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Welcome to a special episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a collaborative production of AAUP presents and the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, or CDAF.
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I'm CDAF fellow Vineeta Singh.
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And this episode is an introduction to a project co-produced by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Anti Repression Network.
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It's called Faculty on the Front Lines, and it documents the stories of 10 faculty targeted for their speech on Palestine.
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And to be clear, this isn't the story of how these faculty were attacked.
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This is a story of how faculty under attack are fighting back through collective action.
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We'll start with a short interview with the project's creator, Anna Fader, and then you'll get to hear one of the 10 stories that make up the project.
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Okay.
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So, Anna, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about how you came to this project?
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I
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hi, I'm Anna.
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Anna Feder.
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I was terminated from a staff position at Emerson College, in, mid-August of last year.
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I had been there for 17 years, both as staff and teaching a course that I designed on cinema exhibition I had a job that I loved.
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I had been there for, 17 years and 12 and a half running a series that I had, launched called Bright Lights, a free public film series, which had a very strong social justice focus, in the last few years.
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It was a not just an opportunity to see cinema, but have conversations around it.
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And so every screening had about a 45 minute conversation, and sometimes it was a filmmaker that was there to represent the film.
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Sometimes it was someone from the community.
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Sometimes it had something to do with the subject of the film, but it was an opportunity for.
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Students, faculty, staff, alumni, to gather in this space with folks in the community, and to have these conversations.
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And, this screening of Israelism was originally planned for, November 9th, 2023.
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And, I had received.
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email from someone on the board of trustees very concerned about the film being, biased addressed the concerns and was told, that it was okay for me to screen the film.
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I'd never had any interference in my program before.
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And then, and that was prior to October 7th, and of course, everything changed after October 7th.
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And, my job was threatened.
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and so I was made to postpone the film to, February 1st, 2024.
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That was the first.
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uh, opportunity that I'd be allowed to screen the film.
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And still all the things that, that the president of the college had threatened, came to pass the college publicly disavowed the screening.
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I was told I had to have an undercover police officer there, and then I was told, and this is when I, if, I tried to screen in the fall that my program would be quote unquote revisited in the future.
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And so they revisited last summer and decided to cancel my program.
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My relationship with students, prior to, to the encampment was really students who worked in the cinema, students who took trips with me to Sundance or South by Southwest or Camden, or students in the class that I taught.
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And so it wasn't until students were arrested 13 students outside of the president's, inauguration, in March of 2024.
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and that had never happened on campus before.
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and so it was a real shock when, 13 students arrested.
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So I was working from home in Providence and I drove up to Boston to be there, when the students were released.
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And so that was the beginning of my relationship with the student activists and the sort of trust that was built there.
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And then, yeah, so when they started the encampment, I was there for half of its 80 hours doing things like helping a take out the trash to make sure there weren't tons of rats and managing donations that came in and making sure that people got food while it was hot, and food that was perishable got thrown out.
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And all the stuff that I'm now doing with food, not bombs, but, but yeah, and I, and this is something that I, had wanted to speak to, and it's something that sort of comes across in these interviews is the way that, faculty and staff support for students is being twisted into, or being.
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Characterize or framed as that we are exerting undue influence on these students that we are somehow leading them rather than we are following them and supporting them in their movement.
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I think that's such a, like when they talk about indoctrination, that's such, showing their hand of Oh, we don't think students can think for themselves.
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we don't think young people can think for themselves.
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So I definitely, definitely see that and I think that's gonna resonate with a lot of people.
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Okay.
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So cut to, March?
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how did you, come to this project,
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Yeah.
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it was really disappointing the ways in which that academic year unmasked people at the institution, and I know that unmasking is continuing, right?
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As these attacks are only escalating, on college campuses.
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And I was lucky enough to find the folks who were aligned and willing to take action, whether they be students, faculty, staff, alumni, folks in the community.
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And I wanted to have a, an even larger network, and connect with more folks across the country who, Who were willing to do things, were willing to take risks, who, lived their values.
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And I think the, I'm trying to remember where I was connected to Eli Meyerhoff from the Center for Direct, for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
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He's one of the fellows.
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and he told me about this network, the Palestine Anti-Repression Network, a group of educators.
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so some are faculty, staff, graduate students, folks who are K to 12 teachers.
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And so I got involved last fall with the group, and it's now grown to over 50 members, so probably doubled in size since I, I joined.
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There had been a continuing conversation wanting to document these stories and to share them out.
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my background is in documentary filmmaking and so it was naturally something that I was really interested in, I wanted for folks to get a sense of who these faculty are.
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their areas of expertise, their scholarship.
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I wanted for them to hear about.
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what they were all facing.
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and I think that there's, there's, this is only a small sampling.
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It's 10 people, but you can start to see, the similarities.
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You can start to see where the attacks are coming from, either internally to the institution or external.
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and then I think even in the cases where some of these stories are public, it isn't always in their words with their framing.
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And so it was really important to hear from them, both what people faced as well as.
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You know what they're doing now, what the, what, they're life beyond these institutions and what they're trying to do to us.
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what we need now in particular is for everyone to be loud Solidarity is something that you have to shout from the rooftops.
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if everybody who believed in their heart, you know that this was the right thing to do, believed in their heart that what's happening is wrong.
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Did something about it.
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we'd be in a very d different position right now.
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I'm thinking about when I send this, podcast episode or when I send the YouTube links to my friends who are not directly impacted, Or feel that they are not directly impacted by this conversation.
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and they feel like, oh my God, all the news that I hear is so overwhelming.
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There's this fire hose of just like awful, awful things that I have to hear about every day.
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Why should they listen?
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why do they need to hear these stories?
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Because education is important to the fabric of our society.
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And, and I, and I understand that it is overwhelming and terrible right now, the op, the options then really are to shut down, which is not a real option, or to find where you can put your energy, what can you affect, with your skills, with your heart, with your lived experience, I think it's important to, to care about.
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All of the ways that the fabric of our society is being stretched and torn and frayed and find somewhere to put your energy towards repair.
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so I think what this has.
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Reinforced for me, this project is what AAUP and of course, other unions have always known, is that we're stronger together, not just as faculty, as students, staff and alumni, but as workers and learners.
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and we have to see through the ways that these institutions try to divide us.
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One of the things that's.
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Both so powerful about the movement for Palestine on campuses and such a threat to the power of these institutions, the administrators, is the way that we were all working together.
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So I'd been at Emerson at 17 years.
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I'd never seen anything like that where students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members We're all in that very small alleyway at Emerson College.
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and the folks who had more privilege, the tenure faculty naturally used their privilege to, to support those with less privilege at the institution.
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And it was just a really organic movement.
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It was just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
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what I hope that people will take away from this is that, that we all don't have to take, we don't have to all put our bodies on the line.
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we don't all have to take.
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Big risks, but we have to take risks and I think this is what listening to these stories, recording these stories has really been, I.
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Has been giving me some hope and I hope that it, it does that for other people.
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Thank you, Anna.
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We'll now hear from Michelle DeGraff, a distinguished scholar of linguistics who teaches at MIT and has graciously shared his voice as part of the faculty on the front lines project.
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My name is Michel DeGraff, and I've been teaching at MIT Linguistics since 1996.
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That's 29 years ago.
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And it, it, it's, it was so exciting to come to MIT, uh, to be teaching alongside pillars of the field such as Noam Chomsky.
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Uh, it also exciting to be part of this department, and for the past 29, well, let's say 27 years.
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Uh, before 23, I had a dream, career at MIT doing.
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what I felt was really important work and my expertise is language and power and the politics of linguistics and how we can use language towards liberation, uh, language for decolonization.
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In fact, in 2021, I offered a special topic seminar on that very topic.
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It was titled.
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Linguistics and social justice.
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And there we had guest speakers from the Caribbean, from Mexico, uh, talking about Ireland, about Seychelles, Mauritius, Australia, Zealand.
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It was an amazing seminar.
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Then October happened, October seven happened, and after I saw firsthand the ways in which language is being weaponized.
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Uh, to create fog around the war on Gaza.
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I felt that given my expertise and also given the fact that someone like Noam Choky at MIT had seen such a, a powerful voice for a free Palestine, I thought it was, it, it was a moment for linguists to shine and to, and to, uh, put a light on the misuse of language for power from Congress to, uh, to Tel Aviv.
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So I offered this course, this seminar, a special topic seminar on language and linguistics in decolonization, inhibition, struggle.
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And, and the goal was to examine the use of, of language for, for power.
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And, and I was shocked that instead of welcoming such a proposal, especially thinking of Noam Chomsky's legacy in the field this, this powerful voice for Palestine.
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My colleagues, uh.
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Scrutinize this proposal beyond what I have experienced.
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However, in 2021, my proposal was approved within a couple of days.
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In 2024, the proposal on in my area of expertise on the topic that was so urgent, uh, the war on Gaza, I was told that I lacked expertise to teach about my area of interest in the context of Israel and Palestine.
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And eventually the course was rejected.
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Uh, but given my career, given my conviction as a linguist activist, I thought that I had to fight this censorship.
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The fact is that two years before my department head had complimented me for my, for my engaging linguistics towards social change, uh, pressing problems of the world through language and linguistics.
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Uh, so what I did then is push back as hard as I could.
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Against that censorship against the decision.
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And, and at the same time, I also adapted in transforming this rejected seminar into a speaker series where I invited, uh, professors, experts from, from actually two of them, from Israel, from a very variety of, um, universities.
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All uh, looking at the use of language linguistics in But Itan Israel around the issues of domination versus liberation.
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And, and I felt that it was one of the most successful seminars I ever taught it.
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Certainly one that engaged in the real pressing issue that that has to be solved.
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Um, the genocide in, Gaza, and, and meanwhile, while I was still pushing.
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For my colleagues to accept, uh, this as a real course.
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I wrote essays in matic in the MITC newspaper, the tech, uh, in, in Newsweek, in Chronicle of higher education.
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In, I give an interview there and I wrote a piece inside higher ed, and then I, I was penalized for doing so.
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I was penalized for ex exercising my freedom speech for writing email to colleagues and writing essays to contest the censorship against.
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My academic freedom, my freedom of speech, and, and eventually the Dean of SHASS, the School of Humanities Art and Social Sciences, he, he cut my salary, he removed my pay raise.
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Uh, I was kicked out of my department of 28 years.
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I was removed into a position called faculty at large that I never knew of before I was transferred, um, to, to shas at the fact at large.
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Um, and, and recently again, I proposed the same course.
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It was rejected, and I'm still out of my department and I'm, I've been accused of misconduct.
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I've been accused of harassment, I've been accused of, of creating, um, disturbances in the department or because of wanting to teach about Palestine.
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So if I never proposed a course on Palestine, I would've still have.
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A very rosy career in linguistics.
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So I'm paying a very heavy price because of the Palestine exception, but, but I'm still fighting.
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So I, I feel that given my career for the past, almost three decades now, given that my career has been built around the study of language and power, and given what's happening today, given, uh, the way that we see that language has been, has become a weapon, uh, to create fog around the War on Gaza.
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We have to keep, uh, fighting.
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We have to keep pushing to defend academic freedom and our freedom of speech.
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That's it for this special episode of A A UP Presents Academic Freedom.
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On the line, you'll find links to the rest of the testimonies recorded for Anna Federer's faculty on the Front Lines project in the show notes for this episode, please consider your homework to go watch these videos and please do follow Anna's advice.
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We can't all do the same things, but we can all do something.
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Welcome to a special episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a collaborative production of AAUP presents and the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, or CDAF.
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I'm CDAF fellow Vineeta Singh.
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And this episode is an introduction to a project co-produced by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Anti Repression Network.
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It's called Faculty on the Front Lines, and it documents the stories of 10 faculty targeted for their speech on Palestine.
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And to be clear, this isn't the story of how these faculty were attacked.
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This is a story of how faculty under attack are fighting back through collective action.
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We'll start with a short interview with the project's creator, Anna Fader, and then you'll get to hear one of the 10 stories that make up the project.
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Okay.
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So, Anna, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about how you came to this project?
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I
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hi, I'm Anna.
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Anna Feder.
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I was terminated from a staff position at Emerson College, in, mid-August of last year.
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I had been there for 17 years, both as staff and teaching a course that I designed on cinema exhibition I had a job that I loved.
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I had been there for, 17 years and 12 and a half running a series that I had, launched called Bright Lights, a free public film series, which had a very strong social justice focus, in the last few years.
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It was a not just an opportunity to see cinema, but have conversations around it.
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And so every screening had about a 45 minute conversation, and sometimes it was a filmmaker that was there to represent the film.
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Sometimes it was someone from the community.
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Sometimes it had something to do with the subject of the film, but it was an opportunity for.
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Students, faculty, staff, alumni, to gather in this space with folks in the community, and to have these conversations.
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And, this screening of Israelism was originally planned for, November 9th, 2023.
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And, I had received.
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email from someone on the board of trustees very concerned about the film being, biased addressed the concerns and was told, that it was okay for me to screen the film.
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I'd never had any interference in my program before.
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And then, and that was prior to October 7th, and of course, everything changed after October 7th.
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And, my job was threatened.
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and so I was made to postpone the film to, February 1st, 2024.
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That was the first.
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uh, opportunity that I'd be allowed to screen the film.
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And still all the things that, that the president of the college had threatened, came to pass the college publicly disavowed the screening.
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I was told I had to have an undercover police officer there, and then I was told, and this is when I, if, I tried to screen in the fall that my program would be quote unquote revisited in the future.
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And so they revisited last summer and decided to cancel my program.
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My relationship with students, prior to, to the encampment was really students who worked in the cinema, students who took trips with me to Sundance or South by Southwest or Camden, or students in the class that I taught.
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And so it wasn't until students were arrested 13 students outside of the president's, inauguration, in March of 2024.
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and that had never happened on campus before.
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and so it was a real shock when, 13 students arrested.
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So I was working from home in Providence and I drove up to Boston to be there, when the students were released.
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And so that was the beginning of my relationship with the student activists and the sort of trust that was built there.
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And then, yeah, so when they started the encampment, I was there for half of its 80 hours doing things like helping a take out the trash to make sure there weren't tons of rats and managing donations that came in and making sure that people got food while it was hot, and food that was perishable got thrown out.
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And all the stuff that I'm now doing with food, not bombs, but, but yeah, and I, and this is something that I, had wanted to speak to, and it's something that sort of comes across in these interviews is the way that, faculty and staff support for students is being twisted into, or being.
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Characterize or framed as that we are exerting undue influence on these students that we are somehow leading them rather than we are following them and supporting them in their movement.
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I think that's such a, like when they talk about indoctrination, that's such, showing their hand of Oh, we don't think students can think for themselves.
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we don't think young people can think for themselves.
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So I definitely, definitely see that and I think that's gonna resonate with a lot of people.
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Okay.
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So cut to, March?
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how did you, come to this project,
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Yeah.
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it was really disappointing the ways in which that academic year unmasked people at the institution, and I know that unmasking is continuing, right?
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As these attacks are only escalating, on college campuses.
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And I was lucky enough to find the folks who were aligned and willing to take action, whether they be students, faculty, staff, alumni, folks in the community.
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And I wanted to have a, an even larger network, and connect with more folks across the country who, Who were willing to do things, were willing to take risks, who, lived their values.
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And I think the, I'm trying to remember where I was connected to Eli Meyerhoff from the Center for Direct, for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
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He's one of the fellows.
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and he told me about this network, the Palestine Anti-Repression Network, a group of educators.
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so some are faculty, staff, graduate students, folks who are K to 12 teachers.
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And so I got involved last fall with the group, and it's now grown to over 50 members, so probably doubled in size since I, I joined.
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There had been a continuing conversation wanting to document these stories and to share them out.
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my background is in documentary filmmaking and so it was naturally something that I was really interested in, I wanted for folks to get a sense of who these faculty are.
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their areas of expertise, their scholarship.
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I wanted for them to hear about.
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what they were all facing.
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and I think that there's, there's, this is only a small sampling.
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It's 10 people, but you can start to see, the similarities.
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You can start to see where the attacks are coming from, either internally to the institution or external.
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and then I think even in the cases where some of these stories are public, it isn't always in their words with their framing.
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And so it was really important to hear from them, both what people faced as well as.
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You know what they're doing now, what the, what, they're life beyond these institutions and what they're trying to do to us.
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what we need now in particular is for everyone to be loud Solidarity is something that you have to shout from the rooftops.
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if everybody who believed in their heart, you know that this was the right thing to do, believed in their heart that what's happening is wrong.
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Did something about it.
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we'd be in a very d different position right now.
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I'm thinking about when I send this, podcast episode or when I send the YouTube links to my friends who are not directly impacted, Or feel that they are not directly impacted by this conversation.
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and they feel like, oh my God, all the news that I hear is so overwhelming.
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There's this fire hose of just like awful, awful things that I have to hear about every day.
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Why should they listen?
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why do they need to hear these stories?
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Because education is important to the fabric of our society.
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And, and I, and I understand that it is overwhelming and terrible right now, the op, the options then really are to shut down, which is not a real option, or to find where you can put your energy, what can you affect, with your skills, with your heart, with your lived experience, I think it's important to, to care about.
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All of the ways that the fabric of our society is being stretched and torn and frayed and find somewhere to put your energy towards repair.
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so I think what this has.
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Reinforced for me, this project is what AAUP and of course, other unions have always known, is that we're stronger together, not just as faculty, as students, staff and alumni, but as workers and learners.
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and we have to see through the ways that these institutions try to divide us.
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One of the things that's.
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Both so powerful about the movement for Palestine on campuses and such a threat to the power of these institutions, the administrators, is the way that we were all working together.
00:09:09.845 --> 00:09:12.085
So I'd been at Emerson at 17 years.
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I'd never seen anything like that where students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members We're all in that very small alleyway at Emerson College.
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and the folks who had more privilege, the tenure faculty naturally used their privilege to, to support those with less privilege at the institution.
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And it was just a really organic movement.
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It was just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
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what I hope that people will take away from this is that, that we all don't have to take, we don't have to all put our bodies on the line.
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we don't all have to take.
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Big risks, but we have to take risks and I think this is what listening to these stories, recording these stories has really been, I.
00:10:02.261 --> 00:10:05.778
Has been giving me some hope and I hope that it, it does that for other people.
00:10:07.398 --> 00:10:08.238
Thank you, Anna.
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We'll now hear from Michelle DeGraff, a distinguished scholar of linguistics who teaches at MIT and has graciously shared his voice as part of the faculty on the front lines project.
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My name is Michel DeGraff, and I've been teaching at MIT Linguistics since 1996.
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That's 29 years ago.
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And it, it, it's, it was so exciting to come to MIT, uh, to be teaching alongside pillars of the field such as Noam Chomsky.
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Uh, it also exciting to be part of this department, and for the past 29, well, let's say 27 years.
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Uh, before 23, I had a dream, career at MIT doing.
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what I felt was really important work and my expertise is language and power and the politics of linguistics and how we can use language towards liberation, uh, language for decolonization.
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In fact, in 2021, I offered a special topic seminar on that very topic.
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It was titled.
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Linguistics and social justice.
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And there we had guest speakers from the Caribbean, from Mexico, uh, talking about Ireland, about Seychelles, Mauritius, Australia, Zealand.
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It was an amazing seminar.
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Then October happened, October seven happened, and after I saw firsthand the ways in which language is being weaponized.
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Uh, to create fog around the war on Gaza.
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I felt that given my expertise and also given the fact that someone like Noam Choky at MIT had seen such a, a powerful voice for a free Palestine, I thought it was, it, it was a moment for linguists to shine and to, and to, uh, put a light on the misuse of language for power from Congress to, uh, to Tel Aviv.
00:12:05.918 --> 00:12:14.773
So I offered this course, this seminar, a special topic seminar on language and linguistics in decolonization, inhibition, struggle.
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And, and the goal was to examine the use of, of language for, for power.
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And, and I was shocked that instead of welcoming such a proposal, especially thinking of Noam Chomsky's legacy in the field this, this powerful voice for Palestine.
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My colleagues, uh.
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Scrutinize this proposal beyond what I have experienced.
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However, in 2021, my proposal was approved within a couple of days.
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In 2024, the proposal on in my area of expertise on the topic that was so urgent, uh, the war on Gaza, I was told that I lacked expertise to teach about my area of interest in the context of Israel and Palestine.
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And eventually the course was rejected.
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Uh, but given my career, given my conviction as a linguist activist, I thought that I had to fight this censorship.
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The fact is that two years before my department head had complimented me for my, for my engaging linguistics towards social change, uh, pressing problems of the world through language and linguistics.
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Uh, so what I did then is push back as hard as I could.
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Against that censorship against the decision.
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And, and at the same time, I also adapted in transforming this rejected seminar into a speaker series where I invited, uh, professors, experts from, from actually two of them, from Israel, from a very variety of, um, universities.
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All uh, looking at the use of language linguistics in But Itan Israel around the issues of domination versus liberation.
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And, and I felt that it was one of the most successful seminars I ever taught it.
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Certainly one that engaged in the real pressing issue that that has to be solved.
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Um, the genocide in, Gaza, and, and meanwhile, while I was still pushing.
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For my colleagues to accept, uh, this as a real course.
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I wrote essays in matic in the MITC newspaper, the tech, uh, in, in Newsweek, in Chronicle of higher education.
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In, I give an interview there and I wrote a piece inside higher ed, and then I, I was penalized for doing so.
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I was penalized for ex exercising my freedom speech for writing email to colleagues and writing essays to contest the censorship against.
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My academic freedom, my freedom of speech, and, and eventually the Dean of SHASS, the School of Humanities Art and Social Sciences, he, he cut my salary, he removed my pay raise.
00:14:54.793 --> 00:14:59.773
Uh, I was kicked out of my department of 28 years.
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I was removed into a position called faculty at large that I never knew of before I was transferred, um, to, to shas at the fact at large.
00:15:09.793 --> 00:15:13.677
Um, and, and recently again, I proposed the same course.
00:15:13.677 --> 00:15:19.227
It was rejected, and I'm still out of my department and I'm, I've been accused of misconduct.
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I've been accused of harassment, I've been accused of, of creating, um, disturbances in the department or because of wanting to teach about Palestine.
00:15:29.513 --> 00:15:33.312
So if I never proposed a course on Palestine, I would've still have.
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A very rosy career in linguistics.
00:15:36.133 --> 00:15:42.312
So I'm paying a very heavy price because of the Palestine exception, but, but I'm still fighting.
00:15:42.312 --> 00:16:03.623
So I, I feel that given my career for the past, almost three decades now, given that my career has been built around the study of language and power, and given what's happening today, given, uh, the way that we see that language has been, has become a weapon, uh, to create fog around the War on Gaza.
00:16:03.623 --> 00:16:07.033
We have to keep, uh, fighting.
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We have to keep pushing to defend academic freedom and our freedom of speech.
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That's it for this special episode of A A UP Presents Academic Freedom.
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On the line, you'll find links to the rest of the testimonies recorded for Anna Federer's faculty on the Front Lines project in the show notes for this episode, please consider your homework to go watch these videos and please do follow Anna's advice.
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We can't all do the same things, but we can all do something.
