We write this in the wake of the illegal arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Alireza Doroudi, and other foreign students and teaching faculty at American universities. We will call these arrests what they are: abductions by ICE cowards in plainclothes and facemasks. “We are the police,” these terrorists tell Ozturk in the video of her arrest on Tuesday. “You don’t look like the police!” the person who recorded the video yells from a window, as they strong-arm a terrified Ozturk into an unmarked car.
Ozturk is an international student pursuing a Ph.D. at Tufts University. She also co-authored an article in The Tufts Daily last March calling on her university to acknowledge Israel’s well-documented genocide in Gaza. The current Trump administration, building on the policies of the Biden administration, is hellbent on denying this genocide and silencing people like Ozturk who speak this truth.
We write from our small campus in southern New Jersey, Stockton University, a mid-size public university. We lack the prestige of Columbia and Harvard, UCLA and Tufts, but as in virtually every other institution of higher learning, we are receiving the same message: if not outright appeasement, do not make waves. Keep your heads down. Stay the course.
The course we are being asked to stay is one of silence. It’s an untenable course, even if its history is longer than most Americans want to admit, evidenced by a recent story which made the rounds on social media. The story recounted how, in 1936, Columbia University expelled a student named Robert Burke for organizing a rally outside of the university president’s mansion, in protest of the university’s close ties with Nazism. Burke, the president of his class, was never reinstated, despite 500 of his classmates rallying on his behalf in front of Hamilton Hall, and “vandal[izing]” John Jay Hall with “red paint and rolls of absorbent cotton.”
When we keep our heads down and stay the course, the fascists continue to lie, extort like the mobsters they are, and humiliate and attack whoever they add to their list of enemies.
Hamilton Hall was also the site of massive student protests at Columbia last spring. Students took over the building and renamed it “Hind’s Hall” in honor of Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl who made headlines in February 2024 after the Israeli army killed her along with the paramedics who had tried to save her. Rajab had called them after the family attempting to drive her to safety—her aunt and uncle, and her three cousins—were murdered by fire from “Israeli tanks.” Hind was hiding amongst the dead bodies of her loved ones when she was killed. Hind was one of more than at least 17,000 children that Israel has killed, so far, in its genocidal assault on Gaza since October 2023.
In late April, 2024, Hind’s Hall was taken from the students when a militarized NYPD forced their way into the building. In unashamed authoritarian fashion, the university barred journalists from the campus just before the police raid, and threatened their own student journalists with arrest. This is the same Columbia University that houses a world-renowned school of journalism, and awards the Pulitzer Prizes.
And the same Columbia University where, it was reported, the dean of that journalism school, the famed cultural critic and historian Jelani Cobb, told foreign students, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” Cobb later walked these comments back, claiming he was trying to protect foreign students by advising them, alongside his colleague Stuart Karle, to keep “commentary on the Middle East” off their social media pages. He said times such as these require a balance of “courage and caution,” with caution apparently taking the lead in that meeting, as it has taken the lead in the meetings that we, also academics, have had with the people who run our university. As Columbia’s longer history points out, institutional silence—to say nothing of institutional complicity—has long been “the course.”
But there is no appeasing an openly fascist Trump administration, for we know that no one is safe under fascism. When we keep our heads down and stay the course, the fascists continue to lie, extort like the mobsters they are, and humiliate and attack whoever they add to their list of enemies. Now it is students, like Columbia’s own Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE agents kidnapped from the Columbia-owned apartment building where he lives, his pregnant wife calling out after him: My love!
Can you hear her voice? Can you hear his, calling back to her? If not, listen carefully, for the list, we know all too well, will only grow, to include your students, your friends, your family members, perhaps also you.
If the university has become a place where our knowledge—of genocide, Palestine, racism, fascism—is a liability, then we must change the university.
Stockton University prides itself for the first MA program in an American university in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We have been teaching our students since 1998 that “Never Again” is Never Again for everyone, that they must never stay silent in the face of persecution and mass violence, that indeed silence is complicity. We have therefore spoken out about Palestine, also before October 2023, as we have about other cases. And we will continue to refuse American higher education’s attempts to silence scholars who make Palestine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza the center of their work, scholars like Dr. Steven Salaita and Dr. Maura Finkelstein, both of whom we have gratefully hosted at Stockton, and who we will host again.
The Canadian journalist Samira Moyheddin recently wrote, “First and foremost… [I speak] the truth on Palestine. Don’t stay in jobs where your knowledge is a liability. Trust me.” To those of us teaching at American colleges and universities, this has a terrifying resonance. This resonance increases every day, and must compel us to say out loud, all the time, that if the university has become a place where our knowledge—of genocide, Palestine, racism, fascism—is a liability, then we must change the university.
As the recent Emergency National Statement to University and College Presidents implores, we must “not capitulate to… the current White House administration’s alarming political campaign against institutions of higher education.” Instead, we must grow coalitions of scholars and students who refuse the “anticipatory obedience” that is currently on display all over the country and on our own campus; who refuse “the Palestine exception” to free speech and academic freedom, so powerfully outlined in the documentary film of the same name, which we screened on our campus this semester; and who refuse now the attack on research and teaching that is expanding quickly well beyond Palestine to deny and suppress settler colonial genocide in the US, the existence of trans people, the intensifying threat of global warming, and the simple scientific truth that vaccines save lives, millions of lives.
We will change the course of a university system that allows for the kidnapping of our students and colleagues. We are told that to refuse this threatens the existence of the university. But if the university’s existence depends upon complying and collaborating with fascism, then we will change the university.
The person who captured Rumeysa Ozturk’s abduction on video shouted at the ICE agents, “this seems like bullshit to me, certainly looks like it.” We will never accept this bullshit, this fascism, this state violence, and we will continue to insist on our role as educators in the struggle for liberation, for truth, and for justice.
Sincerely,
Emily Van Duyne, Associate Professor of Writing
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Literature
Jordan Corson, Associate Professor of Education
Thierry Elin-Saintine, Associate Professor of First-Year Studies Math
Nazia Kazi, Professor of Anthropology
Ekaterina Sedia, Professor of Biology
Ramya Devan, Professor of Economics
Jacob Camacho, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
Emily August, Associate Professor of British Literature
Diana Strelczyk, Assistant Director of Education Abroad & Adjunct Faculty of Sports Studies
Nancy Reddy, Associate Professor of Writing
Heather McGovern, Professor of First Year Studies and Writing
Priti Haria, Associate Professor of Education
Mariam Hussein, Teaching Specialist of Mathematics in First-Year Studies
Christine Salvatore, Adjunct Instructor of Writing
Jimmy Hamill, Assistant Professor of Writing and First-Year Studies
Betsy Erbaugh, Associate Professor of Sociology
