A group of Republican U.S. senators has launched an inquiry into a Rutgers Law School program they say promotes antisemitism and platforms “terrorist sympathizers,” but advocates say it’s a politically motivated attack that threatens academic freedom.
The lawmakers, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway and William Best, chair of the Board of Governors, seeking information about funding for the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights. Referring to anti-terror law, they asked if the university knew about controversial events and speakers and whether it would continue to support the center.
Across the United States, colleges and universities are facing pressure from politicians, political organizations and donors to restrict or punish speech that they deem controversial or discriminatory. Though such campaigns are not new, they have escalated during the Israel-Hamas war. Universities have canceled art exhibits lectures film screenings
As schools respond to concerns about rising antisemitism and Islamophobia, civil rights groups warn they may be infringing on free speech.
The scrutiny of the Rutgers center echoes other controversies, including attempts to ban books and restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
“Colleges and universities should be places that promote the free exchange of ideas,” said Sinha, who serves on the Rutgers center’s 17-member advisory board. “We should be taking steps to ensure that speech is robust and open. I think targeting schools like Rutgers or centers within it would only chill speech, and it undermines foundational First Amendment principles of academic freedom.”
Controversial speech
The research center, founded in 2018 their Feb. 6 letter
They pointed to comments and social media posts that refer to Palestinian resistance as a response to years of Israeli occupation and violence, and that call Israel a settler colonial state — a concept that is widely discussed and debated in academia.
The lawmakers noted that the center sponsored an event with scholar Sami Al-Arian as one of 10 panelists. The Justice Department charged him in 2003 with playing a leadership role in a Palestinian terrorist group. He ended up taking a plea bargain on greatly reduced charges after a jury failed to convict him in the controversial, decade-long case, the Associated Press reported
They also noted that the center hosted an event, “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine,” days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The event had been scheduled months in advance. The title of the event was the same as the lecturer’s book about clinical psychology in the context of Israeli occupation.
Another speaker, Hatem Bazian, retweeted an offensive Jewish caricature and called for “intifada,” the U.S. senators wrote. The professor used the expression at a 2004 anti-war rally, asking the crowd why the United States had not had its own political intifada to protest war. Critics associate the term with armed resistance, but the term in Arabic, meaning “shaking off,” also refers to nonviolent struggle.
The lawmakers also criticized a lecture featuring Columbia University professor Joseph Mossad, who raised controversy in an Oct. 8 article he wrote describing the Hamas invasion into Israel as “astounding.”
In their letter, the senators requested information on whether the center received federal or state money, or had ever received funds from a foreign government, either directly or indirectly.
Citing anti-terror law, the lawmakers wrote that “it is appropriate to evaluate the organizational and financial backing of groups that seek to legitimize violence and provide platforms to terrorist sympathizers.”
Rutgers officials declined to comment on the lawmakers’ inquiry. “We will reply directly to the members of the committee as requested,” university spokesman Dory Devlin wrote in an email.
Signees of the letter
The Republicans, who serve on the Judiciary Committee, turned their attention to the Rutgers center as they evaluated the nomination of Adeel Mangi
Freedom from interference
Sahar Aziz, executive director of the Rutgers center, said she was “disappointed” by the lawmakers’ letter and that it went against the university’s stated commitment
The Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the union representing many faculty members, graduate workers and postdoctoral associates at the university, and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union wrote in a statement
“We are aware that some political officials on national and state levels disagree with select viewpoints that have been expressed by certain speakers at the Center over the years, and to that we say: Welcome to university life,” the unions wrote.
“At Rutgers, we all — professors and students alike — encounter views with which we disagree, even views that upset us. This is not a flaw but rather an essential component of a successful university. Scholars and students are at our best — and best able to contribute to American society — when we are exposed to a wide range of challenging ideas.”
In the statement, the unions also wrote that the senators had conflated antisemitism with criticism of Israel in their letter.
“Criticizing Israel is not de facto antisemitic, just as criticizing the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic’ states of Iran and Afghanistan is not de facto anti-Muslim,” they wrote. “To conflate ethnic hatred with legitimate state criticism is disingenuous and endangers us all.”
Disputes over free speech on campus have long occurred. The Supreme Court repeatedly has said the First Amendment means public institutions cannot punish speech, or exclude speakers, on the grounds that it is hateful or offensive.
There are exceptions
Private universities are not bound by the First Amendment, but most have policies that reflect free speech principles.
In free speech debate, roles are reversed
As chair of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Academic Freedom Committee, history professor Audrey Truschke said she regularly deals with threats to academic freedom, but that it was unusual for federal lawmakers to get involved.
Their letter, she said, was “politicized in nature” and “inappropriate.”
“It’s a direct threat to academic freedom to have politicians abuse their power to try to shut down academic work,” Truschke said.
The scrutiny of campus speech is being driven by some of the same politicians who not long ago railed against “cancel culture” that they argued had silenced conservative voices in higher education. They led congressional hearings and introduced bills calling for free speech protections on campus.
“College campuses are no longer a bastion of free thought, robust debate or a market of ideas,” Cruz, a Texas Republican, said in 2021
Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, who also sponsored the bill, said in a statement, “Free speech is under attack on college campuses. We must fight to ensure that our students are not silenced because of their political views.”
The calls for censorship come as pro-Palestinian protests grip college campuses, sparking a fierce backlash over speech that some groups find offensive or hateful. The First Amendment to the Constitution also protects controversial speech, advocates note.
“The First Amendment doesn’t only apply in times of comfort. The true test of our rights is whether we stand up for them in times of turbulence,” said Sinha, of the ACLU of New Jersey.
Scrutiny is not new
Aziz, of the Rutgers center, a professor of law, has been a frequent author
Israel advocates launched a campaign to get Rutgers to cancel a December seminar called “Race, Liberation, and Palestine: A Conversation with Noura Erakat, Nick Estes, and Marc Lamont Hill” that the center organized.
They alleged that Hill, a Black activist and academic, promoted antisemitism because he used the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” during a 2018 speech at the United Nations. Critics say it is antisemitic, but Palestinians say it is a call for freedom
Holloway, the Rutgers president, told the university board of trustees that his office received
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote to Rutgers that institutions cannot limit invitations to speakers on the basis of “orthodoxy or popularity of their political or social views.” Subjecting invitations to a viewpoint-based litmus test would constitute “censorship in its rawest form,” the free speech advocacy group wrote in its letter.
The university did not cancel the event, citing its commitment to academic freedom.
Other universities and colleges have also reported facing coordinated campaigns targeting events and individual speech.
At Ramapo College, administrators received “countless” emails and phone calls protesting
The college launched an investigation in November. “We are committed to due process and cannot comment further on the investigation,” said spokesperson Brittany Williams-Goldstein.
In November, Hunter College was one of several colleges to cancel screenings of the documentary film “Israelism The Nation
Last month, Indiana University canceled a retrospective have withdrawn
The backlash has followed Aziz outside her job in academia. Last year, a pro-Israel legal group filed an ethics complaint against Aziz in her capacity as a school board member in Westfield. They alleged that posts on her personal Twitter page were antisemitic. They included retweets of articles that labeled Israel as a settler colonial state and as an apartheid state, a view shared by several leading human rights groups
The posts were critical of Israel and not antisemitic, and they were unrelated to her role on the school board, her lawyer countered. The New Jersey School Ethics Commission dismissed the complaint
