By placating Home Republicans throughout a listening to on antisemitism, CUNY’s Chancellor left college students and college to fend for themselves.
“We now have a zero tolerance coverage in opposition to encampments,” stated CUNY chancellor Felix Matos-Rodriguez. “We now have additionally employed greater than 150 full-time safety workers and contracted with a further 250 safety personnel. Our method has proven outcomes.”
On July 15, Matos-Rodriguez was certainly one of three college presidents, together with the heads of the College of California and Georgetown, to face questioning earlier than the Home Committee on Workforce and Training a couple of supposed unchecked disaster of antisemitism.
The Skilled Employees Congress—CUNY’s employees and college union—and plenty of from the higher CUNY neighborhood are saying the listening to by Home Republicans was actually meant to silence CUNY’s advocates for Palestinian human rights. Matos-Rodriguez, they argue, didn’t defend these neighborhood members, in addition to the tenets of free speech and sturdy, open dialog which are vital parts of a thriving tutorial establishment. “It was an egregious abdication of his duty as an educational and his duty as a pacesetter of an educational establishment,” stated Heba Gowayed, an assistant professor of sociology at Hunter School.
Among the many legislators on the listening to was Elise Stefanik, the Republican consultant from New York whose interrogation of elite college presidents in 2024 precipitated the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and Columbia. The committee steered the PSC has an “antisemitism drawback” for having handed resolutions in favor of boycotting Israel previously. One CUNY administration official was singled out for having beforehand labored on the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as was Ramzi Kassem, a CUNY professor and the founding director of CLEAR, a authorized support clinic primarily based out of the CUNY Faculty of Legislation.
The group helped spearhead the authorized protection of Palestinian dissident Mahmoud Khalil. “That is the chief pro-Hamas agitator that led to the antisemitic encampments at Colombia,” Stefanik stated of Khalil. “Is that this acceptable that the authorized protection fund for Mahmoud Khalil is the top of CUNY CLEAR? That’s acceptable underneath your watch?” Stefanik requested. In June, a federal choose agreed with Khalil’s authorized crew that Khalil’s confinement in a Louisiana detention middle was illegal, and that the Trump administration’s pretense for making an attempt to deport him was unjust.
However Matos-Rodriguez didn’t defend the work of Kassem, CLEAR, or the school’s union. “Anyone that breaks our guidelines and our insurance policies, there will probably be an investigation. We’ll examine it. And if there’s any disciplinary motion to be taken, we’ll take it,” Matos-Rodriguez stated in response to Stefanik, who requested for Kassem to be fired. “The PSC doesn’t converse for the Metropolis College of New York. We’ve been clear on our dedication in opposition to BDS and in opposition to antisemitism.”
Present Challenge
PSC president James Davis instantly fired again. “We don’t settle for the false premise that underlies in the present day’s listening to that any campus activism in help of the Palestinian folks is antisemitic, if not prison,” he stated. “All of CUNY needs to be proud that college working at our college are part of the authorized crew defending our constitutional rights and the rights of Mahmoud Khalil, who was kidnapped for his political speech.”
Previous to the listening to, members from CUNY’s School and Employees for Justice in Palestine chapter joined with college from the College of California and Georgetown College to pen a letter urging their institutional leaders to “break the sample” that others in earlier hearings had set by “proving unable or unwilling to face up successfully to the patently false, hypocritical, and deeply anti-intellectual haranguing by members of the committee.” However Matos-Rodriguez “totally didn’t defend college students from false costs of antisemitism,” the members stated in an announcement to The Nation. “It was heartbreaking and infuriating to see him do the Trump administration’s bidding.”
Matos-Rodriguez’s feedback come on the heels of the one year suspension of Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, a Metropolis School pupil and a core organizer of the encampment, in addition to the obvious firing of four adjunct faculty at Brooklyn School for his or her pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Because the administration digs in its heels to repress pro-Palestinian activism, there was a sea change in American public opinion in favor of Palestinians because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “The tides are turning,” Arzoo Malik instructed The Nation. “The folks of NYC help Palestine overwhelmingly. Particularly on our [CUNY] campuses, as they’re public faculties of working-class college students and staff who perceive that our struggles are interconnected.”
Extra than simply being out of contact with mainstream political opinion, Matos-Rodriguez’s failure to defend CUNY in opposition to the Home Republicans mirrored a pacesetter far afield “even from the realm of settled legislation,” stated Gowayed. “The case of Mahmoud Khalil, as an example, is a case the place due course of has selected that state of affairs. Chancellor Matos-Rodriguez couldn’t even maintain up the American authorized system in his response.”
His feedback on the coed encampments have been equally worrisome, she stated. ”To say we’ve a no-encampment coverage, that could be very a lot talking in opposition to the scholars’ proper for civil disobedience. What does that imply in an educational area the place we’ve a duty in the direction of our college students to nurture them and as a substitute we’re enjoying this position of being an arm of the state?”
“CUNY’s latest firing of the adjunct professors and suspension of Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik are deeply alarming and a part of a nationwide, escalating sample of punishing advocacy for Palestinian lives and freedom. Punishing Palestine advocacy not solely violates the Structure however displays anti-Palestinian racism that violates anti-discrimination obligations underneath federal civil rights legal guidelines,” Sadaf Hassan, a employees legal professional on the authorized advocacy group Muslim Advocates, instructed The Nation. “As a public establishment, CUNY is legally certain to uphold the First Modification, not suppress it.”
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