Sarah Mai
Dear UMN students,
This summer, the former Interim President and Provost of the University of Minnesota, with the support of the Board of Regents, bowed to outside political pressure and stopped a professor from being hired at the University.
Yes, this was in blue-state Minnesota and not, say, Ron DeSantis’ Florida.
Late last semester, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) completed its search for a new faculty director. It was conducted by a committee of expert professors who followed all CLA search stipulations and solicited feedback from members of the public. Its final recommendations led CLA to offer the position to professor Raz Segal, a Jewish, American and Israeli scholar who is internationally respected for his work on the Holocaust.
Segal’s selection offended some faculty and members of the public because Segal, an expert in genocide, has characterized the ongoing atrocities in Gaza as genocidal, a conclusion shared by other experts in the field and more broadly.
Two faculty members of the CHGS Advisory Board resigned their seats because they declined to work with Segal. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC), a non-academic organization that includes Israel advocacy in its mission, mobilized a campaign to pressure university leadership into aborting Segal’s hire.
Former Interim President Jeff Ettinger, supported by Provost Rachel Croson, the top administrator in charge of faculty affairs, gave in to that pressure and retracted Segal’s job offer. In doing so, they disregarded the expertise and wisdom of the hiring committee and overrode CLA and the University’s constitutional guidelines and regulations governing faculty hiring.
This “unhiring” of Segal was not grounded in any legitimate academic concerns, but in partisan politics. In effect, advocates of a specific public position on Israel and Palestine were able to block the hire of a prominent scholar who disagrees with that position.
Ettinger and Croson thus violated the principle of academic freedom. This principle is similar to free speech, but specific to educators and researchers in higher education and the sorts of freedoms they need protected for their work.
Academic freedom names the freedom of a professor to make knowledge claims, teach students and conduct university business (including work like running a center such as CHGS) related to their expertise, without interference from political, administrative or public actors. Academic freedom is what makes universities centers of learning and knowledge and not just centers for job training or political indoctrination.
At the University, many of your professors have radically different and opposed understandings of Israel and Palestine. This is normal. Professors often take positions that other professors, students or members of the public might find objectionable or uncomfortable. This is good for intellectual diversity, but it is a betrayal of higher education itself when such objections are weaponized to penalize faculty and exclude certain knowledges and viewpoints — as the administration did with Segal.
The CLA Assembly and the University Faculty Senate, the body of elected faculty representatives for CLA and for the entire University, respectively, thus passed no-confidence resolutions in Ettinger and Croson, specifically for their unhiring of Segal.
No-confidence votes are a big deal. They’re rare because they are how professors express their rejection of irresponsible university leadership. In effect, University professors affirmed that they no longer trust the administration to properly steward the University.
The fact that the no-confidence votes were successful shows that the faculty, through its elected representatives at the highest level of university governance, largely agrees on the unacceptability of Ettinger and Croson’s conduct.
The proper response of administrators who have lost the support of their own professors is to step aside. Ettinger’s term came to an end soon after the no-confidence vote anyway, but our new president, Rebecca Cunningham, has ignored the vote’s significance. Instead, she indicated she would not reverse the decision to unhire Segal, and has left Provost Croson in place. Worse, she has tasked Croson — whom professors clearly signaled they no longer trust — with overseeing a “review” of academic freedom policies and professor hiring.
As a student, you came to the University to expand your horizons through learning from and working with faculty experts and your peers. But the administration has signaled that it has limited respect for the expertise of your professors, and sees satisfying political criticisms as more important than ensuring you have the freedom and support to learn about complex subjects from multiple angles and perspectives.
The administration’s sacrifice of academic integrity and free inquiry to political pressure is, unfortunately, part of a pattern when it comes to Palestine and Israel. Our university includes students and employees who have lost loved ones during Israel’s assault on Gaza. There are also many students and employees without personal ties to Palestine and Israel who are deeply affected and outraged by events since October.
University leadership has never acknowledged the concerns of University members affected by Israel’s assault on Gaza in any substantive way. Cunningham’s recent announcement stating she would not comment on “global issues” (read: Israel/Palestine), and the Board of Regents’ recent refusal to pursue divestment from Israel were both made under the pretense of neutrality. But as the Segal sabotage shows, when it comes to criticisms of Israel or support for Palestine, the University’s leadership is “neutral” in name only.
Timothy Brennan, Tony C. Brown, Michael Gallope, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Keya Ganguly, Claire Halpert and Nathaniel Mills are professors in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.