What will be the future of academic freedom?

Maura Finkelstein is one of many scholars discovering that the traditional protections of academic freedom are no longer holding.

Excerpt: "That night, Finkelstein got Thai takeout and waded back into the news from Gaza. Around 7 p.m. she added a post by the Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi to her Instagram stories. “Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi had written. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

An anthropologist whose expertise lies in urban India, Finkelstein had taught and written about Palestinians for years. She knew that her position on Zionism, one germinated during a high school history class almost 30 years earlier, was not a popular one — especially on her campus. Despite those red doors, Muhlenberg, in Allentown, Pa., is better known today as a destination for Jewish students, who make up around 20 percent of the student body.

Finkelstein herself is Jewish. Over the previous three months she had been called online a self-hating Jew, a Nazi and a Kapo; she had been told that her family must be ashamed of her, that her mother should have aborted her, that she would soon lose her job and that “we’re watching you.”

But that night, reading Kanazi’s words while taking in the news, she felt a pitch of fury and despair at the rising number of dead in Gaza and her sense that too few Americans were similarly horrified. She believed in her right to state her beliefs and share those of others, like Kanazi, with whom she sympathized. Besides, the post would disappear from her Instagram stories by the following evening."