Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, N.Y., have temporarily removed a tenured professor from the classroom because of an article she wrote last week celebrating Palestinian resistance against Israel.
Jodi Dean, a professor of politics, will not teach for the rest of the semester while the private institution completes an investigation, the president announced Saturday in an email to the campus community.
Dean had published a blog post titled “Palestine speaks for everyone” on the website of Verso, a left-leaning book publisher. “As a result of Professor Dean’s comments,” Mark D. Gearan, the president, wrote, “there now may be students on our campus who feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.”
Dean’s punishment marks yet another example of conflicts over pro-Palestinian speech that have erupted on campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Many pro-Palestinian students and employees say their speech has been squelched because of donor pressures and overzealous Title VI investigations. Other students and staff members say some of the campus criticism of Israel has crossed a line into antisemitism and demands a forceful response from administrators.
In his letter, Gearan condemned Dean’s comments and underscored that while the colleges support civil discourse, “we can never and will never condone or praise violence, particularly when that violence is directed at individuals based on their religion, race, or national origin.”
A follow-up message from the provost, Sarah Kirk, was more pointed, explaining that the colleges are obligated under Title VI, a federal antidiscrimination law, to investigate potential “hostile environments” involving national origin, shared ancestry, or other protected classes.
The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened dozens of reviews of colleges’ treatment of Jewish, Muslim, and Arab students since October 7. Hobart and William Smith is not under investigation.
In the Verso piece, Dean, who could not be reached for comment, wrote that images of Palestinian paragliders crossing into Israel on October 7 “were for many of us exhilarating.” She assails leftist academics who she says have made support for Palestine conditional on their condemnation of Hamas.
“Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air?” she writes. “The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown.”
That day, militants affiliated with Hamas and other groups killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 240 hostages. Israel has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in retaliation, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The war has touched off a humanitarian emergency in Gaza, with much of its population displaced and at risk of starvation.
Critics Speak Out
Hobart and William Smith Colleges are private, so they’re not subject to the First Amendment in the same way as public institutions. Still, given the colleges’ stated commitment to academic freedom, free-expression advocates told The Chronicle that the institution should have supported Dean’s right to speak out.
Robert P. George, a professor of politics at Princeton University, said that while he found the views Dean expressed in her article appalling, the colleges’ response seemed to conflict with their own endorsement of the American Association of University Professors’ principles on academic freedom, which are included in the faculty handbook.
“None of the unprotected categories of speech are relevant here,” George said. “Jodi Dean did not threaten anybody. She did not harass anybody. She did not engage in defamation or accuse somebody of a crime falsely.”
Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer for campus-rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the colleges’ actions could have a chilling effect on speech. Many colleges don’t seem to grasp, Greenberg said, that the whole point of academic freedom is to defend professors’ speech rights when it’s difficult or unpopular to do so.
“It’d be great to talk about the weather and other benign topics,” he said, “but when it’s really a challenge, when there are these calls to punish professors for their speech, that’s when the college has to step in and say no.”
A spokeswoman for the colleges said Dean is still being paid, has access to her office, and can continue to do research. She rejected any suggestion that Dean’s academic freedom had been violated, and added that the professor had made comments similar to the controversial essay at a campus lecture on March 28.
“She has every right to write or to say whatever she wants,” the spokeswoman, Cathy Williams, told The Chronicle. “We have a right … to condemn that or to find it reprehensible.”
