Not content to torment the Ivy League, Republicans are seeking authoritarian control over working-class public universities like the City University of New York. The latest salvo: allegedly firing four adjuncts for their support of Palestine.
Republicans’ ideological attack on higher education seemed limited to elite Ivy League institutions at first, briefly dressing up an authoritarian crackdown on left-wing ideas like Palestinian solidarity and racial equality in the drag of anti-elitism. That’s changing. Now they’re coming for public universities all over the country.
On Wednesday, the US Department of Education announced “civil rights” investigations into the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Michigan, and others. They’ve also been investigating George Mason University and, last month, forced the University of Virginia’s president to resign. Faculty, students, higher-education unions, and the communities that depend on such institutions should be ready to fight the tsunami of repression that’s coming.
The City University of New York (CUNY), one of the greatest working-class higher-education institutions in America, is one of the latest institutions to be targeted, recently facing the harassment of a congressional hearing on “antisemitism” (a term that has become a depraved kind of code for the defense of Palestinians, a people currently enduring slow starvation with their children as part of a broader campaign of genocide). CUNY leadership is coping with the attack in the worst possible way: by repressing and punishing pro-Palestinian activism.
On paper, CUNY protects academic freedom in its bylaws, which specify that the university should be a “forum for the advocacy of all ideas protected by the First Amendment,” and emphasizes a commitment to the “principles of academic freedom.” Similar language appears in CUNY’s contract with its faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). But there have been times in CUNY’s history when this value has been breached. In the 1950s, a rabidly anti-Communist Brooklyn College president shut down the school newspaper and encouraged state and federal investigations of left-leaning faculty.
That McCarthyite atmosphere has returned to CUNY. Last month, CUNY fired Corinna Mullin and three other faculty members who haven’t chosen to be publicly identified. According to the union, all have advocated for Palestinian rights.
The firings followed a script that is becoming predictable: of universities capitulating easily to pressure from far-right politicians and braying mobs when it comes to speech about Gaza.
Hiring and firing adjunct professors is, at CUNY, up to the department chairs, and all the fired adjuncts had been rehired by their departments. As James Davis, the president of the PSC, pointed out in a letter to CUNY, in no case was the professor’s job performance judged unsatisfactory, nor were there any complaints of misconduct against any of the four.
Geert Dhondt, the chair of economics at John Jay College — one of several departments in which Mullin taught — said her teaching evaluations were “among the highest in the college.” Dhondt called CUNY’s decision to override the departments “highly unusual, it only happens when there is strong outside pressure.”
And indeed, there has been outside pressure. Mullin’s firing was stoked by local far-right politicians. Republican City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov and her Democratic colleague Kalman Yeger have been calling for Mullin’s dismissal since last year, alleging that she was involved in a violent April protest on campus. Mullin, through her lawyer, has called it a peaceful protest and insisted that she did not break any laws.
Vernikov herself is one to talk about violent campus protest; she was arrested for bringing a gun to a Brooklyn College Palestine protest in October 2023 yet has somehow managed to keep her job.
CUNY leadership has essentially admitted that this was a political purge. At a congressional hearing this month on campus “antisemitism,” Florida Republican Randy Fine asked about Mullin by name, quoting her chanting, “Down with Zionist scum.” CUNY chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez assured the far-right congressman that she was “no longer employed by the university.”
It’s also significant that all the fired faculty are adjuncts, part-time faculty who lack tenure or other job protections that some full-time professors enjoy. In an interview with Jacobin this week, Mullin suggested that the firings were just the beginning of a larger crackdown on anti-imperialist educators. The purge, she said, makes “one thing brutally clear: academic freedom does not meaningfully exist for contingent faculty. But we are not the exception — we are the warning.”
The PSC is holding a protest demanding the reinstatement of the fired professors at Brooklyn College on July 31.
It’s clear that the idea of academic freedom — the idea of universities as institutions independent of the government, which can nurture inquiry and debate free of interference — is more endangered than it has been in the United States at any time since the McCarthy era, thanks to the authoritarian Trump administration and a bipartisan desperation to quash any discussion of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
None of CUNY’s compliance with this project will do the university system any good. The entire academic project suffers when administrators refuse to honor the principle of academic freedom. But such compliance also doesn’t appease the fascists — it just shows weakness.
During the hearings, unmoved by the sacrifice of a few adjunct professors, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a far-right maniac who represents New York State’s North Country region, called for Chancellor Rodríguez to be fired. That he was, in the PSC’s telling, willing to indulge the McCarthyism of the Stefaniks of the world by firing these adjuncts may not even be enough to save his own job.
