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| Cornell University on July 11, 2014 |
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| MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025 |
To Executive Director Paula Krebs, and Members of the MLA Executive Council,
I am writing to inform you that, regretfully, I must decline the 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies offered by the Modern Language Association (MLA). I can no longer consider the MLA my academic home, given its leadership’s refusal, in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to pass to the Delegate Assembly for debate a resolution in support of the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). As a scholar of Palestine Studies and Israel Studies, whose research addresses this very region, I oppose this blatant silencing of dissent and, specifically, of Palestinian voices. I am unwilling for my book to serve as a fig leaf for the Association’s leadership, to cover over its failure to address Israeli violence in the region or its attempt to foreclose any discussion of this violence.
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| Paris on September 1, 2016 |
In early August 2025, the Trump administration extended its shakedown of higher education, which had previously focused on elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia, to target the University of California (UC), the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. Beginning with UCLA, the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding and demanded a $1 billion ransom along with other changes, including an end to gender-affirming care. In response, the UC has launched a glitzy PR campaign enlisting alumni (including UCLA grad and Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to make the case for the university while urging Californians to “Stand Up for the UC.”
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| Sacramento Faculty Lobbying on April 11, 2008 |
During the encampments established and maintained by courageous students and faculty, whose ethical integrity in naming and resisting Israel’s recently resumed genocide in Gaza disgraced the complicity and collaboration of their administrations, activists held firm to the simple exhortation, “All eyes on Gaza.” Though they aimed to disrupt business as usual at institutions that are deeply invested in Israel’s war machine, embroiled in research partnerships with the Israeli universities that design the weaponry, train the personnel, and program the genocide, and ideologically in step with the settler colonial ideology of Zionism, the students were concerned that media focus solely on their protests would distract from the atrocity unfolding with ever increasing violence across the killing fields of Gaza’s concentration camp. Even as their institutions, violating their duty to protect and foster all their students, called in heavily armed phalanxes of police at the behest of Zionist lobby groups and Republican and Democratic politicians alike, or tolerated the vicious assaults of right-wing vigilantes who recognized a natural affinity with their Zionist allies, the students continued to remind us that they were there, on their own campuses, because Israel had systematically destroyed every university and every school in Gaza in its ongoing campaign of cultural genocide that has now extended to the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.
Within the first months of their relentless assault on Gaza, Israel had demolished every institution of higher education in Gaza, sometimes with calculated mining of buildings, sometimes with targeted shelling and airstrikes. They murdered with deliberate intent administrators, professors, and students, even as they continue even now to destroy hospitals and target medical personnel. Their invasion aimed at the complete destruction of the capacity of Palestinians to reproduce either their biological or cultural life. Now, as Gazans have availed of the short-lived ceasefire that Israel was bound to violate sooner or later to return to the ruins of their homes, among the first things they have done is to reestablish schools and try to recreate a system of education. Education and the freedom to learn has always been a deep commitment of Palestinian society long before the land’s occupation by Zionist forces and Israel’s systematic attacks on Palestinian learning, from the theft of whole libraries and archives in the Nakba and beyond to its isolation and siege of universities on the West Bank. But here, as in so many other areas of civil society, Palestinians persist and professors in exile continue to offer classes to students in Gaza over the fragile internet connections that are intermittently available.
Capitulation
Meanwhile, in the United States, the question is whether there are any universities left, not in Gaza, but here. The hapless, often willing capitulation of university leaderships, even at the most richly endowed institutions in the world, to the inroads of the Trump administration’s “all out war” on higher education has already, within weeks of Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders, been a spectacular betrayal of their duty to protect the educational and social missions of their universities. Despite Palestinian student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil’s appeals to Columbia’s administration for protections against doxxing and harassment, and his self-evidently well-grounded warnings that threats by Columbia faculty members against him would lead to his detention, no help was extended and the university effectively left the door open to ICE to disappear him and, subsequently, to conduct further warrantless raids on other students’ rooms—thus allowing access to law enforcement agencies that had been denied by previous administrations at the very moment when those agencies, unleashed by Trump’s fascistic sidekicks, have gone more rogue than ever before. As Khalil states in his letter from detention in Louisiana, Columbia “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”
Chilling as Khalil’s case is, and much as it stands as a harbinger of the repression of dissent that is manifestly to come, he is right to maintain that what appears as an instance of brutal overreach by Trump’s authoritarian regime has to be seen in a longer trajectory of university capitulation to Zionist pressure and collaboration with US state interests. It is no less the case that above and beyond the intense and even eager repression of student dissent on the part of university administrations nationally since October 7, 2023, and regardless of the Trump administration’s recent amping up of the pressure on them, American universities have been engaged in a long campaign of self-destruction fueled by a malevolent combination of forces and organizations dedicated to the capture and containment of higher education at least since the late 1960s.
In the first place, the ongoing capitulation of Columbia and other institutions to Trump’s spurious investigations, which are turning the Department of Education under Linda McMahon into a ludicrous if hyperaggressive smack-down arena, have a longer and equally shameful history. To go back no further than the administration of accused accessory to war crimes, Joe Biden, his attacks on the encampments and baseless insinuation of the violent conduct and “disorder” of these orderly, disciplined and pluralistic protests scarcely differ from the rhetoric of Republican politicians and Zionist operatives. Biden’s statement in May 2024 that “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked” established the same premise as informs the Trump DoE’s letter to Columbia that claims that the university had permitted “an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.” With regard to support for Zionism and defamation of students who oppose its genocidal program, hardly a hair separates the rhetoric of Biden from that of the Trump regime.
Executive Director of Columbia’s own Knight First Amendment Institute, Jameel Jaffer, forthrightly condemned the DoE’s letter as part of an effort to "subjugate universities to official power”. But it was the embarrassing performance of disgraced former Columbia President Minouche Shafik at Congressional hearings last April that threw the door open wide to such politically motivated inroads on the relative autonomy of higher education. Not only did she eagerly collude in Republican congressional repesentatives’ vilification of members of her faculty on the basis of statements cherry-picked without context, threatening to terminate the employment of one of them, she also permitted to pass without dissent the ignorant claim that “from the river to the sea” or “long live the intifada” are genocidal chants when a few minutes study, not to mention knowledge of her own first language, would have easily allowed her to refute such calculating stupidity.
Not that Shafik’s performance in this was any worse than her peers, the Presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, in December 2023. None seemed willing to contest the premises of the egregious opportunist Congresswoman Elise Stefanik when she absurdly “equated calls for an intifada as a call for a global Jewish genocide.” Like Shafik, UPenn’s Liz Magill’s and Harvard’s Claudine Gay’s heads soon rolled, but not for the reasons they should have. It was not any robust defense of academic freedom and first amendment rights, knowledge and research, context and nuance, but their failure to bend even further over backwards to the ignorant rantings of the congressional kangaroo court and their foot-shuffling inability to push back that left them and their comfortable, overpaid jobs vulnerable to further pressure from concerted Zionist activists, pro-Israel lobbyists, and conservative donors.
As further university “leaders”, including the University of California’s Michael Drake, preemptively deliberate the path of no resistance, abandoning DEI programs and introducing disciplinary regulations on student protest and even curricula in advance of the arrival of a clown-cart of DoE Joint Task Force “investigators” on some 60 university campuses, one is left in the embarrassing position of having to invoke the memory of a U.S. Defense Department lawyer, Joseph Welch. Welch famously brought down Senator McCarthy after his long series of red-baiting hearings, merely by asking “Have you no decency?” But the corruption and intellectual debasement of the US universities and their leadership has descended to the point where it proves impossible for a single university president to call out the ignorance and stupidity of the politicians that harass them and whose project is by no means the protection of Jewish students, many of whom were among the encampments, but the erosion of higher education itself. That not a single one of these leaders of some of the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions in the country, supposedly the intellectual hubs of the nation, could summon the courage to defend the importance of knowledge, ethics, and thought, or to condemn the genocide and the scholasticide ongoing at that very moment in Gaza, awareness and defiance of which were fully on display at their own students’ encampments, is both a symptom and a cause of the destruction of the university in the United States. Calculating connivance in stupidity, whether of politicians or of donors, consolidates the tropism towards intellectual vacuity and moral posturing that has long been the tendency of the corporate university's leadership. The greater the wealth and prestige, the less the ethical courage, comes to seem the basic principle of the university’s intellectual bankruptcy.
Prior to around 2009 and Israel’s first all-out war on Gaza, which slaughtered around 1400 Palestinians, systematic repression of pro-Palestinian speech on US campuses was relatively rare: the general “common sense” of the university as of the US public was implicitly if not explicitly pro-Zionist, persuaded as people were that Israel was “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that the Oslo Accords had instituted a peace process from which Palestinians constantly walked away, and that—especially in the wake of 9/11 and the second Intifada, Palestinians were terrorists in any case. Grotesque racist cartoons of Arafat and other Palestinians, close kin to Nazi anti-semitic caricatures, appeared in every mainstream news outlet with mind-numbing regularity. Understanding of Israel’s apartheid, of the reality of what passed for an “occupation”, of the conditions for Palestinian prisoners, of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, and of the draconian slow genocide of the siege on Gaza were confined to a minority. Under such an effective news blockade, censorship and repression were unnecessary.
But the launching of public campaigns for BDS and in particular of the campaign for academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions called forth a heightened degree of censorship and repression now that the hegemony of the Zionist narrative could no longer be assured. Initial Zionist willingness to debate advocates of BDS, in the cocksure belief that, having held the dominant narrative for so long, they would easily prevail, rapidly waned as defense of Israel’s regime became increasingly fraught. Argument was displaced in short order by lawfare, a strategy that has developed and expanded in time with the brutalization of Israel’s own methods of repression and genocidal warfare. In warfare and lawfare, the failure to overcome resistance leads inevitably to retrenchment and amplification rather than recognition of the injustice of the cause. Here again, Khalil's case is exemplary: lawfare having repeatedly failed to break Palestinian solidarity in the courts, whether in cases brought against the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 or Fordham University’s efforts to ban its SJP, the Zionist agenda is now being enacted in extralegal ways by an authoritarian state apparatus in the hope that gross violations of civil rights will produce a de facto transformation of the law, much as Israel’s violations of international law, as Noura Erakat has shown, have had the effect of producing new and brutal legal norms.
University administrations have not been shy of collaborating with the censorship and repression of Palestinian solidarity in synch with a wider political agenda that has seen the passage of House Resolutions condemning BDS, the banning of BDS by state contractors (including universities) in numerous states, and, most recently, actions like the direct interference of the Governor of New York State Kathy Hochul, who removed a job listing at CUNY’s Hunter College for a Palestinian Studies Scholar, on the grounds that the inclusion of the well-established scholarly terms and empirical or legal descriptors of Palestinian and other colonial conditions—apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism—when applied to well-documented Israeli practices constituted antisemitism. University repression has tended to proceed under the familiar mask of institutional neutrality but has not stopped short of outright censorship—as with the banning of student-led Palestine solidarity organizations (including Jewish ones)—and prosecutions.
Although, as Palestine Legal reports, university repression has escalated markedly under Zionist pressure over the past 18 months or so, it has been so widespread since 2009 that a handful of examples will have to suffice. The rash of prosecutions of student protesters that have taken place since the breaking of the encampments by police force last spring had a forerunner in then-Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, Michael Drake’s initiation of a disciplinary process that in 2010 led to the prosecution of the “Irvine 11”. Palestinian and Muslim students had disrupted a speech by then Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, whose invitation to campus at that moment was clearly provocative in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. The Orange County prosecutor relied on Drake’s sanctions to charge the arrested students with misdemeanors. The recent firings of Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke and Yale International Law professor Helyeh Doutaghi were notoriously preceded by that of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois in 2014. University presidents have almost univocally condemned the academic and cultural boycott despite overwhelming and well-documented evidence of the complicity of the Israeli universities with which they maintain close financial and research collaborations in Israel’s war crimes and violations of human rights.
That 100 US university presidents should have condemned the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 came then as no surprise. Why would it have? Such are the presidents of institutions, like former UC President David Gardner, whose refusal to divest from apartheid in the 1980s fueled the student-led divestment movement that eventually brought many colleges and universities to do the right thing, which, indeed, they now celebrate on their websites. At that time, supporters of South Africa argued that “South Africa [was] freer than most African countries" and that it “was scarcely the only country in Africa systematically to violate human rights”. Fed by a well-funded South African propaganda campaign, they questioned the readiness of black Africans for democracy and argued for “increasing all forms of contact” under the rubric of “constructive engagement.” Then, too, university administrators unleashed the police on demonstrators, dismantling the “shanty-towns” that were their encampments.
Absent from that moment, however, was the charge of antisemitism, that has been so irresponsibly and recklessly flung at social justice activists as to have become virtually content-free. No divestment activist was ever charged with anti-Afrikanerism, though Elon Musk and Donald Trump have sought lately to appeal to the wounded feelings of white South African racists. The weaponization of antisemitism by Zionism has offered the university authorities a new instrument with which to suppress calls for divestment from Israel and corporations that support its apartheid agenda that build on the experience of anti-apartheid campaigns against South Africa. Resistance to divestment and the preservation of university investments in corporations that systematically abet Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and assist the commission of genocide—from Hewlett Packard and Caterpillar to Boeing and Raytheon, Maersk and Chevron—is continuous with longstanding university complicity in the business of repression. Antagonism to BDS is intensified by its intersection with the rise of demands on universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations that have both accelerated and denied climate change and imperiled the future of the planet and of their students’ futures, thus exacerbating the contradictions that universities face between their putatively humanistic missions and their material as well as ideological embeddedness in a rapacious neoliberal order.
In some respects, then, the Zionist-led campaign against student activists and their faculty allies is parasitic on the longer history of efforts to subordinate the university to business interests or to those of the neoliberal corporate-state convergence. In its ever-more open embrace of fascist tendencies that has stripped away the democratic mask Israel has always sported, Zionism has seen its image in the mirror of global authoritarianism and found its real face there, to the alarm of whatever remains of that self-deluded category, the liberal Zionist. With unabashed alacrity, it has served as the leading-edge of a right-wing and corporate reclamation of the university whose aim is ultimately the destruction of an already hollowed out liberal institution. Appeals to protect the injured sensibilities of Jewish (read Zionist, since JVP and If Not Now clearly don’t count) students and faculty cynically mobilizes the last admissible remnant of the much-maligned campus DEI policies, ever caricatured and exploited by conservative media to generate a loss of faith in higher education that should have been laid at the foot of right-wing cuts.
At the same time, Zionist fear of such “woke” coalitions as that between Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movements has amplified right-wing antagonism to DEI and energized the Trump regime’s determination to abolish any vestige of anti-racism in the university. The conflation by Zionist organizations like the ADL of Palestine solidarity with antisemitism succeeds only in isolating the real struggle against actual antisemitism from genuine antiracist social movements. But the underlying aim is not to fight antisemitism but to defend an Israeli state predicated on Jewish supremacy which must make alliance with white supremacist authoritarianism to survive. The shared goal is to deradicalize our campuses at a moment when, as during the 60s, capitalism has lost its hegemony and finds that the majority of younger people lean socialist and the majority of the population favor government programs that by any other name would be social democratic, from universal healthcare to social security.
SUBORDINATION
Zionist organizations’ success in their campaign to shut down pro-Palestinian solidarity on our campuses accordingly finds its condition of possibility in a half-century right-wing campaign to transform the university in a direction that would subordinate it to the needs of the corporations. In 1971, Lewis Powell, later Supreme Court Justice, wrote for the American Chamber of Commerce a memorandum in which he laid out the necessity to take back the campuses and stem what he calls—in terms remarkably resonant with the language of the contemporary right—the “ideological war against the enterprise system and the values of western society” whose “disquieting voices” he found among the New Left. His portrait of the “minority” of left voices has become drearily familiar, as has his insistence on the lack of “balance”, “conspicuous by its absence on many campuses” and on the lack of “conservative or moderate” voices. Powell lays out a blueprint for taking back the American university which furnished the map for a concerted and long-drawn out right-wing campaign to regain hegemony, extending from the campuses to the media.
Powell’s analysis and recommendations were amplified some years later by the conservative intellectual warrior Samuel Huntington (of “clash of civilizations” fame) in the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy of 1975, where he expressed alarm over “an excess of democracy” driven in large part by “a tremendous expansion in higher education.” Huntington expressed most clearly the anxiety shared by the Trilateral Commission that the result of the postwar expansion of higher education was “the overproduction of people with university education in relation to the jobs available for them,” leading to frustration and discontent with capitalism. The corollary of this perception was that “higher educational institutions should be induced to redesign their programs so as to be geared to the patterns of economic development and future job opportunities.”
Pursuant to Powell’s and Huntington’s logic, the following 50 years saw the steady decrease in state funding to higher education and the corresponding increase in university reliance on student fees and on wealthy and largely conservative donors to make up the shortfall, along with the increasing vocationalization of higher education. This has gone hand in hand with the shift from the notion of public education as a right (historically a right racially distributed, it must be said, primarily to white citizens) to the conception of education as a commodity in which to invest—and the corresponding transformation of the students themselves into commodities of varying value for accumulation. As Trump’s recent appointee to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon succinctly put it, reflecting the desperately impoverished conception of education that best serves capitalist culture, “Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.”
We continue to live in the shadow of these antidemocratic definitions of the crisis of democracy and the remarkable degree to which it was blamed on the radicalization of the campuses. At the same time, we retain a similar but inverse understanding of the university and its functions. For a decade or so after the end of the 1960s, the university continued to offer shelter to critical and even radical voices and continued to present that as an essential part of its educational mission. To some extent, the relative hospitality of the university to critique stemmed from the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of the university in late Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, for whom the university provided space for what Kant called the philosophical critique of the faculties—Law, Medicine, and Theology—that he saw as direct “tools of the state” (the contemporary equivalent would be the academic-military-industrial complex). They recognized that the university was, as Louis Althusser would later term it, an “ideological state apparatus”, but believed that critique could insure its openness to transformation and to the accommodation of new ideas. In some respects, Kant’s liberal idea of the university remains what we understand by a university and its meaning, an understanding that underlies the mostly under-theorized dismay on the part of faculty at the erosion of the humanities and the shrinking of the space in research or teaching for radical critique of the institution or of society.
Through the 1980s, to a very large extent left critical thinking did exercise a considerable degree of counterhegemonic influence within the university, including antiracist as well as anticapitalist thought. In a sense, we would not be wrong to claim that within the university and through the teaching of generations of students, the left “won” the so-called culture wars as these played out in a gradual liberalization of social mores, from what the right now term “gender ideology” to the rise of social movements against globalization and of antiracist organizing, and even the emergence of a vigorous and theoretically informed Palestine solidarity movement that always understood itself in conjunction with other social movements.
Such achievements, however, went hand in hand with a series of compromises with institutionalized modes of containment of critique. Thus “affirmative action”, attacked in courts and political initiatives, gave way first to “multiculturalism”, as the university sanitized the demands of the student divestment activists to end “apartheid on campus,” and multiculturalism, which responded to the student demand for diversification of the faculty, in turn succumbed first to the rubric of “excellence and diversity” (code for “diversity within the existing protocols of the university”), and finally to the fully bureaucratized DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The university succeeded in successive neutralizations of efforts to transform its institutional function as an instrument of racial capitalism. The bitter irony is that the left seems forever doomed to defend institutional policies imposed by the right in effort to contain genuine desegregation and which the same right then attacks as extreme and absurd.
No less important to the assault on higher education were the fundamental historical changes in the conditions of possibility of the postwar liberal university. That university was more precisely a Cold War university: ideologically, it needed to demonstrate a link between capitalism, democracy and freedom, including the freedom to dissent that the capitalist West found essential to hold up against “totalitarian” socialism. This fact did mean that the universities furnished to a limited degree exploitable political space for a minority of radical intellectuals, and even to the more extensive class whom Powell identified as ranging “from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend.” That space, which the Cold War university could not entirely close down, enabled critical intellectual work within the university and in coalition with social movements and student organizations. Inevitably, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a still incomplete project of the neoliberal “New World Order” in its wake obviated the need to maintain that space of so-called “academic freedom” and entailed its gradual but steady erosion, until now, only remnants remain. The steady downsizing of the “critical” disciplines of the humanities and interpretive social sciences that responds to capital’s growing demand for outcomes and skill-sets to produce a docile and malleable labor force, relayed in a drumbeat of full-throated attacks on university education in the Wall Street Journal, heralded the transformation of higher education into vocational training, a tendency justified precisely by its increasing cost as a commodity that must repay the investment.
Even as “tenured radicals,” as the right liked to call them, were extending their limited cultural hegemony in a restricted sphere of the university, conservative forces, always the better Marxists, played the economic card, militating for cuts in public support of higher education that gradually reduced both state and federal funding to a small percentage of university budgets. Consequently, if not programmatically, universities’ dependence on corporate funding or billionaire donors, who can de facto determine the educational policy of the institutions, left them vulnerable to the ideological demands of their patrons. Powell’s prescription to the Chamber of Commerce, to take back the American university, has been all but achieved.
Contradiction
Into that space of vulnerability of the university, a product of both its internal contradictions and of external economic and political developments, Zionism has stepped, drawing in its wake the extreme right white supremacists with their hatred of wokeness, DEI, critical race theory, intellectual life, student radicals and “Marxist” faculty. It has proven as adept at leveraging the power of donors to limit expression on campuses as it has in making common cause with fundamentally antisemitic tendencies, from Christian Zionists to right-wing extremists, including openly antisemitic leaders like Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the idol of CPAC. We should recall that the fall of UPenn president, Liz Magill began not with October 7, but a few weeks before in the efforts of Zionist donors and organizations like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee to suppress the Palestine Writes festival on that campus in September 2023, on the grounds that it hosted “provocateurs willing to spread antisemitism.” For all these organizations’ protestations that they respect freedom of expression, it is clear that the aim is to suppress any critical analysis of the state of Israel that causes discomfort to Zionists, much as the Republican legislatures in Florida and other states have sought to suppress the teaching of the facts of Black enslavement, Indigenous genocide, and US structural racism on the grounds that they disturb white students. To claim, as the AJC did, that “Events that gather writers, scholars, and artists to focus on a particular culture’s experience and its art are vital parts of the university environment on American campuses” while at the same time denying Palestinians or their allies the right to name in the terms that they choose the determining factors in that cultural experience, Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide, betrays the insurmountable contradictions in which the Zionist narrative consistently founders.
As Albert Memmi long ago pointed out in his classic text on settler colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized, every colonialist eventually gravitates into violent authoritarianism, driven there by insuperable contradictions. “Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom”, Memmi observed. The tendency of Israeli political culture towards an ever-more extreme and genocidal racism over the last couple of decades bears out Memmi’s logic, just as his equally trenchant remark on the ways in which those fascist tendencies return to exert their influence on the “mother country”, or the states that sponsor the settler colony. The rightward turn of Zionism, which has stemmed from its inability to maintain its liberal façade once confronted with a vigorous Palestine solidarity movement capable of communicating Palestine’s “particular culture’s experience” under Israeli domination, now exerts its destructive influence on the American university, seeking the silencing, the detention, the prosecution, the dismissal of those who make its contradictions and its crimes uncomfortably public.
The common cause that Zionist organizations have made with the fascistic Trump regime in its similarly motivated antagonism to intellectual life and genuine education is not a merely contingent or opportunistic alliance. It belongs with the very logic that has informed Zionism since its inception and that was initially openly expressed: every colonial enterprise has to eliminate both the physical presence and the cultural and intellectual life of the indigenous population. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza destroyed every one of its universities but has not broken the spirit or the creative and intellectual will of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, cultural destruction tends to rebound on the perpetrator and Zionism's deepening antagonism to intellectual debate and creative life manifests all the mediocrity and spiritual rigidification characteristic of what Memmi dubbed "the colonizer who accepts", the willing agent of racism and dehumanization.
It remains to be seen whether the administrations and trustees of American universities will muster the courage to face down Zionist pressure to close down what remains of free inquiry and expression in the US university and resist MAGA’s inroads under the spurious cover of investigations of antisemitism. The record to date of capitulation and preemptive collaboration makes it unlikely that they will find the will to do so. That may leave us the sole alternatives either of imagining and realizing a transformation of the university and its mission radical enough to constitute its abolition or of abandoning it to sink into the ruins it has brought down upon itself.
To the Officers and Members of MLA Executive Council: 
MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025
We, the undersigned, resign from our positions as members of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association, effective immediately. Likewise, we resign from the MLA. We refuse to serve in this capacity because of the MLA leadership’s suppression of the Delegate Assembly’s right to vote on proposed Resolution 2025-1 endorsing the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society organizations to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel. The quashing of this vote diverges from the due process that was followed to bring it to the Delegate Assembly.
In early October 2024, Resolution 2025-1 was proposed by a group of general members of the MLA. Despite gathering numerous member signatures in support of the resolution, going through a lengthy vetting process with MLA leadership, and receiving overwhelmingly favorable comments in an online open forum, MLA’s Executive Council stopped the proposed resolution from being considered at the 2025 MLA Delegate Assembly. Executive Director Paula Krebs did not meet with the makers of the resolution to discuss their concerns, nor did she respond to letters from the membership who raised their concerns. Throughout the months of November and December, several former MLA presidents published their letters of dissent and two EC members publicly resigned in protest, citing the “lack of communication and transparency” around the procedural vote. Even though the writers of the resolution followed all protocols to gather the correct number of signatures, they were met with silence by the Executive Council. This came as a surprise to many in the general membership as well as delegates.
As delegates from a range of humanities fields, we have invested significant intellectual and administrative labor in the MLA, some of us for decades. We have demonstrated a commitment to its mission to support “justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.” Simply put, when the Executive Council blocked the vote on the BDS resolution, they betrayed us as delegates and members. In doing so, they improperly prevented us from fulfilling our duties as delegates and from representing our diverse constituencies. Therefore, against this institutional and calculated violation of trust and protocol, we refuse to continue with the MLA and its illiberal and capricious leadership. Our walkout of the 2025 Delegate Assembly reflected our frustration with a governance structure that we have engaged in continued good faith despite a record of obfuscation around the issues of higher education and human rights in Palestine. This year’s suppression of the vote follows last year’s failure to act upon the emergency motion defending pro-Palestinian speech passed overwhelmingly by the Delegate Assembly. The MLA has consistently shown willful obstruction and obfuscation around Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine, which compels us ethically to resign collectively and not be complicit in MLA’s cowardly, preemptive capitulation to outside political pressures and, therefore, complicity with genocide. The recent decision of AHA’s Council to veto a resolution on scholasticide in Gaza, though it was overwhelmingly supported by members, affirms our sense that any statement in support of Palestinian life and liberation would ultimately be silenced by academic institutions.
We are unwilling to remain part of an organization that is complicit in genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, where all major institutions of higher learning have been destroyed by U.S.-backed Israeli attacks. Israel has killed at least 12,794 students and 759 educators in the West Bank and Gaza and has prevented at least 785,000 Palestinian students from attending their schools and universities since October 2023. By resigning from the Delegate Assembly (and as members of the MLA), we stand with our Palestinian colleagues who have called for international academics to “fulfill their intellectual and academic duty of seeking truth, maintaining a critical distance from state-sponsored propaganda, and to hold the perpetrators of genocide and those complicit with them accountable.” If our disciplines are to retain their integrity, we must actively work to undo ties to setter colonial regimes that engage in acts of genocide and scholasticide—a reality that existed in Palestine when the 2005 BDS call was issued and that will persist after the ceasefire goes into effect.
In resigning from the Delegate Assembly, we refuse to support an unethical organization that values its fiduciary concerns and political expediency over human life. Our resignation is an ethical and professional duty that reflects our concerns about the organization’s future viability and its apparent disregard for academic freedom and membership governance. If the MLA abrogates democratic governance, assembly procedures and accepted protocol to succumb to pressure from politicians and outside interest groups and/or align itself willfully with corporate and state interests, the Delegate Assembly effectively becomes an irrelevant body with no ability or purview to argue for academic freedom and just working conditions or to advocate for the humanities in times of crisis. And would such an enervated vision of the humanities be worth saving? What good, after all, are the humanities if we cannot apply our knowledge in the world? If we cannot materially oppose genocide—the gravest of crimes against humans?
Sincerely,
Hosam Aboul-Ela, Rocky Mountain Delegate, University of Houston
Hatem N. Akil, Language Programs Delegate, Valencia College
Amit Baishya, Academic Freedom Committee Delegate, University of Oklahoma
Karyn Ball, Politics and the Profession Delegate, University of Alberta
Purnima Bose, TC Marxism, Literature & Society Forum Delegate, Indiana University
Sarah Dowling, Region 1 Delegate, University of Toronto
Katherine Gillen, Adaptation Forum Delegate, Texas A&M University--San Antonio
Rebecca Johnson, Romantic and 19th Century Delegate, Northwestern University
Boyda Johnstone, Community Colleges Delegate, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY)
Robin Kello, Graduate Students Delegate
Karim Mattar, Global Arab and Arab American Forum Delegate, University of Colorado at Boulder
Nasser Mufti, 20th/21st Century English and Anglophone Forum Delegate, University of Illinois at Chicago
Kalyan Nadiminti, English and Anglophone Forum Delegate, Northwestern University
Angela Naimou, Politics and the Profession Delegate, Clemson University
Janet Neigh, LLC Canadian Forum Delegate, Penn State Erie
Kaneesha Parsard, CLCS Global Anglophone Delegate, University of Chicago
Trisha Remetir, Asian American LLC Delegate, UC Riverside
Juno Richards, LGBTQ in the Profession Delegate, Yale University
Stephen Sheehi, Mid-Atlantic States Delegate, William & Mary
Elizabeth Sheehan, Women and Gender in the Profession Delegate, Ohio State University
Levi Thompson, LLC West Asian Delegate, University of Texas at Austin
Katie Walkiewicz, Indigenous Literatures of the United States and Canada Delegate, UCSD
Jini Watson, Postcolonial Forum Delegate, University of Melbourne
DATED March 10, 2025
To Executive Director Paula Krebs, Coordinator of Governance Leigh A. Neithardt, and Members of the Executive Council:
Mississippi River, New Orleans on January 9, 2025
In response to your undemocratic suppression of Resolution 2025-1, we write to inform you that we are collectively resigning from the Modern Language Association. We no longer see the MLA as a place where we can continue to invest our intellectual labor.
About four hundred MLA members (including delegates, executive forum members, and longtime participants) have signed a pledge not to renew our membership. In addition, because the executive forum structure is the beating heart of the convention, a sizable group of members have resigned, are withholding labor, or protesting MLA’s actions by proposing a session on academic freedom and the Palestine exception for the next convention.
Resignations of Executive Forums en masse include 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, West Asia Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 20th- and 21st-Century American Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Marxism, Literature, and Society Transdisciplinary Connections, and Postcolonial Studies Transdisciplinary Connections. Individual members of twenty-five other executive forums have also resigned and signed the pledge, including Memory Studies Transdisciplinary Connections, Medical Humanities, Sexuality Studies, Prose Fiction, Hemispheric American, Global Anglophone Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Poetry and Poetics Genre Studies. Twenty-twoother forums such as Sound Media Studies, Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Shakespeare, Creative Writing Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, Translation Studies Transdisciplinary Connections, Latina and Latino Studies Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and numerous others who did not wish to be named for fear of repercussion, are withholding labor and/or proposing panels on academic freedom for Toronto.
We list these names and numbers only to give you a sense of the widespread disaffection your arbitrary decisions in the name of fiduciary responsibility have caused among your members. Your actions will have consequences far beyond these numbers. The eloquent and principled statements of resignation, some of which we attach at the end of this letter, urge you to affirm solidarity with Palestinian people in this moment.
Indeed, we are heartened that you have recently conceded that our protests have had an impact, announcing processes to change the constitution in an effort to create a mechanism for the membership to make its views known, separate from the MLA association’s business interests. We believe that these proposed changes, as well as a perfunctory nod to scholasticide, are a direct reaction to the executive forum members’ and delegates’ protests. We are proud of the efficacy of our efforts and of the solidarity shown by all of the forum executive committee members and delegates who took up this question for serious debate.
These changes, should they take place, will perhaps enable MLA members to use the platform of the MLA to respond to threats facing higher education starting in 2027. In sympathy with colleagues who aim to move the MLA to action, we hope that these changes, while belated, will strengthen their academic freedom. We can only note with outrage and profound sadness that these changes have come through the abandonment of any meaningful solidarity with the Palestinian people.
We are further dismayed that you continue to refuse to address the moral urgency of the moment. Neither vague promises about bureaucratic changes nor the obfuscation of their actual impact or the exact time of their execution is enough. Instead of investing more of our time and labor in the MLA, we plan to continue to protest in solidarity with Palestinian scholars and to find other associations and venues that are able to create the conditions for more meaningful engagement with all the challenges of our era, and are not invested in protecting the right to conduct business as usual amid a genocide.
Sincerely yours,
MLA Members for Justice in Palestine
[Below are statements from several forum Executive Committees whose members have resigned, are withholding labor, or are protesting MLA’s actions by proposing a session on academic freedom and the Palestine exception for the next convention.]
CLCS Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum
The CLCS Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum has dedicated our guaranteed session for Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto in January 2026 to the topic of “Colonialism and Academic Imperialism: The MLA and Southeast Asia.” Our session responds to the MLA executive committee’s refusal, during the 2025 Convention, to allow the Delegate Assembly to vote on resolution 2025-1 endorsing the international Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and continued lack of clarity on future actions to resolve this situation. Scholars of and from Southeast Asia have long wrestled with overlapping histories of scholasticide, academic imperialism, and infringements on academic freedom guised in the name of liberal democracy. Our session foregrounds the expertise of our membership in responding to such conditions and explicitly addresses the role of institutions such as the MLA in perpetuating epistemological imperialism and suppressing academic freedom.
RCWS Creative Writing Forum
The members of the RCWS Creative Writing Forum Executive Committee denounce the Executive Council’s decision not to allow discussion on Resolution 2025-1. While we have decided not to resign in order to preserve the creative and intellectual community this forum has provided us, we support our colleagues who have resigned in protest.
After serious discussion, we have agreed to voice our protest by tactically withholding our labor in the following ways:
1) We will not put forward a CFP panel.
2) We will use our guaranteed panel to allow discussion on the role of CW in political crises.
3) We will not recruit to fill the two open positions on our forum.
We would like to underline that the Executive Council’s actions have made scholars reluctant to join our forum. The last person we had invited to join our committee declined in the following manner: “In the end, unfortunately, it's not the right time for me to jump into MLA service. Some of the reasons are personal, and some have to do with the current BDS discussions.”
We regret that the EC has jeopardized our sense of community in this inflexible way.
LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone
As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council's refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, we, the undersigned, pledge not to renew our MLA memberships, following the 2025 convention, and to resign from our roles as members of the 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum. Given that every single member of this Forum has signed this pledge, we see no future for the 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum at the MLA.
It is not lost on us that the ongoing genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, and colonization of Palestine more generally, are the occasions for the dissolution of MLA’s 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum—a field that has arguably depoliticized the interventions of postcolonial studies. We hope the MLA takes note of this irony, and reconsiders its decision to disallow even the smallest stand against empire.
TC Postcolonial Studies
We, the undersigned forum on Postcolonial Studies, do hereby resign from our positions in entirety. We cannot stand by the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward the resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS. All current as well as recently outgoing members of the forum have pledged not to renew our MLA membership after the 2025 convention and do not plan to attend future MLA conferences or teach MLA handbooks and volumes in our classrooms.
Postcolonial studies has been indebted to Palestinian scholars and activists since its inception and it is clear that the field’s commitments to anticolonial justice and assertions of humanity are out of place at the MLA. While postcolonial studies itself has much to reckon with, it is also a field that has wrestled fiercely with settler colonial critique. The ongoing genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, along with the violent history of Palestine’s colonization, must be a topic of serious academic engagement for the MLA to have any moral standing as an international convenor of the humanities, and the recent responses of the MLA leadership haves shown us the need to look elsewhere for the ethical pursuit of knowledge.
TC Marxism, Literature, and Society
In response to your decision against advancing Resolution 2025-1 for debate and a vote in the Delegate Assembly, we write in our capacity as present, incoming, and outgoing Executive Committee officers of the TC Marxist Literature and Society Forum to resign from our positions. In your justification for this decision, you cited your responsibilities to serve as fiduciaries of the organization in a legal landscape in which numerous states have prohibited entering into contracts with entities who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] Movement. We do not find your reasoning compelling. Rather than repeat the convincing arguments that eight former MLA presidents made in their December 18, 2024 letter to you protesting your decision—which inexplicably was not forwarded to the full membership—we will make three other points.
First, in the United States and beyond, lawfare has become a means to curb previously-protected forms of dissent; current and pending legislation in states seeks to restrict civil liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, including speech and assembly rights. As you note in your Report to the MLA Delegate Assembly on Resolution 2025-1, the ACLU and other organizations are challenging such instances of lawfare. In a political climate in which gerrymandered state legislatures and the Trump administration view silence as a green light to enact laws that further restrict freedom of speech and academic freedom, we abjure the MLA’s preemptive ceding of our rights to freedom of thought and protest. We do not agree that the best means of guaranteeing our rights is capitulation to restrictive legislative measures. Such measures should be vigorously fought.
Second, the BDS Movement emerged in 2005 as an initiative from Palestinian civil society to protest Israel’s decades-long human rights violations and brutal occupation of their land. BDS is a non-violent form of disobedience and a departure from earlier forms of struggle which involved armed confrontation. Those of us who advocate for non-violent resistance should support and applaud such initiatives from civil society. Indeed, the MLA’s mission is explicitly oriented toward justice: “The MLA supports and encourages impartiality, fairness, and justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.” In the face of scholasticide in Gaza, the encouragement of non-violent resistance in all its creative forms falls under this mission and we should be able to freely discuss these issues.
Third, our forum executive committee has been frustrated by the MLA’s impediments to facilitating basic communication with the over 500 members we are told constitute our forum. On several occasions, we have complained about your unwillingness to share a forum membership list with the executive committee and the “rule” mandating that all EC communications must be approved before you will forward them to our membership based on an arbitrary time schedule. As we have noted in past communications with you, these “rules” indicate a basic mistrust of our executive committee’s judgement, implicitly suggesting that we are not disciplined enough to send messages that are only related directly to MLA business. They have also impeded our ability to publicize our CFPs and solicit nominations for our committee officers. This mistrust is emblematic of the MLA Executive Council’s suspicion of the Delegate Assembly’s ability to debate Resolution 2025-1 and its opaque decision-making procedures.
Over the last few decades, many in the humanities have decried the dismissal of our relevance to public policy and, more generally, the public sphere. Your unwillingness to bring Resolution 2025-1 for debate in the Delegate Assembly is compelling evidence that MLA itself has substantially contributed to our irrelevance through a retreat from debating the most pressing issues of our day. We regret that the organization has abdicated its responsibility to advocate on this issue and others and, thus, demonstrate not only the relevance of the humanities but our indispensability to functioning democracies.
LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American
The MLA LLC Forum Executive Committee for 20/21C American Literature has collectively chosen to resign following the MLA Executive Council’s vote to withhold the resolution stating that members of the MLA endorse the 2005 call from Palestinian civil society to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in opposition to the war on Gaza. The members of this committee agree that our professional societies should remain forums for open debate and that the MLA’s fiduciary responsibility is encased within–not poised above–its larger responsibility to serve as “a leading advocate for the humanities” when our work is under extreme threat.
TC Memory Studies
We write to you as executive committee members of the TC Memory Studies forum (G108) to condemn the organization’s undemocratic decision to refuse to forward to a DA vote the resolution to endorse the Palestinian-led BDS movement (Resolution 2025-1). As has been widely discussed, including in an essay by a number of the MLA’s own past presidents, the MLA’s legal and fiduciary justifications for this decision are both unpersuasive on their own merits and inappropriate as a response to genocide, scholasticide, and apartheid.
As scholars of memory studies, we cannot silently stand by while the MLA willingly participates in a culture of denial and evasion that has characterized the establishment political response to the genocide in Palestine. Our field was largely founded by scholarship about the Holocaust, and several of us on the forum executive committee study Holocaust memory, among other topics. Decades of powerful work in this field has taught us that it is not enough to oppose genocide and other atrocities long after they are over, as matters for pious commemoration. The animating principle of memory studies is that we must draw the connections between past and present in order for the lessons of the past to be meaningful.
The MLA is not its products or its database but the members who devote their time and intellectual labor to the organization. In light of the MLA leadership’s failure to forward
Resolution 25-1 for a vote, we hereby withhold our time and intellectual labor from the
organization by resigning as members of the forum executive committee and pledging not to renew our MLA memberships.
