“Declaring faculty members as persona non grata appears tantamount to a summary suspension…. The AAUP has long considered denying faculty members the right to carry out their key duties as a major sanction, second only to dismissal in severity. An administration should take such a step only after demonstrating adequate cause in an adjudicative hearing of record before an elected faculty body. No such hearing has taken place [at NYU]. These actions by NYU administrators are part of a pattern of college and university administrations responding to protests by imposing harsh and broadly chilling restrictions and sanctions. As the AAUP warned at the start of the fall semester, such severe limits on speech and assembly discourage or shut down expressive activity of faculty, students, and other members of the campus community and undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education.” 

(The Conversation) – The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A pre-trial chamber of the ICC found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant intentionally “deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity.”

This is not the first attempt to seek legal accountability for Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. In December 2023, South Africa brought a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. In January of this year, the ICJ found there was a “real and imminent risk” that Israel was committing — or would commit — acts of genocide in Gaza.

Nine months later, a United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry reported:

“Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza. Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, constituting the war crimes of willful killing and mistreatment and the crime against humanity of extermination.”

As the world witnesses the ongoing destruction of Gaza, universities in the West have become critical sites of examination, debate and protest. They have also become sites of suppression that shrink, rather than facilitate, the open exchange and analysis of ideas.

Universities are indispensable to supporting the free inquiry needed to do the work of addressing atrocity crimes. However, Western universities are increasingly prioritizing ideas of neutrality over a principled commitment to free speech and the pursuit of truth.

The indispensible role of the university

In an essay on education and neoliberalism, Canadian-American cultural studies scholar Henry Giroux emphasized the importance of the university’s role in leading social change. He said the university is: “one of the few public spaces left where students can learn the power of questioning authority, recover the ideals of engaged citizenship, reaffirm the importance of the public good, and expand their capacities to make a difference.”

Understanding — and ultimately preventing — genocide and other atrocity crimes requires an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates insights from a multitude of areas of expertise including law, history, politics, hard and applied sciences, psychology, journalism and others. Universities are crucial to supporting the evidence-based research needed to do this essential work.

“The chances for truth to prevail in public,” as Hannah Arendt argued, are “greatly improved by the mere existence” of universities and “by the organization of independent, supposedly disinterested scholars associated with them.”

“Palestine Exception,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

Academic freedom should always be highly valued and steadfastly protected. As the Canadian Association of University Teachers stated in November 2023, “academic freedom, like all expressive freedoms, is particularly vulnerable during periods of war, conflict, and social unrest.”

Unfortunately, many have responded to political and donor pressure by repressing discussions of Palestine in the classroom and on campus grounds. These moves curtail the academic freedom of scholars working on Palestine.

When universities become less free, the health of our democracies declines.

The importance of student protest

Over the past year, students across North America, Europe and elsewhere established encampments on campuses to bring attention to Israel’s crimes and to call on their institutions to divest from companies and industries associated with Israel’s assault on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian land.

However, many encampments were violently dismantled, with universities collaborating with authorities to shut down dissent and protest on campus.

Some universities have targeted students and faculty who support Palestinian freedom with surveillance, reprisals and expulsions. They have enacted a range of new policies designed to discourage or otherwise police speech on campus, which disproportionately target speech on Palestine. Such actions violate the expressive and assembly rights of students and faculty and transform the university into places where people are fearful of speaking out.

In October, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, Gina Romero, criticized these policies and practices, urging universities to change course. Romero observed that the “brutal repression of the university-based protest movement is posing a profound threat to democratic systems and institutions.”

Erasure of Palestinian history and culture

Teaching Palestinian history on campuses is essential work, especially as schools and universities in Gaza are facing scholasticide. Scholasticide refers to the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”

Histories of the Nakba — the violent displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the founding of Israel — have been actively denied in Israel and in Western education and public discourse.

The destruction of education is a method of genocide, as education is essential to the continuation of the Palestinian people as a distinct national and cultural group. This destructive erasure is underscored in a recent report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese.

A false neutrality

Instead of providing spaces for knowledge and discussion related to Palestine, Western universities are increasingly asserting that they have a responsibility to remain “neutral” regarding so-called controversial geopolitical issues. However, such commitments to neutrality are, in practice, often false.

Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enrol to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.

Claiming to remain apolitical in effect relieves universities of their responsibility to support the freedom of scholars to document, discuss and educate about political violence. Individual faculty members and students wishing to do so must navigate a bureaucracy of political suppression on campus.

Activism is a form of education and argumentation. Campus activism has long been central to both instigating and consolidating social progress. Restricting dissent on campus is a classic authoritarian tactic.

Universities should be places were we oppose unlawful killing, maiming and destruction, wherever this violence occurs. Universities should be spaces where Palestine is no longer treated as an exception. They should be places that actively support displaced students and faculty and work with Palestinian colleagues to rebuild institutions of learning in Gaza. Finally, universities should be places where students and scholars can freely examine and debate the political, legal and social dimensions of Israel’s actions in Gaza and throughout the Palestinian territory, Lebanon and the broader region.

Heidi Matthews, Assistant Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada; Fatima Ahdash, Assistant Professor of Law,, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and Priya Gupta, Associate Professor of Law, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was a blow for education across the country – but especially for girls and women. Since then, the Taliban’s leaders have outlawed education for girls after sixth grade, expanded religious seminaries known as madrasas ninefold and reintroduced corporal punishment in schools.

Now, the Taliban are continuing their assault on education for both boys and girls by changing the curriculum in grades 1-12. They have already revised textbooks up to eighth grade, and they’re on track to finish the rest within months. After completion, the revised curriculum will go up for approval by the Taliban’s supreme leader and will likely be followed by swift implementation. The process is straightforward. The supreme leader of the Taliban controls education policy – including the curriculum. Once submitted to him, he has no reason to reject or delay the implementation.

As an educational policy scholar who pushed for educational progress in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, I believe these changes echo the tactics of the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s to impose an ideology through textbooks. They also reflect the stifling climate of the 1990s, which promoted violence and suppressed critical thinking in education. By controlling education, the Taliban aims to instill their totalitarian and extremist religious-based ideology in young minds, ensuring their grip on power for generations to come.

The curriculum changes

Afghanistan’s education system is centralized, meaning all schools follow a single curriculum. The current textbooks are the result of two decades of reforms that followed the country’s recovery from the Soviet invasion and civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2001, when the Taliban’s last regime fell, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with international developmental agencies, undertook a critical revision of the national curriculum. This initiative aimed to make curriculum and textbooks inclusive, nondiscriminatory and free from promotion of violence – a departure from previous textbooks that included illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers and automatic weapons.

In the last decade before the Taliban regained power, the Ministry of Education was still attempting to reform curriculum to focus on students’ personal and economic growth. Unfortunately, the ministry never completed the reforms.

Embed from Getty Images
Afghan school boys attend their first class following the start of the new academic year, at a private school in Khost on March 20, 2024. Schools in Afghanistan opened for the new academic year on March 20, the education ministry said, with girls banned from joining secondary-level classes for the third year in a row. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Within a few months after their takeover in August 2021, senior Taliban leaders criticized the previous education system and curriculum, saying it was brainwashing Afghan youth and weakening religious values. They called for a reeducation campaign.

Since then, the Taliban have been revising the curriculum and aggressively rewriting textbooks for grades 1-12. This is based on 26 recommendations from their education commission. Some of the changes approved by the commission include:

1.) Removing subjects like formal art, civil education and culture. Instead, schools are increasing time spent on religious studies.

2.) Removing content about human rights, women’s rights, equal rights, freedoms, elections and democracy.

3.) Removing all images of living beings from textbooks, including pictures of humans, animals, sports and anatomy. The Taliban believe that only God creates living beings, and producing or distributing images of God’s creation is prohibited.

4.) Adding religious material to the curriculum that enforces Taliban narratives. This includes teachings that justify violence against those who resist or oppose the Taliban’s views.

5.) Shaping student behaviors to fit the Taliban’s vision of society, similar to what they defined in recent vice and virtue laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, among other rules.

6.) Requiring schools to teach and assess students on “emirate studies,” which glorify Taliban leaders and their history by characterizing the Taliban takeover as a defeat of secular values, including equal rights, civil society and democracy.

The Taliban have also banned women from studying abroad. In addition, they have prohibited the sale, purchase and reprinting of more than 400 science and philosophy books and confiscated at least 50,000 books on democracy, social and civil rights, art, literature and poetry from publishing houses, bookstores and public libraries.

A 2023 Human Rights Watch report noted an increase in corporal punishment in schools. Even some teachers of nonreligious subjects, like math and science, now have to pass the religious tests to remain employed.

Beyond shaping thought processes, the Taliban aim to influence students’ actions. Through rigid rules and corporal punishments – including humiliation, beating, slapping and foot whipping – they seek to produce immediate behavioral changes that reflect their desired norms. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate individuals who embody the regime’s values and ideologies.

Consequences for Afghan students – and the world

During their first regime from 1995-2001, the Taliban used textbooks with biased content that promoted violent jihad. For example, the alphabet taught to first graders included teachings like “J” stands for jihad and “M” for mujahideen – referring to Islamic guerrilla fighters.

They increased religious education to 50% of the curriculum and banned art, music and photography. They deemed music against God’s will, according to their interpretation of Sharia.

As a result, academic freedom vanished. Student enrollment dropped. Families lost trust in schools, and many teachers left the profession, leading to the eventual collapse of the education system in the 1990s.

The Taliban are threatening to do the same today with their latest curriculum changes. Schools may turn into indoctrination centers instead of places for real learning. I fear that the altered curriculum could breed mistrust in public education. Furthermore, the Taliban removed the 2008 law that made school mandatory. As a result, many parents may pull their kids from schools again.

The ideologically driven curriculum also raises international concerns and has already led to cuts in foreign aid. Donors won’t support institutions that promote discriminatory ideologies. This is straining an already vulnerable education system, threatening its survival.

Ultimately, the Afghan people will bear the brunt of these policies, but the effects could spill beyond the country’s borders and impact the world.

Enayat Nasir, Doctoral Research Assistant in Educational Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rebecca M. Cunningham
President, University of Minnesota
upres@umn.edu . . .

Dear President Cunningham and Colleagues:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our concern about the decision of the administration of the University of Minnesota (UMN) to indefinitely suspend eight students who participated in an occupation of a university building, Morrill Hall, on 21 October 2024. Whatever one thinks of the students’ action, we regard the university’s decision to bar them from classes, dormitories, dining halls and campus jobs as an unduly harsh sanction that violates their rights to education and sustenance. The fact that this sanction was imposed without the students having had the opportunity to defend their actions in a properly conducted disciplinary process makes it all the more egregious. The university’s actions in this regard seem aimed at deterring students from exercising the dictates of their conscience on matters of urgent public concern. They also contravene the University of Minnesota’s laudable tradition of countenancing contentious student protests.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.

On 21 October 2024, some members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), part of the UMN Divest Coalition, held a rally to protest UMN’s recently revised student conduct policy and the Board of Regents’ rejection of requests to divest from Israel-related investments. Divestment had been the subject of ongoing discussions between university leaders and UMN Divest since the dismantling of the spring 2024 protest encampments. Some students and alumni then marched to Morrill Hall, a main administrative building, and barricaded themselves inside, using patio furniture and other items. Protesters declared the building “Halimy Hall,” in commemoration of 19-year-old Medo Halimy, a university student in Gaza who documented daily life in wartime and was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis in August 2024.

According to a 22 October 2024 statement from the Office of the President, the students spray-painted over internal security cameras and damaged other property. The statement asserts that employees in Morrill Hall were unable to exit the building due to protesters preventing their free movement and exit. “These actions crossed the line into illegal activity,” the statement asserts, and on that basis the University of Minnesota Police Department entered Morrill Hall two hours into the occupation, along with Hennepin County police officers, arrested eight students and three alumni. We note, however, that video evidence seems to show students encouraging staff who wished to leave to do so after announcing their occupation and offering escorts to an available exit. Those arrested were released without charge from Hennepin County Jail on 24 October 2024.

The university has issued indefinite interim suspension orders for the eight students, on the premise that they pose an ongoing threat to the university. The orders bar them from attending classes, living in dormitories, eating in dining halls or participating in their campus jobs and activities. Students also face two sets of disciplinary hearings, to which they are permitted to bring lawyers: a first hearing concerning the interim suspension and a second concerning the conduct charges.

We regard the barring of the students from all university activities, before any transparent investigation or disciplinary hearing has been conducted, to be an unduly draconian sanction that contravenes the university’s obligation to educate and to foster debate, however heated. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has recently called attention to the alarming expansion of restrictive policies that intimidate and silence faculty and students, especially those voicing their principled opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. As the AAUP put it, “Administrators who claim that ‘expressive activity’ policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.”

The University of Minnesota’s recently issued protest guidelines state that “engagement that is inconsistent with University policies becomes civil disobedience.” We remind you of the generative role of civil disobedience in the university’s own history. For example, in January 1969 African American students occupied Morrill Hall to protest discrimination and racism, an event documented by the University Archives. Their action led to the founding of the African American and African Studies Department later that year.

Students engaged in conscientious political action who are willing to accept the consequences of their actions ought not to be prevented from continuing their education. We therefore call on you to rescind the indefinite suspension orders imposed on the eight students and to ensure that any disciplinary process to which they are subjected is conducted in a fair and transparent manner and in accordance with generally accepted standards.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Aslı Ü. Bâli
MESA President
Professor, Yale Law School

Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California