families—were saddled with felony charges (students at Columbia, meanwhile, were generally charged with misdemeanors, which university administrators pressured prosecutors to drop).

But Palestine had been a subject of fervent activism and controversy at CUNY long before October 7. The 2014 war in Gaza marked a major inflection point, including at the law school, where I graduated last year. In its wake, the higher-ups at CUNY Central commissioned an investigation by a law firm into alleged antisemitism, zeroing in on the actions and comments of the student group SJP. The final report, released in 2016, concluded that the students’ words were protected speech and that “die-ins, mock checkpoints, and the SJP banner may offend some, but the First Amendment does not permit a public university to take action against them.”

Students within CUNY Law, led by SJP and the Jewish Law Students Association, pushed the law school faculty to adopt a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution, which it did in 2022. In response, New York City Council member Inna Vernikov pulled $50,000 earmarked for the law school. The graduation speakers that year and the next, Nerdeen Kiswani and Fatima Mohammed, both made strident pro-Palestinian speeches that attracted scrutiny. Mohammed was vilified online by numerous high-profile politicians, alongside calls to strip CUNY of its taxpayer funding. New York congressman Mike Lawler introduced unsuccessful legislation in the House, threatening to pull every “single dollar of federal education funding if they peddle in the promotion of anti-semitism at an event on their campus.”

Once again, the CUNY administration has launched another investigation into alleged antisemitism within its institutions, backed by Democratic governor Kathy Hochul and bankrolled by a federal earmark of $75 million to prevent hate crimes and protect houses of worship. Hochul has tapped former judge Jonathan Lippman, now at the powerful law firm Latham & Watkins, to spearhead the investigation. Reports of antisemitism have risen since Hamas’s attack. So has Islamophobic violence. While Jewish students have faced harsh or hateful comments on campuses, Palestinian Americans have been murdered and grievously injured—including one college student paralyzed—in attacks that have continually failed to garner the signature empathy of the president. In May, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to Lippman regarding the ongoing investigation at CUNY Law, urging him not to “delve into matters of academic freedom and free expression.” The letter noted that six faculty have been contacted as part of the investigation, most of whom are people of color and Muslim.

The CUNY system is a prime target for public retaliation as an institution with a radical left tradition. “The Achilles’ heel is that we are dependent on the public kitty,” said CUNY Law professor Frank Deale, who has taught there for nearly all of its forty-year history. Deale himself first got involved with the issue of Palestine in the 1980s, representing South African activist Fred Dube after he was ousted from a teaching position for giving students an option to write on Zionism as racism. In our conversations during my last year at law school and after, Deale consistently cited the ongoing dismantling at New College of Florida. “That can happen here if the political situation gets so retrograde that right-wingers take over the city government,” he told me. “The school will always be vulnerable to that.”

Public universities, like all public services, are being systematically stripped of funding and legitimacy. Students may indeed be rethinking the “value” of college, but this has more to do with the eye watering price tag and a dimming view of economic security a degree might afford. The real reason behind attacks on the university is that they serve as a bastion for critical thought challenging the status quo. “Universities have always been the place where new ideas and activism emerge,” Sinno told me toward the end of our conversation. “Often what they start ends up changing society,” he said, referencing the antiwar protests of the 1960s. Student movements have thus become a key voice of dissent to stamp out, and public universities a prime target by association.

But where conservatives have been the traditional foe of academic freedom, in the wake of October 7, lines of red and blue are increasingly blurred. In the context of Palestine, however, this exception makes sense. For decades, Palestine has been a taboo subject for Democrats and Republicans alike, one broken by the unprecedented protests on streets and campuses. “I have no doubt that in this particular movement for Palestinian human rights it will also be transformative for American society,” Sinno said. “And in twenty years, those students who are being maligned now by conservative forces will be generally regarded as a transformative force.”