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Source: The Chis Hedges Report
The End of Academic Freedom (w/ Maura Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report
By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
The gutting of public funding for higher education in the United States has led to the takeover of universities by private donors, many of whom are Zionist entities and billionaires. As a result, universities have become, as guest Dr. Maura Finkelstein calls them, “banks and real estate development companies that offer classes.”
As demonstrated by Finkelstein’s story, this new paradigm of higher education has pushed aside democratic values and academic freedom. In January 2024, as a result of a McCarthyist-style crackdown on pro-Palestinian faculty, Finkelstein was fired from her position as a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College. Her dismissal followed a farcical Department of Education investigation, making her one of the latest victims in the purge of dissenters against the Zionist narrative.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Finkelstein explains how Muhlenberg reached this point of seemingly no return and how it serves as an example of how universities nationwide are capitulating to the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech with regard to the genocide in Gaza.
From the increasing pressures from Zionist campus organizations like Hillel International to the constant monitoring and surveillance of those sympathetic to the Palestinian plight on social media, Finkelstein and host Chris Hedges make clear the walls are closing in on American education and democracy itself.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Dr. Maura Finkelstein, a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College, was fired in January 2024 — solely because of one anti-Zionist repost on Instagram — after being trolled for months by Zionists on social media. Zionists, including students and alumni at the college, denounced her “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” Finkelstein, who is Jewish, was attacked online as a self-hating Jew, a Nazi and a Kapo. Her detractors posted that her family must be ashamed of her, that her mother should have aborted her, that she would soon lose her job and that “we’re watching you.” A Change.org petition, with some 8,000 signers, called for her termination. It posted screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only,” below which she had written “Free Gaza, free Palestine, stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli and American war machines.” In another, on Oct. 26, she wrote, “ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITS OCCUPATION.” The petition prompted The Department of Education to launch an investigation into Muhlenberg.
The firing of Finkelstein is an ominous threat to academic freedom. It signals that there is no protection, even tenure, for those who oppose not only the genocide, but the state sanctioned narrative. Those without tenure, who form the vast majority of university faculties, have even less job security. The assault is built around the specious argument that support for Palestinians rights is a form of antisemitism, even if you are Jewish. It is designed, of course, not to root out antisemitism but silence the left, liberals and crush all dissenting voices.
Finkelstein is not alone. Over 3,000 university students were arrested, most during the Biden administration, on college campuses. Student activists, along with faculty and administrators, have been expelled. Middle Eastern departments have been gutted, closed or put into receivership. This witch hunt, foolishly given credibility by university administrators eager to curry favor with their rightwing critics and the Trump administration has led the White House to withdraw $11 billion in research funding. Harvard alone stands to lose $2 billion. The Trump administration is seeking to revoke student visas from many of the 1.1 million foreign students in the U.S. It is threatening to also revoke nonprofit status from universities such as Harvard and withdraw accreditation from Columbia University, despite Columbia’s capitulating to every demand made by the Trump administration.
Joining me to discuss this wholesale assault on academic freedom and its consequences is Dr. Maura Finkelstein. Professor Finkelstein, who received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai. Her essays have been published by Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera.
Let’s just lay out what happened to you. And I think one of the things that’s so disturbing to many of us is what they used, which was just slander, unsubstantiated slander, to terminate your tenured position. So just walk us through that process.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Chris. It’s a real honor to be here. So I think there’s two ways or there’s two intersecting threads to the story. I think one is the way that these online spaces create and facilitate slander, smears, attacks, doxing, harassment. And I think there’s also the way that these institutions are utilizing those attacks, if not partnering with them to take those attacks to an institutional level and actually shut down folks who are speaking out about genocide.
So with my case, what happened was, like so many people, I was teaching about Palestine before October 7th, 2023, before the al-Aqsa Flood. I had a class that I taught that was about Palestine. I included Palestine in all of my classes.
Well, this was a big concern to Hillel International and the Hillel chapter on Muhlenberg’s campus, which is, for folks who don’t know, a student organization that claims to be the center for Jewish life on campus, but is actually a Zionist organization with direct ties to Israel.
Chris Hedges
They’re largely controlled by AIPAC, having run into the Hillel House myself.
Maura Finkelstein
Very much so. Yeah, they became partners with AIPAC about a decade and a half ago, I believe. And they’ve been part of the larger Zionist movement to shut down all support for Palestine on campuses. So Hillel had been monitoring me, students had been calling for boycotts of my classes.
Chris Hedges
Let me just interrupt you. When you say monitoring you, that often means putting students in your classroom to essentially report back to them. Is that how they were monitoring you?
Maura Finkelstein
You know, I hear so many stories about how that happens, especially to my Palestinian colleagues. That’s been happening for decades now. What actually was happening with me was slightly different. They were aware that I was talking, speaking, writing about Palestine. I had brought a Palestinian speaker to campus.
And so instead of actually infiltrating my classes, they called for a boycott of the class. So students were bullied into not taking my classes. I heard from anti-Zionist Jewish students who needed a Jewish space on campus and so were part of Hillel, but were told that if they took my classes or spoke to me or engaged me that they would not be welcomed in Hillel.
So it was kind of the opposite, which made my classes slightly smaller, but also meant that for the students who took my classes, we didn’t have the constant disruption and bullying and threats that so many faculty who teach about Palestine have experienced and are experiencing now.
But what happened after October 7th is that I had a Zionist student in both of my classes who was part of Hillel. He’s actually since moved to Israel and joined the Israeli military as far as I know. And he filed a complaint against a class that I taught on October 12th, in which I gave my students space to ask questions about what was happening. And that set off a series of events that began with Muhlenberg students and alumni with ties through Hillel attacking me on social media.
And so the school started investigating my classes. That didn’t go anywhere. They started investigating my publications. That didn’t go anywhere. And in late November, there were concerns about my social media. And that led to a couple investigations in November and December that didn’t really go anywhere. I mean, I was barred from my office for a week, I had to move my classroom.
There were things that the college was doing to protect Hillel students and disrupt my job. But nothing really stuck in terms of a formal investigation until right after the Department of Education released their investigation into, I think at the time it was like 90 some schools, Muhlenberg was on it. And within days, there was a formal complaint filed both by the college and by a student in Hillel leadership who I still to this day have never met.
I mean, I’ve never taught the student, met the student, encountered the student. And it was a complaint about this one Instagram post that I did not write. The Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi wrote it. I reposted it in my stories. And the complaint was brought forward. And this was one of the earlier Title VI investigations that was making the argument that Zionist is a protected class, like race, ethnicity.
And so that was the argument that was made by the college. And what I learned later through the investigation is that the director of Hillel, the Israel fellow at Hillel, so this is a former Israeli soldier who was brought on to American colleges and universities through Hillel in order to encourage students to create a relationship with Israel, perhaps move there, perhaps join the military, that these two staff members had actually started a WhatsApp group with Hillel students.
And they were monitoring my social media. They were screenshotting everything I posted, which was a lot, and sending these images to students with the argument that my posts were so dangerous and violent and so hurtful to students that what they must do is show them to the students and encourage the students to file complaints and that’s what led to the official investigation into me over this one post.
Chris Hedges
Well, the Department of Education, I believe, only cited one social media post. Is that correct?
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, that’s correct. Well, yes, there were actually two. So one of the things that happens when you read through these reports is that it becomes very clear that a lot of the complaints that were lodged against colleges and universities were from figures outside the colleges and universities who are not part of the college or university community, weren’t taking classes, weren’t on campus.
And they’re very thin and very similar complaints. So I think there were five of those that were really clearly not from Muhlenberg. One of the complaints was a post that I made that 17 students at Hillel filed a complaint about in November and that investigation was dropped. And then, you know, that ended up in the Department of Education report.
And then the one post that ended up being what I was investigated for, this Remi Kanazi post. That was also in the Department of Education report. So there were two that were actually based on real social media posts and the rest were completely fabricated.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about the administration of these colleges. They have just surrendered completely with almost no exceptions. Maybe Wesleyan is one, or Union Theological Seminary, but you can count them on one hand. And I think that’s very frightening for those of us who spent eight years at a university, probably spent close to that as well or more doing your doctorate.
But it’s terrifying because having covered despotic regimes, that last readout of free speech and self-criticism and dissent is always usually on those university campuses. And when that’s shut down, it’s extremely ominous for where a country goes. But let’s talk about the decision on the part of the administrators of Muhlenberg and other universities to essentially sacrifice you, I think, vainly.
They’re not reading power. This isn’t a discussion of good faith. It’s about shutting down pluralism and other voices and the left and even liberals. But let’s talk about in your own case specifically, and then the broader sort of response on the part of those who are running universities and colleges across the United States.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, thanks for that question. So in terms of Muhlenberg, I think Muhlenberg College is a really good example of all of the problems that we’re seeing in higher ed in the United States right now. So it’s a small private college. It’s almost entirely tuition and donor run.
It’s been financially struggling since I was hired, if not, you know, for years before. There have been hiring freezes, have been pay cut freezes, the enrollments are down. So these small colleges are really struggling and the only way they can survive in addition to tuition, which just keeps going higher and higher and higher and student loan debt is an absolute disaster. But the other way that they can survive is through private donors.
And one of the things that Muhlenberg has done over the past few decades is really relied on certain private donors, many of whom are Zionist, one of them being Hillel International, to help shape the character and identity of the school. So Muhlenberg is known and very proud and, you know, Hillel Muhlenberg on their website claims that it’s a safe space for Zionists.
It’s about 33% Jewish as far as I know the last numbers, which puts it in the top four percentage wise in terms of Jewish population schools in the US. And almost all of those students are recruited through Hillel. And so you have students coming onto campus who are really committed to the Zionist agenda of an organization like Hillel and they really want to be part of a Jewish community. And so what that means is that if Muhlenberg wants to survive as an institution, it needs to make these donors happy.
It needs to make these tuition paying students happy. And so while I have no sympathy for the administration, I think when you have those stakeholders want someone like me gone and threaten to pull financial support, make sure that Jewish students are not coming to this campus, you know, it puts administrators in a bind. Do they support actually the sort of fundamental investment of a school, which is education, which is free thought, which is the ability to engage hard ideas, or do they bend to their donors?
And in the case of Muhlenberg, they bent to their donors, the chair of the board of trustees is also a Zionist, his wife is Israeli, there’s a lot of investment in this. And the entire time that I taught at Muhlenberg, I was aware of this chilling Zionist climate. I thought that I was safe and protected because of my own identity. That turned out to be false. But you know, for years, many of the faculty I know who perhaps are not Zionists or are committed to Palestinian liberation would never utter the word Palestine on campus.
They were too scared to do that. They were afraid they were going to lose their jobs. And I think what Muhlenberg and what my case sort of illustrates is the fact that higher ed is so broken in this country. We have no robust public education. We have schools like Columbia that if anything, they’re banks and real estate development companies that offer classes.
And so you see these administrators becoming more and more business oriented and less education and research oriented and more invested in ensuring that they exist in a space of capital accumulation and less in terms of being spaces of learning and education.
So I think that my case reveals the crisis in higher ed, but of course a school like Muhlenberg and a school like Columbia are entirely different financial models. And yet both schools are capitulating to Zionist censorship.
Chris Hedges
When I interviewed Katherine Franke, the law professor who stood up for the physical assaults against students, many of whom of course were Jewish, who were protesting the genocide, she very quickly said in the interview that it wasn’t just outside forces, it wasn’t just the Trump administration, but the trustee board of Columbia itself that was perpetuating, and this is the point that you just made, and of course, even at a place like Columbia with its massive endowment or Harvard with its $54 million endowment, these administrators, many of whom are increasingly drawn from the corporate world, they’re not academics, and then of course give themselves these staggering salaries of half a million dollars a year while 75% of faculty are now contingent or adjuncts, making slave wages.
But they don’t work for the schools. I think this is the point you’re making, they don’t work. They work for these trustee boards, which is about accumulating wealth and increasing or protecting the endowment solely.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the question that we need to be asking in higher ed, not just in terms of censorship and this chilling right-wing move that is anti-equity, anti-diversity, etc, etc. But also, where is the money going? So for transparency, I was a tenured professor who’s chair of my department. I made $80,000 a year. So that’s $50,000 a year that I was taking home.
It’s not a lot of money considering I worked for two decades in my field, but you’re having administrators at Muhlenberg who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re having administrators at Columbia who are making millions of dollars. And so these are people who have a lot to lose.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about the way Title IX and Title VI have been weaponized. You know, so much of what’s happened in this country is, I mean, the constitutional rights have just been inverted by judicial fiat.
And this is just another example of mechanisms that were created to protect minority or vulnerable groups. And they were weaponized against you. They’ve been weaponized against those who dissent from the dominant narrative. Can you talk about that?
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, absolutely. So the way it works at a small college like Muhlenberg is that there is a Title IX office.
Chris Hedges
Maybe we should just explain what they both are for people who don’t know.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, so Title IX and Title VI are these laws that are basically protecting vulnerable communities on campus that might be marginalized, pushed out, discriminated against because of racism, sexism, et cetera. So Title IX has become, I mean, it’s many things, but it’s become the office on campus where gender and sex-based discrimination is handled.
And so anyone who has followed the rampant crisis with sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus knows that Title IX is actually more about protecting institutions than it is about protecting students and faculty and staff who have experienced harm. And Title VI from the Title VI Civil Rights Act protects against discrimination against race, ethnicity, et cetera. And religion has been brought into that in large part thanks to President Trump’s last term.
And so at a small college like Muhlenberg, there’s a Title IX office and Title VI is handled within it. And what we’re seeing across the country is that Title VI is being weaponized, and this is not new, I mean this has been ongoing for over a decade, but Title VI is being weaponized by Zionists to make the argument that any criticism of Israel, any criticism of Zionism is actually anti-Semitic, that Zionist is a protected class, that any anti-Zionist speech, any pro-Palestine speech, any call for Palestinian liberation is akin to anti-Semitism.
And, you know, we can look across our institutions to see the way that that is either being officially embraced, whether it be through the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, or whether it be something like Muhlenberg in which I was investigated for anti-Semitism because of my anti-Zionist political speech. So the thing about Title IX and Title VI, is that when there is a Title VI or Title IX violation, these violations are sort of lifted outside of the normal functions of a college and university, which in the case of a faculty member like me, would be through faculty governance.
So what should have happened is that there had been a complaint against me, a committee of faculty members whose job is to actually hear my case and decide whether or not there’s a legitimate case and whether I should be investigated, punished or acquitted based on the complaint.
That should have been the first thing that happened. It would have been transparent. It would have been following the faculty handbook, which are rules that were outlined by the American Association of University Professors. And when these complaints, especially around Zionism and criticism of Israel are being brought forward and college and university administrators are pushing them into these Title IX or Title VI proceedings immediately, they become confidential.
They are moved outside of faculty governance. They basically become this black box. And what I experienced last year is a just complete and utter secrecy to the point in which every time I would talk to a colleague about what was going on, I would get a threatening message from the Title IX office telling me that I was violating the terms of the investigation, that I was compromised in the investigation, et cetera, et cetera.
And so when I’ve been talking to faculty, staff, and students who are being brought into these processes of investigating anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine speech and activities, what they’re facing is signing NDAs, being sworn to secrecy, existing within these processes and procedures that have no transparency at all.
And what I learned through my investigation and what I’ve learned through talking to other folks is that especially last summer, college and university administrators across the country sort of organized policies and procedures that could actually circumnavigate these established forms of governance in order to take control and basically censor speech on campus.
So there’s been this very chilling silencing that has everything to do with the sort of normal functions of a college and university, which is not perfect, but has its reasonings being controlled by administrators who are looking to get rid of students, get rid of faculty and get rid of staff who are threatening the Zionist agenda of the institution.
Chris Hedges
But of course, going after people who denounce the genocide or challenge Zionism as just a mechanism to essentially shut down the left, shut down even liberal dissent, because those people who take those kinds of stances generally don’t come from the right, and they generally have a conscience. I want to talk about what this has done to the universities.
Ellen Schrecker, the historian of McCarthyism, said that what’s happening now is far worse. Because during McCarthyism, were purges of faculty, people who were charged for having links to the Communist Party, whether they did or not. You had, of course, rippling through Hollywood and I.F. Stone and all these figures.
But she said this time around, they’re not just going after figures like you. They’re reconfiguring the institutions themselves. They are deforming the institutions in a way that’s far more egregious than what happened in the 1950s despite the fact that faculty had to take loyalty oaths and this kind of stuff. I don’t know if you agree with that and if you can comment on it.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, I do agree with that. And I think one of the things that I am seeing is that there are two powerful stakeholders in this movement. One is the Zionist, the Jewish Zionist bloc. And one is the sort of Christian nationalist, Christian Zionist right-wing movement, like the Heritage Foundation who now are working in partnership with each other to not just go after those of us who are condemning genocide and condemning Israel and condemning Zionism and speaking up for Palestinian liberation, but also they’re going after DEI.
They’re going after gender and sexuality studies. They’re going after ethnic studies. So I think what we’re seeing that is so scary is that these institutions, these colonial institutions that have particular forms of hierarchy that have particular forms of exclusion, they’ve become a little bit more liberal. They’ve become a little bit more inclusive. And that’s created great disruptions over the past few decades on college and university campuses. So I think what I’m so concerned about amongst many things is the way that administrations are allowing for these very, very, very conservative anti-equity Zionist white supremacist organizations to sort of pressure college and university administrators to not just silence people like me, but also close their DEI offices, cancel their trans studies programs, cancel their ethnic studies programs, close their Middle East studies programs.
And I think this is actually what a lot of administrators want, especially because they’re coming from the business world. We don’t have complacent campuses. We have much more diversity. We have folks who are coming from very, very, different life experiences than what has traditionally been the university student body, faculty body, staff body. And that’s really challenged the way these institutions are run. So I think we’re seeing this sort of large scale crackdown on the left, on liberals, on inclusion, on diversity.
And I think that’s also what’s so different about the McCarthy years as well. And this is Saree Makdisi’s argument that it’s not just, I mean, we can talk about the way that the US and Israel interests are entangled, but it’s not even about protecting American interests, it’s about protecting Israeli interests, this foreign country.
And so I think because these forms of silencing and institutional violence are coming from all of these different directions, it feels like this perfect storm. But I do think that it’s evidence of how the right has been so successful over the past few decades of just transforming these conversations around diversity, inclusion, equity, et cetera into narratives of anti-Semitism.
And when we talk a lot about the Heritage Foundation Report Project Esther that came out last year, but in 2021, the Heritage Foundation had a report called Inclusion Delusion, where they basically argued based on social media that staff members in DEI offices were anti-Semitic and did not support Israel and therefore wouldn’t support Jewish students and called for a dismantling of DEI because of that. And so we’re seeing these very successful campaigns sort of come to fruition in this moment.
Chris Hedges
And since you raised it, let’s talk about the Esther report, which is pretty chilling.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah. I think one of the things that I am thinking the most about, I mean
Chris Hedges
We should explain what it was.
Maura Finkelstein
So on October 7th, 2024, the Heritage Foundation released a report and I’m trained as a social scientist and I think that this is really dark, dangerous times, but also anytime I want to feel good about my social science research skills, I read a Heritage Foundation report and it’s really bad research. But they put forth a report called Project Esther in which they argued that a shadowy and non-existent Hamas support network or HSN, this sort of like international movement of folks on the left, who supported Palestine, who are invested in anti-colonial theory, Jewish Voices for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, sort of all of these different kinds of organizing and thinking on the left were part of this international conspiracy and that it was undermining democracy, it was trying to destroy capitalism, which for the record sounds great to me.
And that this needs to be the sort of greatest concern in fighting anti-Semitism. It called for an anti-Semitism task force. These were of course all Christian nationalists, Christian Zionists. And I can’t speak with any real authority, but I’m sure that this report helped lead to Trump’s executive order that is now disappearing students, especially Palestinian students who are speaking up for Palestine and against Israel.
And what I think is so dangerous about the Project Esther report, aside from the fact that the Trump administration has used it for very, very violent means, is that it deflects away from the fact that there are actually these sort of international organizations that are compromising American interests, that are dividing loyalty, but they’re not coming from the left, they’re coming from the right, they’re coming from Zionist organizations.
The student who brought the case against me in terms of the post that got me fired is in leadership with the Israel Leadership Network, the ILN, which is a very real organization that Hillel International started with in partnership with the Israeli government in order to train American college students how to defend Israel and shut down criticism of Israel and support for Palestine on campus.
So you actually do have these movements, but this shadowy Hamas support network doesn’t exist and not only does it not exist, it’s being used to free ICE to disappear our vulnerable students who are fighting for justice in Palestine and criticizing an ongoing genocide.
Chris Hedges
This is [Richard] Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” where all of the things these proto-fascists do, they project onto their opponents. But of course, for them, it’s quite real. What’s this done to American education? I look at it as a real body blow to everything you and I care about.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think that it’s pretty depressing to think about how higher ed in the US is going to recover from this and what the future of higher ed looks like. I mean, the crisis in higher ed has been ongoing. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is startling how quickly these institutions are capitulating and crumbling.
I take a lot of comfort in student movements. take a lot of comfort in our colleagues who continue to do the work that they do bravely on campus, despite the threats and the surveillance and the suspensions. And I feel like every week I hear a new case of a faculty or staff member who is being threatened with termination, who’s being suspended. And so that is still ongoing. What I think is really terrifying is how many people I know are just quietly putting their head down and trying to do what they can without drawing attention to themselves.
They’re self-censoring, they’re afraid of surveillance, they have their beliefs, but they’re too scared to actually go into the classroom and teach their students. This is very concerning to me, and I can say this from the position of no longer having an institution that is threatening me, I’ve already gone through that.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be living with this level of threat and surveillance. But until we have a robust and comprehensive community-based movement that leads to a strike, that leads to a refusal to capitulate with the demands of the institution, I think we’re just going to see a chipping away at everything that makes these institutions valuable and worth saving.
So I feel very pessimistic about the future of higher education. And I don’t know if these institutions as they stand are even worth saving at this point. I mean, I’m a person who would love to see robust public education. I think education should be free. I think it should be inclusive. I think it should be democratic. We definitely do not have that in the United States.
And I don’t know what it would take to create that or revitalize that. But I think especially in terms of the way that the model has contributed to both the strength of private colleges and the privatization of public universities, it’s pretty hard to imagine how these institutions are going to recover and get back to, you know, the work of teaching and learning that they supposedly promise.
Chris Hedges
Well, they just become vocational and everybody majors in computer science.
Maura Finkelstein
Right or you just buy your degree, you can still pay.
Chris Hedges
Or you’re branded. Yeah. That’s what Princeton is. Sorry, Sofia. So you’re right exactly in terms of how we have to respond. But I was up with the Columbia protesters in the spring of 2024 when they had, Columbia is just under, it’s under lockdown. You can’t get into the quad, you know, they have police presence on campus.
And they said because they had shut down the encampment, they said, now we have to, precisely what you just said, that we have to call for a general strike. We have to call for university-wide strikes. Well, what happened over the summer of 2024 is that all of these universities coordinated with private security firms, many with links to Israel, to impose such draconian rules that not only could you not have encampments, you couldn’t even flyer on campus.
There was just no room anymore for any kind of dissent. And so I think two of the things that disturbed me is one, that those students who certainly correctly saw what was in front of us and were attempting to react, came back in the fall to academic gulags, and these universities made their choice, which was we are going to essentially abolish free speech. We’re going to abolish free speech on college campuses.
Maura Finkelstein
I mean, it’s scary to imagine what happens next, right? You’re a student and you’re placing yourself in massive amounts of debt. You’ve been working so hard for your degree. You’re a faculty member. You have been, I mean, I was one of these. You’ve been working for decades towards this career. You finally have it. What do you do? And we’re seeing the real material impact of this.
And I say it again and again, but once we’ve gotten to the point in which our students are being disappeared by ICE, they’re being detained, they’re being deported, that is, you know, we keep reaching these tipping points and it’s so scary that I don’t even have language to articulate it. But I also think, and I think the students have really shown us this, but I think on a larger scale, nothing’s going to change if people aren’t willing to really give up things.
I think that we’ve created a pretty, for a lot of people, especially in higher ed, it’s not upwardly mobile quite in the way that we used to think it was, but you get your professor job, it’s pretty comfortable. You get into your Ivy League school, it’s going to lead to a particular kind of future. And whatever that future was, it doesn’t really exist right now. And I think that until we see a collective movement of people who understand that at the end of the day, this is about a genocide that we’ve been watching live streamed for over 20 months.
I have, I mean, you write about this, you’ve been covering this for years and years and years. Over the past 20 months, I have seen things that I couldn’t even imagine, the most horrible things in the world being done to what I think is a safe calculation, 800,000 to a million people who have been slaughtered and 2 million people who are on the verge of starvation who are dying of illness and starvation, et cetera, et cetera.
And within that landscape, giving up a career, giving up a degree, from my perspective, it doesn’t feel like a lot to lose. It feels like a small thing to lose. And I think the sort of difficulty of living in this country right now in the U.S. and how expensive things are, how sort of unlivable everything feels, and also the way that we’re socialized into this very individual way of engaging the world and not really thinking about community care, not really thinking about collective action.
I think these things have made it really, really difficult for any kind of large scale movement. But I think until folks are really clear about the fact that we owe Gaza the risks that we can take. We owe Gaza the attention and the refusal to capitulate to authoritarian crackdowns until we see all of our lives entangled and realize that nothing changes unless we’re willing to sacrifice things. And that is different for everyone, but until we’re actually willing to lose things, I don’t think things are going to change. So I agree that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how to survive on these campuses.
And also as I watch my colleagues twist themselves into knots to try to survive within these structures. The question I keep asking myself is how bad does it have to get for you before you realize that we are all connected in the struggle and we’re experiencing it differently, but there has to be real sacrifice. And I think that that comes from the willingness to lose one’s job, the willingness to be expelled, the willingness to be suspended.
And you know, I talk to people on an individual level and there’s buy-in on an ideological level, but not on a material level. And so I think as long as that inability to imagine oneself as part of a collective and an urgency around that sort of movement and action, I don’t think things are going to change.
Chris Hedges
It’s also about integrity, dignity, salvaging. You’ve salvaged yours. I worked at the New York Times for 15 years. They bring in a lot of very talented, idealistic journalists, and then they crush them, the institution, and by the end they’re broken. And they get to still run around and say they work for the New York Times, but they’re, as [T. S.] Eliot said, hollow men and women.
And I think that’s also why I admire what these students have done so much, or what people like you and Rupa Marya and Katherine Franke and others have done. I just have two last questions. One, what has this done to your students with a conscience? And then I want to talk about how this experience has affected you personally in terms of your own reassessment, maybe even growth and having confronted the New York Times and been pushed out, it’s not easy.
It’s like you, I worked many years to get to the New York Times and be there and it was hard, it’s hard. But let’s talk about the students and then let’s just end by talking about, you know, how this experience has made you perhaps reflect on yourself and the world around you in different ways
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, thanks for that. So in terms of my students, you know, the ones that I still have a relationship with, I have a relationship with a lot of my former students, I think that when I imagine what it’s like to be a young person right now, I lived long enough that I see a great shift, but my students are young enough where they are just entering their life now and they’re entering the world.
And I think a lot of them are very scared. They’re angry. They don’t know what they’re doing, what their future looks like. But the thing that I have actually learned from them, and I’ve seen this through the encampments, I’ve seen it through talking to my former students, is that in a way that perhaps my generation didn’t, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, it was a very different time. My students are seeing connections, they’re seeing the way that, you know, what is happening in New York is, you know, reflecting what’s happening in Gaza and what’s happening in Iran is reflecting…
You know, they’re seeing these connections, they’re seeing climate collapse, they’re seeing the fact that they will probably be in debt for the rest of their life. They’re seeing that the jobs that they thought they might someday get don’t exist anymore. And on a good day, I take comfort in knowing that I had conversations with them over the years about how to see these things as interconnected.
And now I’m watching as they learn it in real time on a global level and it’s been, it gives me hope and it gives me a little sense of faith that these students who are no longer willing to accept a status quo, a very, very, very violent status quo, that’s not good for them. It’s not good for anyone that they’re actually willing to push back, to speak up, to fight. I’ve been really inspired by my students and I’ve been really honored to stay connected with a lot of them over the years and sort of see how they are paying attention, they are connected to the world.
And that makes me feel like it is possible to imagine some kind of collective action in the future that is based in community. I see my students making those connections.
Chris Hedges
And yet, Maura, they’re alienated from the very institutions that should be nurturing and forming them.
Maura Finkelstein
Yeah, and I think there’s actually something kind of inspiring about realizing that the things that they thought that they were going to buy into are not there for them. They’re not there to provide. They’re not there to lift them up, that they actually can’t look to the institution for the things that they thought they needed.
They actually have to find them with community, with organizing. And I think that that’s a really important lesson to learn because to ask, to answer your question about me, you know, I wanted to teach, I wanted to write, I wanted to travel, I wanted to continue learning throughout my life.
I thought being a college professor was the way to do that. And it was for a while. And I’m glad that I had that experience. And I don’t think that that is, especially in the United States, I don’t think the act of challenging power, thinking in particular kinds of ways, having the really important, uncomfortable conversations with our students that we need to be having is possible within American college and university spaces right now. And so if it’s not possible, I don’t want to be part of that. And so I’m fine moving on and looking for other places. But I think the thing that is really troubling in terms of what that means is that education is supposed to be uncomfortable. Learning is supposed to be uncomfortable.
And we have colleges and universities who are saying we don’t want our students to be uncomfortable, i.e. we don’t want them to feel bad about their genocidal politics, et cetera, et cetera. And so just seeing that and understanding those commitments makes me feel liberated to not be part of those institutions anymore, to not be watching my back, to not be careful about what I say or not say.
And so I can continue to write and I continue to think and have the important conversations and be constantly holding myself accountable for the spaces that I show up in and trying to continue to center liberation, center social change, center justice. And I will continue to do that wherever I am. Unfortunately, in the United States, that also requires a paycheck in order to survive. But I think on the level of the human, I feel freer being outside of the college than I ever did inside it.
And for me, the most important thing is to continue to draw attention to what is happening in Gaza and to continue to learn how to show up as a better ally and collaborator with the people that I feel like I’m in community with and I will continue to do that wherever I am.
Chris Hedges
Great, thank you, Maura. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
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