In January of this year, Maura Finkelstein, a tenured associate professor at Muhlenberg College, temporarily reposted on Instagram a statement from a Palestinian American poet. Months later, a faculty and staff committee recommended firing her over that post, she said.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” the post read, according to Finkelstein. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide-loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat-out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
A week after that post, the college suspended Finkelstein from campus and teaching amid alleged student complaints about an Oct. 12 class discussion and the Instagram repost, according to Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the American Association of University Professors’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance, who’s advocating for Finkelstein.
Finkelstein’s Instagram post wasn’t her first statement on Israel that drew controversy. In October, a Change.org petition authored by “Muhlenberg College Alumni and Supporters” called for her removal. The Intercept, which first reported on her firing Thursday, said she “was the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators—as well as local news outlets and politicians.” And it reported that shortly before Finkelstein’s Instagram post, the provost told Finkelstein there had been a complaint filed against the college with the U.S. Education Department, and it referenced her.
Faculty speech related to Israel and Palestine has faced heightened scrutiny since the Oct. 7 outbreak of war, with some faculty members being suspended and nontenured faculty losing their jobs. All the while, groups representing faculty and academic freedom advocates have sounded the alarm about how that crackdown and scrutiny threatens academic freedom.
A tenured professor losing their job would be an escalation. Finkelstein, who is Jewish, told Inside Higher Ed on Thursday that her case sets a “terrifying precedent” for academic freedom.
“If I can be fired for criticizing a foreign government, calling attention to a genocide and using my academic expertise as an anthropologist to draw attention to how power operates, then no one is safe,” she wrote in an email. “I wasn’t fired for anything I said in the classroom. I was fired because of a charge brought by a student I had never met, let alone taught, who had been surveying my social media account for months. This isn’t about student safety, this is about silencing dissent. We are witnessing a new McCarthyism and we should all be terrified of its implications.”
Muhlenberg fired Finkelstein in May, Finkelstein said, but she didn’t go public until the Intercept article, which called her the first tenured professor to lose her job over pro-Palestine speech. Major academic freedom advocacy groups say this is the first case they’ve heard of that shows a tenured faculty member being fired for pro-Palestine or pro-Israel statements. Like Finkelstein, those groups are worried about the precedent set by Muhlenberg’s decision.
But Finkelstein isn’t done fighting her dismissal. She’s appealed and is working with lawyers to explore her options. While she appeals the decision, Finkelstein is receiving salary and benefits but not teaching.
Still Awaiting a Hearing
It’s not supposed to be easy to fire a tenured professor. The AAUP’s recommended best practices call for due process, a system of appeals and faculty input on their peers’ conduct.
In Finkelstein’s case, a confidential panel of faculty and staff members received a lengthy investigative report, prepared by an outside party, and then recommended firing her, she said. Levy said the panel cited only Finkelstein’s Instagram repost in determining Finkelstein was responsible for bias-related conduct. Finkelstein added that there was a “308-page investigative report,” but the panel determined the “single Instagram repost on my personal social media account was ‘chronic and pervasive’ behavior.”
The provost concurred with the firing, and the college fired Finkelstein at the end of May, Levy said. Finkelstein appealed under an equal opportunity policy but, last week, an external appeals officer working for Pennsylvania-based TNG, a risk management consulting firm, rejected the appeal, Levy said. TNG didn’t return requests for comment Thursday.
The college’s faculty handbook says there’s another appeal process available to Finkelstein through the Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee. But Levy, in a letter sent to Muhlenberg president Kathleen Harring this week, said “almost four months after having been notified of her dismissal, [Finkelstein] has yet to be afforded that process.”
None of the five members of the Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee, all of whom are faculty members themselves, responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday. Levy’s letter said the AAUP is sending a “committee of inquiry composed of three AAUP consultants” to Allentown, Pa., where the private college is located, to investigate “the issues posed by Professor Finkelstein’s case.”
Muhlenberg didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview Thursday, and officials instead sent the same response they gave to the AAUP’s letter.
“The college is committed to and upholds the tenets of academic freedom, tenure and due process as set forth in the [AAUP’s] 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” the letter said. “Also, as you know, the college treats matters of this nature as confidential. Please note that there are several statements in the letter that are not factually accurate and that the letter does not accurately reflect the status of the confidential proceedings in this matter, which are ongoing.”
The college didn’t specify which statements in the AAUP letter were incorrect or how the proceedings were still ongoing.
‘Incredibly Disturbing’
Since the Oct. 7 attack, the AAUP has worried about scholars being punished for their “extramural” speech, a lack of due process for faculty members who face punishment and a conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
Finkelstein’s case checks all three boxes.
The AAUP’s policies call for faculty members who are facing termination to first be given a hearing in front of an elected faculty body, where the institution’s administration bears the burden of demonstrating to the committee just cause for firing. But at Muhlenberg, Levy said, the Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee can choose not to offer any hearing—and even if one is now offered, it would come well after Finkelstein’s firing.
Also, Levy said, the AAUP believes “extramural speech rarely bears upon the faculty member’s fitness for their position.” Furthermore, she said the case involves “the apparent equivalence of criticisms of the policies of the state of Israel with harassment and discrimination under equal opportunity policies”—an equivalence that has negative implications for professors’ ability to teach about Israel’s history, policies and actions.
Levy said this is the first instance AAUP has heard of a tenured faculty member being fired for pro-Palestine or pro-Israel speech. (She said AAUP hasn’t heard of firings of even nontenured faculty for supporting Israel.)
Graham Piro, the faculty legal defense fund fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said his organization also hadn’t heard before of a tenured faculty member being fired over pro-Palestine or pro-Israel speech.
“It’s incredibly disturbing; it does not bode well for tenure,” Piro said. He said FIRE is also looking into the situation.
“Tenure can’t just be thrown away because the public gets angry about something an academic says,” he said.
In an email, Kristen Shahverdian, program director for campus free speech at PEN America, said, “This case is the first that we have heard of of a tenure-track professor being fired for pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli speech.”
“The principle of academic freedom is meant to afford professors protection for their public, extramural comments—even when some find what they say deeply offensive,” Shahverdian said. “Public and private colleges alike should be doubling down on protecting the academic freedom of their faculty members in this time of deepening polarization—not outright firing them for social media posts.”