[News] SFSU Faculty Hearing Committee upholds Grievance by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

[Anti-Imperialist News]

PRESS RELEASE: October 14, 2021 - FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION

ACADEMIC SPEECH AND FREEDOM ON PALESTINE - IMPORTANT RULING AGAINST SAN 
FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY CONCERNING THE POWER OF BIG TECH OVER ACADEMIA


In a decision with major implications for campuses across the country, 
on Thursday a panel of three faculty members at San Francisco State 
University (SFSU) upheld a grievance filed by Dr. Rabab Abduhadi, 
founding director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas 
Studies (AMED) program, regarding violations of Professor Abdulhadi’s 
academic freedom.


The grievance seeks redress for the failure of SFSU to protect Dr. 
Abdulhadi and the AMED program from the arbitrary cancellation by Zoom 
and other social media outlets of her online open classroom, “Whose 
Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila 
Khaled.” The University is bound by contract, law and AAUP policy to 
protect academic freedom rather than subcontracting the responsibility 
to private companies. Further, universities must maintain structural 
independence from the whims and demands of partisan lobbying 
organizations, including Zionist groups like the Lawfare Project and the 
Israeli government aligned app, ACT IL, both of which played a prominent 
role in the manufactured outrage campaign that led Zoom to cancel Drs. 
Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa’s open classroom in September 2020. The 
panel’s finding confirms both the University’s surrender of its 
responsibility to the overreach of private tech giants into academic 
affairs and its complicity with Zionist and right wing groups aiming to 
silence Palestinian voices on campus. In its decision, the faculty panel 
affirmed 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 characterize this harm in two ways: 
1) that the university did not provide adequate support to Dr. Abdulhadi 
against the actions of the corporate entity, Zoom, and, more importantly 
against the outside organization, Lawfare Project.”


The SFSU panel’s ruling has tremendous significance beyond its own 
campus and teaching about Palestine. With the growth of online learning, 
university teachers and students have become increasingly dependent on 
corporate media platforms such as Zoom, Google and Facebook. Advocates 
express alarm at the growing power of these corporate entities to censor 
the content and timing of classroom speech and activities, especially 
those deemed by university administrators as controversial. As Dima 
Khalidi, the director of the advocacy organization Palestine Legal, has 
written: “[such] attempts at censorship also have consequences not just 
for movements supporting justice in Palestine, but for racial, 
Indigenous, gender, immigrant, economic and LGBTQIA+ justice movements 
challenging government repression and overreach within the United States 
and globally.”


Dr. Abdulhadi has been a luminary among international Palestinian 
intellectuals, known for her original scholarship on Palestinian women’s 
movements and her pioneering pedagogy integrating Palestine into a 
critical, community-focused ethnic studies framework. She has won 
numerous awards for her scholarly and civic leadership, including the 
Georgina M. Smith Award for “exceptional leadership” in 2020 from the 
American Association of University Professors .


SFSU has shown its bias against AMED and in favor of Zionist 
organizations through its open collaboration with groups such as 
International Hillel and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN). These 
groups conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and have as their 
stated mission to suppress support for Palestinian rights on campuses 
and to exceptionalize the complaints of Jewish students above all 
others, including Muslims and anti-Zionist Jews. The decision will now 
be placed on the desk of SFSU President Lynn Mahoney, who will have 
three weeks to uphold the panel’s findings. If she does not, the 
grievance will go to arbitration.


For further information and interviews, contact:

Rabab Abdulhadi* - rabab.abdulhadi at gmail.com; 914-882-3180 (cell) 
*Please text first

Omar Zahzah - omarmzahzah at gmail.com; 562-896-3313 (cell)

Rosalind Petchesky - rpetches at gmail.com; 917-378-5683

Harry Soloway - sologant at gmail.com; 914-815 2479 (cell)

A copy of the Faculty Panel Decision is attached below.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cWJ9rvURNHTZsDWbrDkanK7TbYyP2wl8/view?usp=sharing
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