As we return to our campuses this Fall, we are reminded of the speech that prize-winning Palestinian poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha delivered  at the National Book Awards last November. Using the opportunity afforded by that prestigious forum, Tuffaha appealed to her peers in the room and beyond it: “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine. I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop.” Speaking of the important role that each and every one of us has to speak up against the brutal reality unfolding before our eyes, she implored: “Our service is needed as writers, our service is needed as human beings, in every room, in every space, especially where there is something to risk or there is an opportunity to be lost or that courage will really cost you. That’s what’s most needed…I want us to feel just a tiny fraction a tiny fraction more than we do in our deeply comfortable American lives…and be uncomfortable and be disoriented and be angry and get up and demand that any administration no matter what letter it has at the end of its name…that we pay for should stop funding and arming a genocide in Gaza…”  

How can we, as teachers, mentors, researchers, and colleagues live up to Tuffaha’s call for the kind of “courage [that] will really cost you?” Those who have already faced their fair share of repression might want to retreat for a moment. More mass support is required. How can we encourage the hitherto less courageous to inch closer to directly confronting the challenges of  teaching students in the middle of an ongoing genocide funded by our US tax dollars? How can we support one another in developing syllabi that will educate rather than shield students?

These questions guided our organization of this short piece for academics going back to the classroom amidst conditions of heightened surveillance and repression. Universities, intent on escaping federal extortion and in pre-emptive obedience to dictates coming from federal and state authorities, are promising to crack down  on those who dare to speak the truth, while new policies seem to encourage students to snitch on their professors and on each other. We invited colleagues to share their concerns, as well as their commitments to their students, to themselves, and to Palestinians. We hope for this to be a living document and to gather more contributions about the semester as it progresses.

Tani Barlow (Rice University)

Because I teach East Asia content courses at a small Southern private university, nobody pays much attention to me or to what I do and I am personally out of the loop and expected to be a minor problem. Zionist efforts to interrupt our work have irritated even physics faculty who, while not involved in the BDS and JFP movements on campus, are showing up at Senate meetings to directly call on ADMIN to pay attention to the genocide and to censure Zionists propagandizing and just recently to shed light on “endowment” for hiring ex military.  Overreach has triggered pushback from liberals. I am so old, so ignorable, so predictable that I am not myself feeling a sense of difference or insecurity but I am extremely worried about my untenured junior comrades. They and their students are the backbone of our campus movements.  However, I am also aware that they have their eyes open and have come out of graduate school with an understanding of how far to go and when to fall back.

We [campus solidarity org] are tightly organized because we are so small. I think the strongest impact has been AAUP because when faculty feel insecure and gravitate toward AAUP, they better empathize with the JFP position. They themselves are feeling a little freaked out by the Trump takeover here in Texas so they see more clearly than before that an AAUP is one way to push back. That brings them closer to empathizing and learning more about systemic oppression.  The national level discussions have also been useful to those of us working in the South where Left political presence is weaker. However, that said, most of us involved in political work came to Texas from more progressive parts of the country or the world so this is not our first rodeo.  

In terms of structural changes that we need to be fighting for, this is the question with the highest stakes for me. Erosion of norms around honest teaching has been steady over the last decades. The structural reasons are well known on the Left but among students I think we need classroom commitment to demystification of the university system and intellectual work. I explain how universities work in the course of teaching, how we decide to become historians, what credentials, what vetting, what problems and so on so they see us as workers not genie dropping from the sky.  Being very senior is a gift because I can tell stories about being a student during the anti-Vietnam war, apartheid, war on Iraq, public school defunding, fascist takeover movements. I think that reminding young students that movements take time is helpful in showing them that you can commit for a lifetime; “success” is not measured in weeks but in years and years. It is a great thing to be a historian right now. When we teach history honestly and completely as I try hard to do then students learn about capitalism, they learn what their way of life has cost from extermination campaigns and colonial subjugation to environmental catastrophes. Teach history. Explain that historians know more because that is our job. This is not about your opinion and my opinion or some abstract debate. Read, consider evidence, revise, rethink and then open your mouth. Teach how to think as much as immediate information. In the space of a classroom, how we assign readings, structure critique, teach analysis, help students learn how to read documents and ideas, situate them with skills to see what is in front of their faces. “I did not know” is unacceptable in these times, as it has been throughout my lifetime so I think structurally that teaching history is a way to arm students for a big, long fight.

Karim Mattar (University of Colorado – Boulder)

As an educator in the field of Palestine studies, I have always worked under the assumption that any material or content covered in the (American) classroom may be subject to surveillance. Researching StandWithUs’s “Best Practices: Overcoming Anti-Israel Challenges on Campus” handbook in 2022 (especially its “Dealing With Professors” chapter, which provides students a step-by-step guide to smearing their teachers and legal support in doing so), my first instinct was to present my findings about this sort of affront to academic freedom in the classroom and more publicly, as a context that students and the broader academic community should be familiar with when studying the literature, history, and politics of Palestine. This, naturally, opens up broader questions about the influence of outside special interest groups on the American classroom. I believe—and I teach—that by grappling with these questions, we gain a more thorough understanding of the reasons why the 120+-year history of Zionist atrocity vis-à-vis Palestine and the Palestinian people continues to unfold into the present day. I am unshakably committed to facts, evidence, and reason in the classroom and throughout my work, and any attempts towards repression that have arisen for me personally or that might arise in the future are insignificant in the context of the Zionist entity’s genocide.

In Spring 2025 I taught a course on “Palestine: Literature, History, Politics” where we dealt with some of these issues. It was a highly successful class, and my department, division, and university offered me all the support I needed. (In this, I am perhaps an exception to the rule of repression that we have seen throughout higher education in the last two years.) It was recommended to me that I expand this class into a large lecture course. This semester, I am teaching two undergraduate courses on “Bearing Witness: Representation and Responsibility” and “Solidarity,” where we will be engaging Palestine in relation to other historical instances of mass atrocity and movement-building from around the world. Educating about these issues on the basis of facts, evidence, and reason is my job, and I will continue to do my job whether or not I hold a position in an academic institution.

I recognize of course the deep anguish and professional upheaval—the destroyed careers—that external special interest groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have caused to students, faculty, and staff across the country. I stand in solidarity with every single one of them, and seek in my work both in and beyond the classroom to expose and to fight back against the malign influence of these groups in American higher education and in American society more broadly. I believe that the entire higher education sector—students, academic workers, administrators, associations, and unions alike—must stand together against such genocide apologists and collaborators, and in one voice say “enough!” I am dedicated to helping create the conditions for this moment of collective liberation.

Shaista Patel (University of California – San Diego)

One of the first stories that I heard many different versions of while growing up was the 12th century Iranian Sufi poet Farid al-din Attar’s 4,500-line poem by the name of Manṭeq al-ṭayr, translated into English many times since the late 19th century as Conference of the Birds. As Shi’a Ismaili Muslims, we uphold the esoteric as sacred and believe in the anagogical understanding of the Qur’an. This tale, with its deeply mystical metaphors about the human search for God, had a deeply profound impact on me growing up, and later when I could read, I read cover to cover versions of some of its English translations. The only form in which this powerful story can be summarized is always fragmentary—perhaps even profanely reductive and sinfully conformist given my own intellectual confines and the death of any imagination I had before beginning graduate school. Conference of the Birds is an allegorical poem about a quest of the birds for their sovereign, Sīmorgh (phoenix). However, to find Them, the path these birds must embark on is a treacherous one; it requires them to cross seven valleys, each representing common human emotions, failures, and desires such as the desire for quest/search, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, wonderment, fulfillment in annihilation. By the end, only 30 (si) birds (murgh) reach the final valley, only to realize that this whole time, the One they had been seeking is but they themselves. That there was no sovereign to be found in a palace on a throne, but They were already present in each one of them. 

The multiple lessons in this poem, filled with many anecdotes that I read or were read to me as a child, began to give me an idea of what it meant to have faith. Faith in the Divine, in Allah which I held as a Muslim. However, I have often mulled over this poem to think about questions of complicity as well. Complicity in the many structures of domination and subordination in which we, as university professors are implicated. The diffused, ubiquitous everyday ways in which we strengthen the antiblack, racist, casteist, white and Brahminical institutions issuing us our paychecks. Many of us, and I hope you’ll see yourself reflected in this, pride ourselves on biting the hand that feeds us; but we pretend to bite this hand only until we actually have to take risks in our career and stand with our students who are being targeted for organizing and participating in campus protests against white settler colonialism, casteism, Zionism, Islamophobia, xenophobia etc. Then, like rats in a sinking ship, we quickly scurry to the side of the Chairs, Deans, and Chancellors and nod at how we have been betrayed by these students who were only supposed to pen narratives against structures of violence and speak in ways the university grants us permission—hold conference panels or edit journal issues or write a book or two on Palestine. 

Decolonization, as we have seen in these last two years, clearly is a metaphor for us academics who have jargon and a sundry of hollow critiques of the university. Instead of thinking of the enemy out there who is out to get the radical, freedom-fighter me, I have, like the birds, learned to see the traitor, the scary administrator, and the orange tyrant in myself. This is not a reductive argument of “we are all complicit” until nobody understands themselves to be complicit. But I am persistent that this probing of ourselves, our histories, complicities, implications and words not matching the flow of the purse must be interrogated. We must begin here. My reflection in the mirrorlike countenance of the white supremacist university means that thinking about student safety, well-being, and future needs an interrogation of me and my practices in the classroom. 

Nothing has helped to explain the importance of this constant reflection better than the last two years when even the thin rudimentary veneer of the performative of the academics winning tenure writing beautiful and powerful words about social justice was willfully taken off as they asked Palestinian students whose kith and kin were being bombed and starved to perform white civility in how they relayed their “feelings.” Don’t protest but write a book report on a Palestinian author’s book; don’t demand divestment from Zionist capitalism and instead organize a space maybe celebrating Palestinian culture; Don’t embrace the lessons from Refaat Alareer’s poetry but maybe make kites in a park…away from the premises of the university. I have been living in constant fear of my own colonial civility coming in the way of how ethically I have the capacity to engage with students expecting more from me than their Zionist, white or Brahminical supremacist professors, chairs, chancellors, and presidents.  

And, more than ever before, I fear myself and my seemingly radical colleagues in how we are engaged in surveilling students and encroaching on their imagination and courage to speak, to take sides against power, and engage in actions deemed as irresponsible by the university, and by extension, the police state. For example, post the elections in 2024, conversations in my own department with other faculty when graduate and undergraduate students expressed fear of surveillance through digital monitoring tools such as Canvas, a web-based learning management system, led to us suggesting the students to email us faculty on our school email addresses with ideas for resisting this surveillance. This is because, as the students were informed, many of us do not even have email IDs outside the university email address. This sort of response cannot be about mere obtuseness of these colleagues; I am convinced that it must be about our/their apathy toward the students. I am surprised that the students have yet to pelt us to our deaths with stones. 

I teach in a large public university in a border town with many students who are either undocumented or have undocumented family members and do not even have social media for their family’s protection. In today’s moment, when many of the instructors are concerned about students using AI to plagiarize on assignments, I think we really need to focus on the ways in which we are (still) instilling cop pedagogy that not only adds to the students’ stress level but potentially makes them more exposed to the state. I still see course outlines in social sciences and humanities that use software such as Turnitin to detect plagiarism in students’ work. Universities around California and other states have literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep tabs on its students’ work submission. Moreover, it stores students’ data “In connection with legal or regulatory obligations, including to disclose your Personal Information as necessary to protect our rights or the rights and safety of our Users, or as necessary in the event of a court order, regulatory inquiry or other lawful”. Of course we already know that Turnitin flags the work of non-native speakers of English 61% of the time and that of English speakers at a miniscule rate. Therefore, while it is advisable to hold a conversation with students about “a critically engaged approach to AI,” the practice of employing detection tools in our classes should be immediately stopped. 

Moreover, as I unfortunately realized only last year (as I said, academia has really made me uncritical and doltish), it is also not safe to podcast or document our lectures with audio or voice recording. I teach courses such as “Decolonial Theory” and “Decolonial Muslim Feminisms” and in these last two years in particular, I have failed at discussing decolonization as a praxis and process without discussing with students many of the professors who are beloved by the students. I have felt compelled to inform them about which seemingly ‘decolonizing’ professor of theirs was seen standing with the administrators and official cops instead of the students at the Gaza solidarity encampment at our university in April/May 2024 and who called Muslim and Palestinian students as scary or uncouth in academic senate meetings. White feminists have long written about how gossip is important and a feminist tool of creating community, so I proudly do my feminism this way. Better to betray these academics and colleagues than the people being genocided. 

However, I do still fear in terms of safety for myself, and my students any repercussions from these academics. We, as a breed of people (known as academics) are the most petty and venomous beings, I believe. Therefore, while I used to also often record short video lectures on Zoom and have tried podcasting for a couple of classes in different semesters/quarters, I have now decided that because Zionists and sycophants come in many forms, shapes, and positions, it is better to be extra careful. Moreover, I never want to allow myself an opportunity to retaliate against a student if they say or do anything that concerns me. Taking appropriate measures to address concerns related to students is different than retaliation, of course. Having students’ verbal comments/viewpoints recorded for later access by the university or the class instructor is just not appropriate and another means of surveillance even if that has not been my intention. 

In the current moment when more than ever before, allegations against a student plagiarizing can seamlessly blend with the threat of deportation or collecting data on students is in service of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), students using AI, students not showing up to class, students arriving late etc. students not submitting their midterm tests should not even inform the ways in which we design our classes.¹ We need to think differently about course assessment as well as how we are sharing data outside the class with students. For example, I have noticed that not uploading my course material on Canvas has led to poorer student evaluations. It is easier for students to find everything in one place rather than on Google drive folders (which probably isn’t a much better option than using Canvas, but I am struggling to find better platforms). But holding conversations with students about protecting ourselves and challenging the university’s quest to surveil our course outlines, our assignments and submissions, and every lecture has helped set the context for my different approach to teaching and assessment and collectively build better consensual and respectful ways of designing my course and setting the goals and expectations. I also periodically remind students that not all cops roaming the campus are in blue–some take the form of their favorite professor or the kind administrator they might have been led to feel comfortable with and around. And some are just best friends or partners with these cops and there is no justification they can offer for not being treated with extra suspicion. 

As I try harder to not let myself off the hook or feel injured when a vulnerable student treats me with suspicion, and as I constantly try to actually practice and not simply perform humility (I fail 99% of the time but I want to keep trying), I remember that words and practices of discipline, civility, control, compulsion, distrust, efficiency etc. are all part of the cop pedagogy. Being an instructor in the classroom is often about policing and with this realization of the expectations associated with my position, every time when I am standing in front of my students, I feel the distance between me and those raging Zionist donors and chancellors and president(s) close a bit more.