Volume 7, No. 2, February 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
In what follows I will describe my journey through the pitfalls of US academia from my graduate student days in the 1980s to a tenured full professorship, and how I’ve experienced repeated attempts at silencing and censorship. I begin with a description of how I was harassed as a graduate student at Tufts because of my advocacy of Palestinian human rights and the right to self-determination. After completing my first year on a tenure-track position several years later, I describe my department chair’s attempt at intimidating me after I challenged Susan Sontag on campus. I did get tenure, but had to fight for promotion, and in the decades that followed, endured several forms of harassment and discouragement by pro-Zionist colleagues, which I’ll outline in some detail. After becoming a full professor and being elected director of our Women’s and Gender Studies programme, I had to endure an unjustified ‘firing’ from my position due to a Fox-related reporter coming after me under trumped up (no pun intended!) charges, for supposedly hiring an instructor who’d tweeted about wishing Trump dead. I traced the back story to a reporter connected to an anti-Muslim extremist group, American Freedom Defense Initiative, right wing Zionist conspiracists Pamela Geller and Richard Spencer’s apparatus. My administration has always viewed me with suspicion because of my political views, so this article was a convenient excuse to relieve me of a leadership position.
Beginnings
When I arrived at Tufts from Pakistan at the end of the 1970s as a graduate student in English, I was hardly aware of the influence Zionism exercised on college campuses, an extension of its hold in the halls of Congress and US politics in general. Like many who grew up in what was then called the Third World, my generation had bought into the ideal of the US as the bastion of free speech, equality, and a haven for immigrants of all races, colours and creeds. The history of its genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples were elided in the popular narrative of the US as the ‘Land of the Free and the Brave’.
Very quickly after my immersion in my graduate studies in 1979, my political education began to be shaped by cataclysmic global events like the Iranian Islamic revolution, the Afghanistan debacle in which the US and USSR battled for control of the region, which heralded the end of the Cold War, followed by the failure of the Camp David Accords to uphold the UN’s charter, which included the right of return, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine and participation of the PLO in all decisions pertaining to its future.
Together with some of my fellow international students from Lebanon and Iran, I realised that most students were ignorant of history beyond the US’s borders, and unaware of media bias regarding the Third World. We decided to focus on one particularly egregious case of mis- and disinformation: Palestine. I became a founding member of the first-ever student-led Committee on Information about Palestine on my campus and soon learned how risky it was to speak out on behalf of Palestine. Our event posters were routinely torn down: I actually caught someone from Hillel in the act of defacing one such poster. Threatening messages were left on our answering machines. At one point, our committee members wrote a letter to the editor of the Tufts student newspaper, The Observer, outlining some of these incidents:
The consequences we are seeing today for students and faculty protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza are much worse. Back then, the reactions to our efforts at presenting an alternative viewpoint on the question of Palestine were limited to messages meant to intimidate. It did not result in a loss of future employment, as it has for many student supporters of Palestine today.
My own professional trajectory proceeded smoothly after finishing graduate studies at Tufts. I was hired to a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Montclair State University (MSU) a year after I graduated. Aside from a few visiting professor gigs at Harvard, NYU Abu Dhabi and several universities in my home country of Pakistan over the past several decades, MSU has been my tenure home since 1987. My 38-year career is a study in surviving in academia, at times even thriving, despite the many obstacles small and large that are thrown into the paths of faculty like me who challenge the political narrative around Zionism.
First Rebellion as Assistant Professor
During my second year at MSU, I attended what was then an annual campus event, the Presidential Lecture. That year, our speaker was the famed New York intellectual Susan Sontag, who was introduced to us by a deferential group of administrators, including the Acting President and a leading member of our English Department faculty. Sontag spoke on the unit of time known as the decade – what it is, what it signifies, how it came to be a temporal marker, and so on; the usual arcane stuff intellectuals like to ponder. She honed in on a specific decade to provide some concrete examples to buttress her larger argument: the decade that the world witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish peoples by the Nazis.
The Holocaust was horrific. But this same decade also witnessed numerous other horrors, including the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands and the concomitant Nakba (catastrophe) visited on the Palestinian natives of those lands, thousands of whom were forced to flee Israeli forces. Many were massacred, many more witnessed the destruction of their homes, their olive and lemon groves, their villages. When I raised this for Sontag to comment on, asking why she had not alluded to this other group of people affected so badly during the decade under scrutiny, she started to tremble on the stage and ultimately responded with anger at my temerity in asking such a question.
I remember how several junior faculty approached me nervously as we streamed out of the auditorium. Wasn’t I afraid of jeopardizing my tenure and promotion at the institution, they asked? As if on cue, the following day I received a summons to my chair’s office, who told me she wished to school me in Zionism, and that in order to remove my ignorance regarding the god-given right of Jewish peoples to the Land of Israel, she recommended I read Maimonides. It was a meeting designed to humiliate and intimidate; I was treated as a child in need of guidance for my ignorance. I realized I would have to proceed with caution if I was going to get through the next few years, and past the tenure and promotion decision. Luckily for me, I had a wonderful defender in the person of a senior member of the department, a popular and well-respected colleague. She wrote a strong op-ed for the campus student newspaper, The Montclarion, defending my right to free speech and expressing disdain for the globally renowned author (Sontag) who could not respond to a fair question except by berating me in public. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed to discover daily messages left on my voicemail by university faculty and staff whom I did not know, acknowledging my courage in speaking out on a controversial topic.
Since these were the days before social media, my encounter with Susan Sontag did not go viral, avoiding what today would likely be some sort of cancellation. Several years later I did get tenure – but no promotion. For that I had to fight hard, to the point of threatening a lawsuit, but with the help of our union I was promoted to Associate Professor the following year.
Post-tenure Obstacles and Resistance
The politics of fear that I observed among non-tenured faculty especially, and among those aspiring to leadership positions in the department and institution in general, operated on the unspoken assumption that criticism of Israel was unthinkable. This resulted in a self-imposed censorship on the part of the majority of faculty at the university. Only one other senior tenured faculty member of my department was vocal in support of Palestinian self-determination, and he has been effectively sidelined as an extremist who defends Stalin. He and I were the only ones who would speak out against Israeli apartheid state policies consistently. We were especially vocal during moments of crisis such as during the two intifadas and the reprisals these invited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) against civilians, mostly women and children.
When I tried to organize a day long teach-in with scholars and artists at my university to educate our student body as well as the larger community on the scale of atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead (2008), I was taken aside by department members who later went on to hold leadership roles. They tried to discourage me from inviting some of the speakers I had lined up, specifically, the Israel critic and academic activist Norman Finkelstein, who had been denied tenure at DePaul university for purely ad hominem reasons. When I asked why, I was told: “He is not a scholar.”
Finkelstein is a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of more than a dozen books, has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Israeli extremists and often silenced in the process. Unfortunately that was the effect my colleagues’ persuasive tactics had on me as well. In the end, I invited Joseph Massad, a scholar of Palestinian history at Columbia, who hadn’t yet become targeted the way Finkelstein had. Both Finkelstein and Massad are respectable scholars who’ve been kind and gracious in their dealings with me through the decades. I’m sure my colleagues wouldn’t recognize or even agree that what they were doing was a form of censorship by invoking the dreaded spectre of antisemitism. Their approach to censoring opinions like mine are far more sophisticated than the more coarse and obvious intimidation of some other colleagues.
An example of the latter is the behaviour of a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist who was chair of our College’s department of Religion and Philosophy for many years. Let’s call him Ezra. He had a large Confederate battle flag affixed to his office wall. For displaying a treasonous emblem extolling the virtues of a slaveholding past, this colleague was never sanctioned or told he couldn’t fly the flag in full view of students (and faculty) walking past his office, many of whom surely felt intimidated or unsafe. Yet after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel that immediately resulted in Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza, the little Palestinian flag I affixed to my office door drew notice and condemnation from several faculty members, including my current department chair (one of the two colleagues who in 2008 had argued against issuing an invitation to Norman Finkelstein). He told me during a private exchange that he was hurt to see this display of support for Palestinians so soon after Hamas had attacked Israel. I pointed out in a friendly exchange of views, and without endorsing Hamas’ actions, that there really was no comparison in terms of number of lives lost – 27,000 (now over 35k) vs 1,200 – nor had the Hamas attack resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side anywhere close to what Israeli counterattacks on Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes delivered in retaliation. The sign on his door, announcing his office as a safe space for all students experiencing “anti-semitism, anti-Zionism, Islamophobia” had, on the other hand, by equating anti-semitism with anti-Zionism, opened up a dangerous space, one that encourages attacks from students on those of us (like me) who proffer critiques of Zionism as a racist nationalist ideology (an ideology that is unacceptable to many people of the Jewish faith). Sure enough, a student in one of my classes this past semester brought a charge of anti-semitism against me, which I managed to effectively debunk because of meticulous record-keeping I have learnt to do precisely to ward off such attacks. Whilst within a week of my putting up the little Palestinian flag in a display of solidarity, it was gone, vandalised, my Chair’s sign, despite requests like mine to alter its wording, remains on his door. Despite our cordial relationship, I cannot get him to see how the views his office door presents – conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism – poses a threat to freedom of speech in our classes. It’s not anti-Semitic to question the Israeli state.
Struggle to Be Given Due Recognition for my Scholarly Output
Between 2005 and 2015 I sought the University’s highest award, the rank of Distinguished Scholar. Ezra, my Christian Zionist colleague, was a powerful faculty member back then (he’s since retired). Ezra headed the committee in charge of selecting our College’s nominee for this award. Winning it was important to me, as it would legitimize the kind of scholar-activism my career emphasized. My work combined literary and cultural critique to advance a social justice agenda. I believe that it was the activist nature of my scholarly work and my open advocacy of justice for Palestine that led Ezra and his neoconservative protégés to deny me appointment as Distinguished Scholar for over a decade. I had to apply ten years in a row before I got it – something that has never happened before or since. I was named as Distinguished Scholar only after I finally brought a complaint against Ezra, insisting he be relieved as chair of the selection committee; no one is supposed to serve continuously on any faculty committee for that length of time.
Ezra was a bigot who had exerted his influence to deny me professional recognition. What follows are some of the steps he took to prevent me from being appointed as Distinguished Scholar. One year, Ezra’s committee selected an unqualified nominee rather than me. This proved to be such a ridiculously partisan decision that even the university president, no supporter of mine, denied Ezra’s pick, with the humiliating result that no one was awarded this honour that year. The faculty member they had selected published nothing except a few newsletter entries and an article in a non-peer-reviewed journal; by that point I’d published books and peer-reviewed articles. A colleague on Ezra’s committee shared this faculty member’s application with me. It was just two pages long. I used this pitifully short application to compose a letter to my dean and the university president to let them know that if Ezra wasn’t removed from his position of power, I would be forced to take up the matter with our union. My letter also established that many recent Distinguished Scholar nominees had far less distinguished publication records than I had.
Sure enough, the next year I got the Distinguished Scholar appointment I should have received a decade earlier. I can only believe that threatening to involve the faculty union had helped. Maybe also my university administrators had come to realize how capricious and prejudicial Ezra’s leadership had been. Perhaps because my scholarly publications have nothing to do with Israel-Palestine, I was helped with a strong case made on my behalf by my department’s representative to the Awards committee – the same colleague who is unhappy with my anti-Zionist views.
In the aforementioned episodes with Ezra and my old department chair, the latter has been very subtle in this area of curbing my right to free expression through a soft ‘guidance’ approach, at times even by helping me advance certain career goals. The other made blatant attempts to deny me a platform of visibility and scholarly prominence due to my views on a particular issue. The real problem is that these two very different types of censoring actions, one within the bounds of friendly collegiality, the other not, are united under the banner of a shared Zionist ideology that has huge clout in academia and politics. It works to isolate people like me through efforts to curb our speech and actions, thus effectively diminishing our influence and contributions. Despite pleading for the past two decades for a tenure-track line hire in Arab and Arab-American literature and culture, or another hire in postcolonial studies like myself who could teach courses I’ve created, such as Images of Muslim Women, which currently gets offered only when I am available to teach it, my requests have been effectively sidelined. Hiring another brown South Asianist like me or an Arabist has proved impossible over the past 37 years, and we remain a white- and male-dominated department, teaching a largely traditional curriculum.
Post 9/11 Harassment
Ezra, the Christian Zionist colleague who prevented me from obtaining the Distinguished Scholar award for a decade, in the aftermath of 9/11 started posting outrageous racist and xenophobic comments about me on a 34,000 strong university-wide faculty and staff listserv. One such comment, directed at me, was: “Go back to the caves you crawled out from.” This came in reply after I insisted on historicising the 9/11 tragedy. I’d placed the September 11 attacks in the context of arguments being made by activist writers like Arundhati Roy, who have described the many 9/11s that preceded what happened on US soil in so many countries of the global south, thanks to unrelenting military and economic interference by the US’s military-industrial imperialist complex. Part of my own historicising argument was to link unqualified US backing of the Zionist colonial-settler Israeli apartheid nation to the state of general distrust and dislike of the US by the majority of the world’s brown and black peoples. Making such arguments obviously did not go down well with people like Ezra. Accordingly, he made vocal attempts to silence me. Many of our colleagues came to see him as the bigot he is, including those who may have had similar reservations about my views.
Becoming the Anti-Zionist “Muslim Woman”: How I was Ousted as Director of Women’s Studies
A strange confluence of pressures formed around me in the decades after 9/11. I became the “Muslim Woman”, made to represent both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academia, as well as a suspicious ‘other’ for harbouring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many. Several students, especially in classes where I taught Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Arab feminists like Nawal el Saadawi, both of whom sharply criticize Zionism, US imperialism, patriarchy, racial capitalism and so-called Islamic fundamentalism, called me anti-American, complaining about me in student evaluations. At times some students expressed anger at my views, but in recent years, the number of anti-Zionist Jewish students has grown exponentially on campus. I’d like to think this has been a result of exposure to critiques of Zionist discourse taught by college faculty like me. In any case, the net result of the confluence of both admiration as well as distrust for what I stood for, for the views I espoused unambiguously in my teaching and my writings, exposing the links between all manner of pieties, combined to result in a number of attempts to silence me.
The first of these was the discovery that my name was on the AMCHA list of professors ‘inimical to Israel’ and hence to be avoided and denounced. Here is the AMCHA Initiative’s website announcement of their stated objectives:
“IMPORTANT: Share this list with your family, friends, and associates via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or word-of-mouth.
As the fall semester begins, many students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. AMCHA Initiative has posted a list of 218 professors identifying themselves as Middle East scholars, who recently called for the academic boycott of Israel in a petition signed. Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering.”
I’m the only such signatory listed from Montclair State University.
I believe accusations of antisemitism, combined with the fact that I am of Muslim Pakistani background, led to the events that got me fired from my position as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) several years later. During the 2016-2017 academic year, after a semester teaching abroad at NYU in Abu Dhabi, during which time another person had succeeded me as Director of WGS, I returned to Montclair State. Unfortunately, the woman who had succeeded me as Director of WGS suddenly resigned, and I was requested by colleagues teaching in the programme, as well as the Provost, to take up the post once more. I agreed to do so for one year, to ensure that a programme I had built up over the past six years would not fall apart. Over the summer I worked to restore some order in the programme prior to the start of the academic year, which included finalizing the hiring of two new adjunct instructors. One of these new instructors, who had already been hired by the outgoing Director, had recently tweeted his disgust about President Trump, stating, “Trump is a f—ing joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.” I did not know about this tweet. Even if I had, I would have treated it as protected speech that occurred off campus. A few weeks prior to the start of the Fall term, I was asked to meet the Dean of my college. He informed me that I had been relieved of my position as Director of WGS.
The reason I was given for this ignominious firing from a leadership position that I had been invited – nay begged – to fill, was that a letter had been sent to the President of the University asking how someone calling for the assassination of our country’s President had slipped through the cracks in the hiring process. Since I was the Director, the accusation was clearly pointed at me, and had its desired effect: the adjunct was fired and I was relieved of my directorship . Here is how I saw what happened, as I outlined in an article published soon thereafter in Counterpunch:
I believe strongly that my ‘firing’ was in response to the Islamophobic rant sent to the President, Provost and Dean of my university by right wing columnist James Merse (who writes for a rag called the Daily Caller [co-founded by Tucker Carslon] in NJ) – and on which he also copied me. In this email he threatened the university, claiming he and his “cohort” of right-wing supporters would have marched in protest onto the campus had the admin not fired Allred! He kept asking in that email: “How did Allred’s hire slip through the cracks?” (he had previously stated such things publicly), and since I was the new Director in charge of the Programme at this time, the question was obviously pointed at me. Now all the administrators knew I had had nothing to do with hiring this Allred guy – so why remove me then? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these right-wing nuts like Merse knew of my public writings exposing their outfits and the individuals that head them and that right now in the US, these scary folks are exercising their financial and political clout to pressurize university administrators to fire or otherwise silence voices like mine who are anathema to them.
An article I had published a few years prior, also in Counterpunch, traces precisely this money-trail of funders of Islamophobia which, as I argued in the article, is quite clearly linked to pro-Israeli sources and conservative dark money. My research into these links was prompted in the fall of 2012 by huge billboards appearing at my Hudson Valley town’s train station, touting nakedly Islamophobic ads. I bring this up as I believe this type of public-facing writing puts folks like me under surveillance by right wing operatives, and which led to a well-orchestrated attack linking me to the adjunct instructor advocating Trump’s assassination. I had claimed in an earlier Counterpunch article:
I was stunned to see an ad on a billboard staring me in the face from across the train tracks stating the following: “19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.”
The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihadwatch.org” and “AtlasShrugged”. Jihad Watch is a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and its Director is a man named Robert Spencer who is the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). According to the Jihadwatch website Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the US Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the US intelligence community. Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), is a supposed ‘expose’ of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the US (https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/24/islamophobia-in-america/).
Spencer was joined in weaving his web of anti-Muslim (and more specifically, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian) conspiracy theories – which are still being taught to the US military by his colleague Pamela Geller, an acolyte of the 20th century writer Ayn Rand, a libertarian conservative and uber-capitalist – hence the name of the blogsite she sponsors, AtlasShrugged.com, which today has become https://gellerreport.com/ and is spewing forth venomous stories repeating unsubstantiated Israeli hasbara claims about Hamas’ rapes of Israeli women (which have been proved to be utterly factitious, relying on uncorroborated accounts of two unreliable witnesses belonging to a very suspect and morally compromised militia group called ZAKA).
Jihadwatch and AtlasShrugged were also behind another series of ads posted on municipal buses in San Francisco: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad” (http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/).
The equation of ‘civilized man’ with the State of Israel, the ‘savage’ with that of the absent Arab, is lifted verbatim from a 1974 lecture by American author Ayn Rand, which have been echoed by Golda Meir and other past and present leaders of Israel. Muslim brown women like myself, proclaiming solidarity with Palestine, are subject to the same propaganda that renders us dangerous ‘others’ who are a threat to the values of western ‘civilization’.
Connecting the Dots, Past to Present
What I’ve tried to do throughout my academic career is to connect the dots between phenomena the academy wishes to keep separate and de-linked. Most of all, drawing connections between Zionism, US militarism, racialized capitalism and white liberal feminism, is the kind of display of disobedience to the norms of our profession that must needs be punished.
It was therefore no surprise that the administration responded to the call by the reporter for the Daily Caller “to organize and lead significant peaceful but loud – protests and campaigns” by firing the aforementioned adjunct and publicly dismissing me from my position as Director of WGS. Doing so can be read as a decision to a), appease a university President wary of someone with my political views leading a small but thriving programme with a reputation for disobedience; and b), to perform damage control in order to mollify conservative donors potentially triggered by the Daily Caller article.
What I had argued several years prior to my wrongful dismissal – that a confluence of interests in the US political and cultural sphere threatened to fill the polity with hatred, xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism – presaged the following outcome in my professional life: as a brown Muslim woman who had painstakingly exposed the influence of Zionism on American political life, I would not be given a public-facing position.
Where I Am Today/Where We Are Today
We obviously live in a surveillance state and today we are seeing the terrible consequences of speaking truth to power. Students and faculty across our campuses who dare to condemn Israeli genocide and show empathy with Palestinian civilians being butchered in the thousands are being doxxed, fired, and otherwise harassed.
With a handful of other faculty, I am active in discussions nationally and on campus, providing analysis and information beyond state-sponsored media narratives. Once more, we are the victims of name-calling, and one of my departmental colleagues has been publicly silenced due to complaints against him of “creating a hostile work environment”. Since his comments are posted on a public faculty listserv, everyone there is on a coeval footing; my colleague is not in any way in a supervisory role for others on this list. The complaint is therefore nonsense. I have just published an essay outlining this outrageous turn of events in Counterpunch. More recently, I was verbally assaulted by the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, who accused me at a university event in full view and hearing of colleagues and students of making assertions and comments he found insulting and egregious. When I politely asked if he could identify these remarks, he replied, “I don’t want to talk to you.” Given his role as my supervisor, such behaviour definitely constitutes the creation of a hostile work environment. His attack followed on the heels of an initial refusal by my department chair to allow me to post a talk I’ve organized on campus on our department’s social media sites called “Why Palestine Matters” by a well-respected scholar, Andrew Ross. My chairperson eventually consented to my request to post the event on our sites after I pointed out that his refusal was undemocratic and tantamount to censorship of faculty and student rights. However, he made it a point to let me and others know that his initial refusal was occasioned by the fact that the talk was being co-sponsored by SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), and that in order for the flyer to go out on our sites, I had to remove an image of blood dripping from beneath a woman wearing Palestinian embroidery. To him, the image was upsetting as he saw in it a reference to the antisemitic trope of Jewish blood libel, even though I explained (after apologizing for having hurt his sensibilities) that what was being referenced was the ongoing bloodshed of the Palestinians of Gaza. I paste below both the original flyer and the revised one, to show how my language and art were policed:
While dangerous attempts to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism remain widespread – consider the US Congressional Resolution passed December 2023 – public sentiment has changed for the better. This has been unambiguously on view as millions of people across the world, many of them Jewish, continue to take to the streets in protest at the Israeli genocide. Following the International Court of Justice’s ruling, this crime will now forever be associated with the Israeli state.
On American college campuses, many more of us than ever before are refusing to be silenced or intimidated. Helped by several colleagues, I am proud to announce the formation of Montclair State’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. We are slowly seeing our membership grow, although many members have requested anonymity. We hear almost daily about the firing and suspension of untenured faculty who are vocal in their support of Palestine. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian students are being doxxed, and have had job offers rescinded.
While I have been deliberately sidelined in the decision-making apparatus of university life, I believe that justice will always prevail in the end. I am proud of having remained a disobedient voice, of questioning the norms that compel us to be compliant to authority in and outside of academe. I’d like to end by citing a passage from Steven Salaita’s latest essay, in which he pulls no punches regarding the compromises we as scholars working for remuneration and rewards make; at the same time, he exhorts us to do the right thing, to embrace disobedience and class disloyalty, in order to refuse compliance to a genocidal world order:
“Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions – that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away. Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties. Disobedience should be introspective, then. We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant. How can this be done? It’s hard to say. But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt.”
Steven paid the ultimate price for disobedience – he was fired from his faculty position even before setting foot on the campus that had hired him, for a series of tweets condemning Israeli slaughter in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. I am lucky I managed to get tenure, and within the constraints and privileges afforded by it, have tried and will continue to try to speak truth to power.