Some Historical Context

In the United States, engaging in scholarship and advocacy on Middle East issues, certainly on Palestine, has long attracted attacks from campus and off-campus organizations and individuals. Many of the senior members of MESA remember a time when graduate students were regularly discouraged from selecting dissertation topics on Palestine because of concerns over future employment, junior faculty were encouraged to avoid or skirt the topic in their classes, and establishing a named chair in or a center for Palestinian studies on campus would have been unimaginable: the threat of being charged with antisemitism for teaching, writing, or public commentary that was implicitly or explicitly critical of Israel was always present. Although such concerns regarding censorship and harassment have never disappeared—witness the first attempt at online monitoring and harassment, the Campus Watch website founded in 2002 by Daniel Pipes—there is no question that gradually more faculty have been hired with a Palestine research focus, more courses teaching critically about Israel/Palestine have been offered, and pro-Palestine advocacy on campuses has attracted increasing numbers of students, faculty, and staff. The story behind this evolution is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that openings for more scholarship in academia on Palestine and advocacy for Palestine on campus gradually emerged, even as attempts by pro-Zionist organizations to delegitimize and censor these successes accelerated.

How then does what we are experiencing today compare with the record of the past? A near consensus has emerged that the threats to academic freedom that we are witnessing on our campuses today are unprecedented. First, the current attacks on universities are broader than those of the past. They brutally target Palestine studies and antigenocide activism, and concomitantly engage in an assault on teaching, scholarship, and advocacy of anything smacking of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI): gender, colonialism, racism, inequality, social justice, and the like. The weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those engaged in teaching about Palestine and in pro-Palestine advocacy has become one of the first battering rams utilized by the political right to achieve a central goal: taming or destroying American higher education as a locus of critical inquiry and potential opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian project.

Particularly pernicious has been the broadening push by US federal, state, and local governments as well as some private actors and institutions for the adoption of the widely critiqued International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.Footnote ¹ CAF issued a letter in December 2019, when the first Trump administration published an executive order purporting to seek an end to various forms of discrimination, which required all executive branch departments and agencies charged with enforcing Title VI to “consider” both the definition of antisemitism adopted by the IHRA in 2016 and the “Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism” that accompanied its definition.Footnote ² As CAF’s letter made clear:

Successive Democratic administrations also have played a major role in paving the way for today’s crisis. Their unwavering support for any and all forms of aid to Israel has been coupled with a policy of marginalizing or suppressing voices critical of Israel and US support for it. It was under the Biden administration that Title VI investigations came to be used as a cudgel to repress student-led protests in support of Palestine.Footnote ⁴ And it was Joe Biden and his entire foreign and defense policy team that allowed and enabled the genocide to begin. Using the ever-receding prospect of negotiations toward a ceasefire, they provided cover for and encouraged Israel with unceasing rounds of military and political support.Footnote ⁵ That atmosphere of genocide denial and repeated apologias for war crimes was key to setting the stage for the unprecedented repression of antigenocide speech and advocacy on our campuses.

Although its statements at times included some performative concern with Palestinians, Arabs, or Islamophobia, the Biden administration’s pronouncements generally constructed the activism, protests, and encampment movement of 2023–24 as manifestations of antisemitism, delegitimizing those speaking out or demonstrating against the genocide. Footnote ⁶ That in turn reinforced a discursive permission structure on the basis of which university leaders countenanced or embraced mass arrests, violent interventions by campus police and other “forces of order,” and draconian disciplinary actions, some of which ended in suspensions, eviction from student housing, or expulsion. Spring 2024 also saw a dramatic increase in the use of all manner of surveillance on campus, including facial recognition, drone tracking, and social media and Internet monitoring of students and faculty—trends which have only continued.

Attacks by the Second Trump Administration

The blueprint for the current assault on higher education, entitled Project Esther, was released on October 7, 2024, by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the same think tank that produced the infamous Project 2025.Footnote ⁷ Although it is framed as targeting antisemitism, it in fact takes aim at only those individuals and groups who are critical of Israel and ignores the various forms of antisemitism inherent in the white Christian nationalist ideology espoused by so many members of the Trump administration and its supporters. Project Esther must therefore be read as part of the administration’s broader fascist program to stifle free speech and attack minority communities. Anti-Zionist and antigenocide activism may be its first targets, but its larger project is to silence and repress, and when possible deport, communities and movements seeking to protect or advocate for civil, political, and economic rights.

Following the inauguration, the Trump administration wasted no time in implementing this part of its extreme right-wing agenda.Footnote ⁸ The opening salvo came in early February 2025 when it established a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Footnote ⁹ According to the official announcement, the task force’s first priority is to root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses. The serial attacks on universities began shortly thereafter as the administration first set its sights on Columbia, to make an example of the university that had seen the most high-profile antigenocide encampment protest in spring 2024.

The demands made of Columbia following the administration’s cancellation of $400 million in federal grants included: restructuring its internal disciplinary processes, with an insistence on expulsion or multiyear suspensions of offending students; implementing comprehensive admissions reform; adopting a definition of antisemitism along the lines of the IHRA definition such that criticism of Israel could be labeled antisemitic; and placing the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) in receivership for a minimum of five years.Footnote ¹⁰ The outrage in the scholarly community and beyond in response was well summarized in the CAF letter sent to Columbia urging it not to acquiesce in the administration’s attempt at extortion: “Acceptance of the demands set forth in that letter would destroy the independence of Columbia University and threaten the independence of every other college and university in this country. Compliance would also gravely undermine our democracy, already under severe threat in so many arenas.”Footnote ¹¹

Nonetheless, Columbia accepted the administration’s demands. When the administration then targeted Harvard on March 31, the playbook quickly became clear: level outrageous charges, suspend huge sums of government grants or other federal support, and make submission in the face of the extortion the only way to (perhaps) recover the monies and escape future attacks.Footnote ¹² Since then, the Trump administration has simply continued to follow suit against a growing list of America’s most prestigious institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, UCLA, Princeton, and UC Berkeley: the list only continues to grow. In addition, sixty universities remain in the crosshairs of the Department of Education for purported failure to address antisemitism and other Title VI–related violations.Footnote ¹³

In the meantime, there has been pushback. Rejecting Columbia’s course of unconditional surrender, Harvard filed a lawsuit, in which MESA filed an amicus curiae brief.Footnote ¹⁴ This case was very important for both its content and its symbolism of resisting government intimidation. Nonetheless, it must be noted that Harvard had already conceded significant ground in the direction of Trump administration demands by removing the leadership of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) for purportedly unbalanced programming and suspending its public health school’s research partnership with Birzeit University.Footnote ¹⁵ On September 3, 2025 the judge in the case did rule that the threatened cuts were unconstitutional, unquestionably an important result.Footnote ¹⁶ (That said, the Trump administration seems set to continue the fight.)Footnote ¹⁷ In the meantime, a number of other higher education associations, including MESA, have filed lawsuits to block Trump’s executive orders, DEI “guidance,” and other deeply troubling policies.Footnote ¹⁸ Notable efforts to fight back at the university or faculty levels also have emerged elsewhere around the country.Footnote ¹⁹

A parallel track of government repression has been its war on international students.Footnote ²⁰ In addition to the spring 2025 arrests and abductions of several high-profile students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, there has been massive canceling of student visas. As of mid-August the number stood at more than six thousand, with the State Department claiming that two to three hundred of the visas were revoked on the grounds that the students had engaged in “support for terrorism.”Footnote ²¹ An extension of this policy has been the investigation of prospective students’ and scholars’ social media accounts for perceived “hostility” to the United States.Footnote ²² There are also cases of students who do not seem to fit this category, having been accepted by US institutions but then having been denied visas, while others face a severe backlog even in scheduling a visa interview.Footnote ²³ As part of its extortion attempt against Harvard, the administration threatened to halt the university’s very ability to enroll international students by decertifying its student and exchange visitor program. Footnote ²⁴ In addition, the travel ban announced in early June 2025, although not specifically targeting students, nonetheless makes it impossible, or nearly so, for students from nineteen countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and most recently Palestine, to obtain visas.Footnote ²⁵ The administration also is currently eyeing a new rule that would set draconian time limits on international students’ study in the United States—leaving graduate students in the position of having to reapply for a visa extension and be subjected to scrutiny and surveillance of their social media posts and research on an ongoing basis—as well as restricting transfers and program changes and giving the federal government greater authority to determine academic progress.Footnote ²⁶

Exchange programs also have seen or been threatened with cuts. Shortly after Trump took office administration officials unilaterally rejected Fulbright grants to both American and foreign scholars late in the application process.Footnote ²⁷ Unsurprisingly, projects involving gender, race, and climate change were prominent among them, the justification being that they were out of compliance with presidential orders. In February 2025, the State Department quietly froze all grant payments for exchanges and global education programs for a month, upsetting the study and plans of some 12,500 Americans who were abroad or slated to go overseas soon.Footnote ²⁸ All of this affects study and instruction in the United States, but also potential funding for study abroad—including funding for language instruction—as well as for programs bringing foreign scholars to the United States. There are, as well, serious concerns about the continuation of funding for National Resource Centers and area studies.Footnote ²⁹ In short, there has never been such a multipronged assault on academic freedom in US history.

Mission of the Committee on Academic Freedom

For more than three decades the MESA Committee on Academic Freedom has been the association’s primary voice for protesting violations of academic freedom in both North America and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. As stated in its recently revised protocol, CAF’s central mission is “advocacy for, and the defense of, the academic freedom and freedom of expression of members both of the North American scholarly community engaged in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, and of scholarly communities in the Middle East and North Africa, irrespective of academic affiliation or discipline.”Footnote ³⁰ CAF’s definition of academic freedom draws on the seminal 1940 American Association of University Professors Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and its amendments which, certainly because of the constitutionally guaranteed protection of free speech, anticipated that the threats to academic freedom in the United States would come from within the academy.Footnote ³¹ Whether it was research, teaching, or extramural speech, the main threat was anticipated to come from individual colleges’ or universities’ own faculty or administrators, or from pressures of scholars’ and students’ academic disciplines. However, in the last several years we have seen threats to academic freedom in the United States increasingly directed from outside universities, from federal and state governments. Moreover, CAF’s mission has always been broader than that envisioned by the AAUP; it also draws on the international human rights tradition as embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Since 2007, CAF has had two wings. As the protocol details, the wing focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) typically investigates:

In the case of the North America wing, CAF’s interventions have most commonly focused on colleges, universities, and other postsecondary institutions, although it also has written to state and federal government officials. Its letters have addressed such issues as interference in faculty governance and faculty sovereignty in the classroom as well as:

The committee’s interventions have at times been in defense of MESA members, but as the mission statement makes clear, our professional and ethical commitment is far broader: a majority of our interventions over the years have addressed violations beyond our own scholarly community, whether here in North America or in the MENA region.

The Committee on Academic Freedom in Action

CAF’s MENA wing, headed since 2013 by Miriam Lowi, professor of political science and international studies at the College of New Jersey, comprises faculty colleagues with particular expertise in one or more states of the region. Some members are organized into teams dealing with countries in which we have had large numbers of cases. Currently that includes Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine.

Potential cases are generally brought to the committee’s attention by CAF members themselves, but we also receive word of cases from other MESA colleagues and beyond. The proliferation of social media has made it easier to learn of violations of academic freedom than was once the case, but a survey of our letters clearly shows we have tended to find or have reported to us fewer cases from the Maghreb, and certainly fewer from some Gulf states than from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine/Israel. The members with country expertise first conduct preliminary research to determine if there is sufficient evidence to substantiate that a violation has taken place, but also to determine if an intervention from CAF would be welcome. To that end, our members reach out to the persons involved or, if the person has been detained, to family or colleagues. Only if it is clear that a letter would do no harm do we then proceed. Once the letter is drafted it is submitted to the entire committee for approval. Finalized letters are then sent to the university or government officials most directly involved. In addition, however, the committee has developed tailored lists of national, UN, EU, and other officials to whose remit the case is relevant to be copied on our letters. In this way, we have sought not only to raise the profile of the violations, but also to put the primary addressees—usually MENA government officials—on notice that we are sharing our letters of protest or concern with high-level officials in governmental and nongovernmental organizations dealing with human and civil rights, including academic freedom. We further promote our letters on MESA’s social media, which reach not only MESA members, but also important human rights, academic freedom, journalistic, and other organizations.

Over the years, we have striven to cover as many countries as possible, but we depend on the volunteer time and expertise of those members who are willing to join our efforts. Therefore there are many cases we never learn of or are not able to address. In addition, wars, invasions, and civil conflict have been all too common in the region and, in such circumstances, we have faced a dilemma: the evidence of violations of academic freedom is often extensive, but they cannot be separated from the broader destruction. To write a letter about an individual professor or university when entire communities are under direct assault makes little sense. As a result, in the cases of Iraq and Yemen, for example, we produced statements or open letters about the educational sector in the context of the broader conflict.Footnote ³²

CAF’s other wing, the North America wing, has been headed since 2011 by Zachary Lockman, professor of history at New York University. A majority of its members are based in the US, with a smaller contingent of Canadian scholars. Once a case has been raised with the chair or a committee member, relevant materials are circulated to the entire committee to determine whether an intervention is warranted. If approved, letters are assigned on a rotational basis and, as in the case with the MENA wing, additional research and contacts are undertaken to ensure that sending a letter is welcome. Once drafted, the letter is submitted to the full committee membership for approval. We have not generally copied our North America letters to organizations or individuals beyond those directly concerned; however, with the current dramatic increase in violations here in the United States committed by the federal government, we have now begun to bring these cases to the attention of relevant UN offices.

We are periodically asked about how often we are successful in our protests or defense of our colleagues, or how much of an impact our letters and statements have had. These are important, but difficult, questions. Each of our letters ends with a request for a response, but in practice we rarely receive answers, certainly when it comes to the MENA region, but even in the majority of our North American cases. And, unfortunately, in far too many instances, the violations we protest are allowed to stand.

Nonetheless, we, and we assume MESA members as well, view the countless hours that committee members spend researching and drafting our interventions as important work. These letters stake out a territory of commitment and values that we are determined to defend when it concerns not only MESA members, but also colleagues well beyond, whether in North America or the MENA region. In sending our protests and expressions of concern we take a stand as a community of scholars that will not be cowed by abuses of power or authoritarianism abroad or here at home. The solidarity we demonstrate with those on whose behalf we write also has an important affective component for those who find themselves and their families perilously isolated when they become the target of powerful state actors. And, there are cases in which we know that our letters have made a difference, at times singly, but often as part of a chorus of voices of scholarly and human rights organizations. We also have used the annual MESA Academic Freedom Award to further highlight cases of particular importance.Footnote ³³ Finally, our letters, carefully researched and written, constitute a significant archive of public documentation for those working on human rights, education, and authoritarianism. They are records across time of violations of academic freedom as well as of individual and societal attempts to push back against coercive practices by state or private institutions and actors.

The Evolution of CAF’s Work

From its inception and through the early years of my chairing CAF, its work consisted of writing letters in defense of individual faculty or students. The MENA region was the primary focus, although a few letters also were written each year on cases in the United States and Canada. The committee’s numbers were small, seven to ten members, and the total number of interventions annually was generally fewer than ten.

When I took over the role of chairing the committee in 2007, after our late colleague Joe Stork stepped down after ten years of service, it had become clear that the amount of work we were trying to undertake demanded an expansion of committee ranks, as well as a reorganization to ensure greater efficiency. To that end the committee was divided into two wings: one focused on the region and one focused on North America. During this period leading up to the so-called Arab Spring, the number of letters rose to about fourteen annually, with the majority still targeting MENA cases.

The authoritarian turn in Turkey, beginning in 2005, and then the Arab uprisings, triggered not only an increase in the workload—by 2013, we were producing upward of twenty letters per year—but also new kinds of work. In the case of Turkey we not only recruited additional members, but, with the government persecution of those who had signed the Peace Petition, and then the deepening state repression following the failed 2016 coup attempt, the nature of the letters themselves evolved.Footnote ³⁴ They became detailed accounts of the growing assault on not just the educational sector, but on free expression in general, as successive emergency orders hollowed out or closed numerous educational institutions through mass firings and detentions. Our letters to Turkey constitute an unparalleled archive documenting the authoritarian emasculation of the country’s university system, such that some of our colleagues have been able to use them in their legal defense.Footnote ³⁵ In addition to these letters, the MENA wing produced several additional documents—information sheets and advice—to aid Turkish colleagues who could not return or who sought to escape the repression by securing academic positions in Europe or North America.Footnote ³⁶ In 2016, in part because of the events in Turkey, CAF reached a new milestone, issuing fifty-one letters, more than doubling any past year’s count.

As for Egypt, although the committee had periodically issued letters decrying the poor state of academic freedom, the July 2013 overthrow of the Mursi government and the vicious repression that followed made Egypt an even more frequent target of our interventions.Footnote ³⁷ The 2016 disappearance of Cambridge University PhD student Giulio Regeni, and the subsequent discovery of his body showing extensive signs of torture, led the committee to discuss with the MESA Board a new initiative: the issuance of a research advisory for students and faculty considering study or research in Egypt.Footnote ³⁸ CAF had issued a “Statement of Concern Regarding Travel to Iran in 2007,” but we felt the dire situation in Egypt required something stronger, and therefore issued a security alert for study and research in Egypt.Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, after several years of deteriorating conditions relative to academic freedom and freedom of expression in the UAE, in the wake of the detention and conviction of British PhD student Matthew Hedges for espionage, we urged the board to issue a statement on the deteriorating security situation and its implications for researchers there.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 2022, we sent a private letter to members of the Egypt National Council for Human Rights regarding a number of Egyptian cases about which we had written in the past as presidential pardons were being considered and that had given us some—if ultimately misplaced—hope for their release.

Over the years Iran also has been a regular target of our letters, which have generally focused on the suppression of campus protests and students activists, and the prolonged detentions of scholars, among them some high-profile dual nationals.Footnote ⁴¹ However, the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests triggered a new level of broad repression in the country.Footnote ⁴² In response, in addition to our letters, CAF engaged an Iranian scholar to compile a list of Iranian professors dismissed from their positions in the wake of the protests.Footnote ⁴³

As for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, university closures, military assaults on universities, arrests and detentions of students and faculty, restrictions on freedom of movement (particularly for Gazan students), and the bombardment and destruction of Palestinian educational institutions during the wars against Gaza in 2008–9 and 2014 have been the focus of many interventions over the years.Footnote ⁴⁴ The violations have been so frequent, numerous, and severe that the committee has periodically issued letters of concern about the educational sector in general. The beginning of the genocide in 2023, the scholasticide in Gaza, and the concomitant Israeli assaults on education in the West Bank led the committee to decide that it no longer made sense to address letters to Israeli officials.Footnote ⁴⁵ Instead, we have directed our interventions, which also have included joint statements with the board regarding the decimation of the education sector in Gaza and the cultural genocide against the Palestinians, to relevant US, EU, and UN officials.Footnote ⁴⁶ Finally, especially, although not exclusively in the case of Palestine, we have come to interpret our mandate in defense of academic freedom to include research centers whose reports or studies are highly regarded and widely used by academics. Perhaps the most notable case of our defending such groups was our 2022 selection for the MESA Academic Freedom Award of six Palestinian civil society organizations after they had been targeted for closure by the Israeli military occupation.Footnote ⁴⁷

In a departure from the usual subjects of our letters, in 2018 CAF took on the New York Times and its subsequently discredited correspondent Rukmini Callimachi for her unauthorized removal of Iraqi documents from the country and their unredacted use in her sensationalist series, “The ISIS Files.”Footnote ⁴⁸ We were joined by a number of other institutions protesting the violation of Iraqi rights to these documents, their use by an unethical journalist, and the failure of hosting institutions—the New York Times and George Washington University—to involve trained archivists in their oversight and management.Footnote ⁴⁹

Turning to North America, CAF’s letters have long, overwhelmingly had some connection to scholarship or teaching on Palestine/Israel or efforts to suppress boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campus activism. As the pressures to adopt the 2016 IHRA definition of antisemitism, with its dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, have intensified, the committee has written a growing number of letters to both Canadian and US government departments and universities outlining its pernicious implications for academic freedom.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 2018, in response to growing online harassment of members of our Middle East studies community—faculty and, increasingly, students—the North America wing produced “Exposing Canary Mission;” this guide is a detailed discussion of the operation and actions of this website to which students and faculty can direct their departments, deans, or other university administrators as an aid in defending themselves against its slanderous posts.Footnote ⁵¹

The dramatic intensification of the assaults on academic freedom in North America since fall 2023 have led to an unprecedented increase in CAF’s work, with the total number of letters produced in 2024 reaching sixty-six, forty-eight of which were sent to US and Canadian institutions. Over the past two years, the North America wing members have devoted countless hours to researching and writing about the many, varied threats to our educational institutions and scholarly communities: their letters are a remarkable and impressive testament to scholarly solidarity. In addition to these many interventions, which responded to only a small fraction of the overall number of potential cases, CAF produced two statements in conjunction with the board regarding the suppression of campus protests in North America as well as an open letter to US and Canadian college and university presidents about the importance of protecting free speech and academic freedom.Footnote ⁵²

The CAF leadership also participated in a listening session with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and played a role in coordinating with and supporting academic freedom efforts of several sister organizations. We have had periodic meetings with colleagues from the International Studies Association and Scholars at Risk. We also provided advice regarding the structure of our work and procedures to our colleagues from the British Middle East Studies Association (BRISMES) and la Società Italiana di Studi sul Medio Oriente (SeSAMO; Italy) as they founded their own committees on academic freedom. Further, as the challenges to academic freedom for the Middle East studies community have increased across Europe, we have participated in a number of meetings with French, German, and Spanish colleagues to share our experiences and reinforce solidarity.

Other MESA Academic Freedom Initiatives

In the wake of the 2016 elections, the threats that Donald Trump had made during the presidential campaign against Muslims and Arabs and their countries of origin took on heightened significance. The MESA leadership determined that a new committee was needed to focus in particular on various legal threats—not only to academic freedom but also to the civil and political rights of the members of our community. MESA’s Task Force on Civil and Human Rights was created, in which both the CAF and CAF North America wing chairs participate as ex officio members. Although the defeat of Trump in 2020 led to a temporary hiatus, the recent rising tide of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian activity, and more recently the all-out assault on university faculty, staff, and students has led to the committee’s reconstitution and reinvigoration. In addition to a number of frequently asked question (FAQ) webpages related to visas and law enforcement on campus, the committee has launched the Academic Freedom Initiative.Footnote ⁵³ Funded by the Mellon Foundation, it involves tracking trends on campus, compiling data sets focused on recent immigration actions affecting higher education, and adverse employment outcomes for university employees since October 2023.

A second initiative that grew in part out of CAF’s work, but which is independent of it, has been MESA’s Global Academy (GA).Footnote ⁵⁴ Its mission, enabled by securing external grant support, has been to provide small grants for research and conference travel to enable scholars from the MENA region in the US and Canada who cannot safely return to their home countries to remain active members of the broader scholarly community. It also curates research presentation opportunities at major Middle East centers, offers professional development workshops, provides publishing opportunities, and helps sustain a faculty mentorship network to enable these scholars to re-create forms of intellectual community after having been wrenched from their home academic contexts. Since its inception in 2019, the GA has provided grants to nearly one hundred scholars from across the MENA region, some for multiple years.

The most recent committee to develop from MESA and CAF’s work in defense of academic freedom is the Committee on Academic Autonomy (CAA). The CAA will focus on providing support to the various centers, programs, and departments devoted to Middle East studies at major universities and colleges. It seeks to raise the positive public profile of these centers of knowledge production as well as work to equip both MESA’s institutional members and its affiliated organizations with resources and other assistance regarding the most important issues facing them.

Finally, a project that is not a formal extension of CAF, but in which several CAF members and other Middle East scholars are involved, is the creation of an archive of the lives of Palestinian academics who have been killed in the genocide in Gaza. For those whose names are known and about whom information is accessible, biographies are being written highlighting their various achievements, contributions, and familial ties. The aim is both to honor and preserve the memory of these individuals and to disseminate broadly the archive of their lives. This collection should be available online in early 2026.

Other Institutional and Community Responses

In the past, in cases of harassment or intimidation by off-campus individuals or organizations, some colleges and universities were willing to make public statements in defense of their faculty or students, or failing that, at least provide private reassurance. Although it is impossible to know how common such forms of support have been, given how generally risk-averse (some would say cowardly) university leaderships have tended to be, it is safe to assume that often no action in defense of harassed faculty or students has been taken.

When the pressures have come from within the university itself, the outcomes have depended upon myriad factors: the rank and status of the individual faculty member or student, the type of intimidation involved, as well as the internal processes for pursuing complaints. However, university grievance processes and offices charged with protecting members of the campus community need to be understood for what they are: systems intended in the first instance to protect the university, not the faculty member or student. Therefore, sadly, their utility in defending against harassment has generally been quite limited.

Relatedly, faculty governance—a relationship by which faculty have sovereignty over intellectual or knowledge production, academic programming, and faculty hiring and promotion—and university autonomy also have been in retreat for some time.Footnote ⁵⁵ The corporatization of the university has given increasing power to administrators and boards of trustees. Often coming from the private sector, board members may have little understanding of—or interest in—what faculty regard as the most important values for what are supposed to be centers of learning and critical inquiry.

Today we face not only the largely ineffective institutional “supports” of the past, but their operation in the context of a federal government in which the ruling party is the primary mover behind the authoritarian assault. Indeed, since the beginning of the second Trump administration, unless one is claiming anti-Zionist, antiwhite, anti-Christian, or anticonservative discrimination or harassment, one probably need not seek the help of a Title VI office, nor of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.Footnote ⁵⁶ No longer must we defend ourselves “simply” against a student claiming biased lectures or readings or a community group complaining about purported antisemitism in an op-ed or social media post. Today the government itself poses the greatest threat.

Certainly, university leaderships are faced with immense pressures, as well as clear constraints on their power. Nonetheless, they do still have a basic responsibility to support, and when possible protect, the members of their communities. In a March 13, 2025 statement the MESA Board called on colleges and universities to fulfill these responsibilities and resist pressures by the government and other groups based outside academia to silence scholarly engagement with the question of Palestine/Israel.Footnote ⁵⁷ Unfortunately, in some of the highest profile cases, the opposite has been true. Most infamous to date has been the example of Columbia’s president who, when pressed by Republicans during the show trials of spring 2024 about specific professors whom pro-Zionist groups had been targeting, indicated that they would not be reappointed, had already been dismissed from leadership positions, or would be otherwise “disciplined.”Footnote ⁵⁸ More recently, in September 2025, UC Berkeley, along with at least four other University of California campuses, complied with a Department of Education demand to hand over the names of students, faculty, and staff in cases of alleged antisemitism.Footnote ⁵⁹ University leaders have in effect been deputized by the Trump administration to carry out its campaign of repression.

With college and university leaders having largely abdicated responsibility for protecting faculty, staff, and students against the ongoing assaults, members of university communities have had to seek help elsewhere. In some institutions, the national AAUP or individual campus chapters in alliance with campus unions and other faculty associations have sued the Trump administration, as has MESA, which has played a singular role among scholarly associations, and which on September 30, 2025, won a major First Amendment case in defense of noncitizen students and faculty rights to engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy.Footnote ⁶⁰ In addition, organizations that offer legal advice or services to faculty, students, and staff targeted by anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, anti-Palestine solidarity, and Islamophobic attacks have stepped up to embrace the dramatic increase in the demands for their advice and assistance. Palestine Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Knight Institute, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project, among others, have all expanded their work to address the avalanche of requests for support. Although there have been a number of notable success stories, the overall atmosphere of intimidation, harassment, and criminalization of antigenocide speech and advocacy has not abated. Indeed, as the months have passed the administration’s authoritarian attacks on free speech target an expanding circle of issues, actors, and sectors.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Whether one views what is occurring as rapidly advancing authoritarianism or democratic backsliding, intimidation and violence are the currency of this regime, and their manifestations have become all too common in our media, our public and private institutions, our streets, and our neighborhoods. Nor is this a passing threat; all indications are that the struggle against multipronged government repression is likely to be a long one, and the outcome is far from certain.

In the university we have become accustomed to the advice given to junior faculty to remain cautious until they have secured tenure. With a dramatic increase in hires of faculty off the tenure track over the last several decades increasing precarity in our field, that advice is all the more pertinent, just as it constitutes a recognition of the traditional contingency of academic freedom in the US. Recently we have seen tenured faculty fired, departments placed in receivership, and admissions and hiring criteria upended by federal government intervention. In October 2025, the MESA Task Force on Civil and Human Rights published an online FAQ sheet with detailed advice for how to navigate the classroom and teaching as well as the broader university in this perilous time.Footnote ⁶¹ The AAUP and Faculty First Responders also have issued an advisory with guidance for academic workers.Footnote ⁶²

At this dangerous juncture, each of us must decide, based on our principles, our strengths, and our vulnerabilities, about the proper course of action, how to continue to teach in the areas of our expertise, publish what our research leads us to write, and engage in the advocacy work to which we feel called. Certainly, faculty with secure positions have an increased responsibility to support more vulnerable colleagues as well as graduate and undergraduate students. Beyond that, in the face of ascendant white Christian nationalism, those of us who are citizens—and not people of color—are generally less vulnerable, and so have a heightened responsibility to speak out and to reject obedience in advance.Footnote ⁶³ Although a ceasefire/prisoner exchange was reached in October to end the US-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza, as of early December 2025 the genocide had not been brought to an end, and Israeli army and settler anti-Palestinian violence and ethnic cleansing were surging in the occupied West Bank. In the context of the massive death and destruction in Gaza of the past two years as well as the growing authoritarianism in the United States, teaching about Palestine and confronting the genocide-denying forces that would silence us could not be more important. The work of CAF and the growing number of initiatives that have evolved from MESA’s commitment to academic freedom are among our community’s strongest defense against the dangerous forces ranged against us. We must continue to act in community and solidarity. The time to stand together against genocide and authoritarianism is now.