Grieving against the neoliberal university’s collusion with apartheid Israel, Zionist donors, and private tech companies

On March 18, 2022 the hearing was held for the grievance that I, faculty lecturer in Women and Gender Studies (WGS), filed against San Francisco State University for its Administration’s role in silencing the AMED/WGS open classroom on “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” that I had a great honor to co-organize with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, Director of Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies. After an adjournment, the remaining part of the grievance hearing was held on April 12, 2022. 

On April 26, 2022, Faculty Hearing Panel (FHP) ruled unanimously in favor of our academic freedom; ordered SFSU to apologize to Drs. Rabab Abdulhadi and myself, and promptly hold our open classroom, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.” (see here). The landmark decision affirms:

“We unanimously conclude that the Employer [SFSU] violated the Grievant’s [Professor Kinukawa] right to academic freedom. The Grievant has carried their burden of persuasion in demonstrating the grievance.

Given the nature of the injury, we conclude the following remedies are appropriate:

1. San Francisco State University issues a public apology to Dr. Kinukawa for failing to uphold their right to academic freedom.

2. Develop a workaround from Zoom for delivery of the event (or similarly situated events) to avoid disruption of academic scholarship and teaching. This remedy may not (and likely will not) require creation of a new platform from scratch. Rather, the remedy orders the Employer to coordinate a good-faith resolution of this matter and bring an end to the continuing violation of working conditions.”

In addressing the remedies, the FHP stated: 

“Pursuant to the Faculty Hearing Manual, this Faculty Hearing Committee is given ‘discretion’ in fashioning remedies. See Faculty Hearing Manual IV. Relevant considerations include: (a) how serious was the violation; (b) was the violation prejudicial; (c) what loss did the faculty member suffer as a result of the violation; and (d) based on the nature of the loss, what remedies will make the faculty member whole for any losses suffered. Id. at IV(B).” 

The FHC meticulously built their case using the “broken pipe” theory that Dr. Abdulhadi discussed in her testimony and that which she had conceptualized right after the silencing in September 2020 (Abdulhadi, October 23, 2020). The FHC’s righteous decision underscores our colleagues’ resolve in refusing to remain silent against injustice and defy what Dr. Abdulhadi (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) has called the New McCarthyism replicating the McCarthy witch hunt era–an unfortunate abdication of academic integrity which took decades to rectify. 

The decision is our collective victory and a vindication for the movement fiercely led by Dr. Abdulhadi to defend AMED and Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice at SFSU and beyond, supported by CFA SFSU Chapter and the amazing and invincible members of the International Campaign to Defend Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, whose names I will list and recognize each and everyone for their steadfast support and having our backs. 

Following the unanimous decisions by two Faculty Hearing Panels’ that sided with Dr. Abdulhadi in her two statutory grievances, the third FHP’s decision sent a powerful message to SFSU administrators, condemning their collusion with private tech companies, the apartheid state of Israel, Zionist organizations and their multi-year attempts to censor our teaching, control our curriculum, silence Dr. Abdulhadi and AMED Studies, and smear, bully and seek to dismantle the justice-centered critical AMED pedagogy that is inspired by the spirit of ’68 SFSU Strike, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front.  

In a complete disregard for the faculty shared governance, however, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney vetoed all the three rulings by the faculty panels. On May 17, 2022, following her vetoes of the faculty panel rulings for Dr. Abdulhadi’s grievances, President Lynn Mahoney yet again vetoed the unanimous ruling in favor of my grievance. As Dr. Abdulhadi’s friend, the late Palestinian Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, who was assassinated by the Israeli occupying army in Jenin, affirms, “Dissemination of truth is the biggest fear and threat” to Israeli Zionists. President Mahoney’s vetoes only prove her fear of Dr. Abdulhadi’s work that deeply resonates with Shireen Abu Akleh’s insistence to speak truth to power, for which she lost her life.

In protesting against the massive injustice, I am publishing the opening and closing statements that I read at my grievance hearing. I wrote both statements in a close collaboration with Dr. Abdulhadi. Throughout the grievance process, Dr. Abdulhadi generously shared her decade-long critical theorizing with me and ensured that I am always intellectually empowered. Dr. Abdulhadi also even helped copy-edit my drafts of the statements and sharpen my argument at the earliest hours in the morning of the hearing. The capitalist and colonial notion of authorship does absolutely no justice to our collaborative working process. 

Opening statement (3/18/2022)

I have been teaching at SFSU as a faculty lecturer in the Department of Women and Gender Studies since the 2015-2016 academic year. I am a queer scholar-activist with Zainichi Korean and Japanese ancestries. My scholarship and teaching are intimately tied to my social activism, including my participation in the transnational “Comfort Women” Justice movement against far right Japanese Government’s historical denialism and its refusal to redress Japanese imperial military’s sexual slavery system during WWII (Kinukawa 2021). 

Since Spring 2020 I had a great honor and privilege to collaborate with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founding Director of Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED), a revered feminist scholar and public intellectual. We co-organized a series of ten online AMED/WGS open classrooms on gender and sexual justice in Palestine and Arab and Muslim communities. Those classes were really memorable pedagogical moments. Every student in my two sections of WGS 150, who come from diverse intellectual and personal backgrounds, responded strongly and most positively, writing how the open classrooms transformed their understanding of anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist and queer justice, and deeply and personally touched them. Over five semesters, our joint open classrooms served over 500 students in our classes alone along with thousands of other participants from wider communities around the world.

For fall 2020, we planned two virtual open classrooms, the first of which was “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” on September 23. This open classroom, however, was shut down by social media platforms such as Zoom, Facebook and YouTube, with Zoom taking the lead in censorship, as a result of a massive campaign by Israel lobby groups. In collusion with those groups, SFSU administration violated our academic freedom and silenced the open classroom. 

Here is a brief synopsis of what transpired leading up to the censorship. On September 14, 2020, nine days prior to the censored class, right wing Zionist group, the Lawfare Project, sent a letter to the US Department of Justice alleging that our open classroom violates US anti-terrorist law by providing “Material Support for Terrorism.”

Three days later, Zoom responded to Zionist pressure and threatened to cancel our webinar. In her official capacity as Vice President for Academic Affairs, our University Provost Jennifer Summit sent Dr. Abdulhadi and me an email on September 18, in which she echoed the Zionist allegations without citing legal counsel. Rather than protecting our academic freedom and mobilizing all university resources to enable us, as SFSU faculty, to do our jobs, our university Provost left us to fend for ourselves, telling us to “assess the risk” of teaching our classroom, including possible “imprisonment” and advised us to “seek legal advice from a knowledgeable attorney” on our own. Ultimately, less than two days before the class, Zoom canceled the class with over 1400 registrants.

Despite having full knowledge of the Lawfare Project’s past history of targeting Dr. Abdulhadi who defeated them in a federal lawsuit that was dismissed with prejudice, SFSU administration uncritically amplified Zionist and right wing unfounded allegations of the illegality of our open classroom. As a matter of fact, by Sep 21, three days after the Provost’s email and two days prior to the open classroom, CSU’s legal counsel already knew that our classroom violates no law. 

Why didn’t Provost Summit consult with the university’s lawyer first, before sending us that threatening email? The email scared me and my partner to our bones and affected our life over months, making us anxious and worried about imprisonment and deportation and over the possibility of losing my job as a faculty lecturer at SFSU. Over two months, I, with help of Dr. Abdulhadi, searched for immigration lawyers, who finally assured me that there was no legal basis for my worries. Up to this day,18 months later, SFSU administration never apologized to us for the Provost’s Sep 18 threatening email.

By contrast, representing SFSU administration, President Lynn Mahoney spoke at a Zionist rally aimed at demonizing and further criminalizing us and our guest speakers. Even SFSU’s Division of Equity and Community Inclusion along with its Office of Diversity, Student Equity, and Interfaith Programs, went as far as to co-sponsor the rally, along with Zionist groups such as Hillel,  Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the consulate of the State of Israel.

While President Mahoney made herself readily available to Zionists, meeting repeatedly with Hillel students, she did not once reach out to us. Given that Provost Summit and President Mahoney are themselves feminist scholars specializing in relevant fields such as Medieval history and construction of whiteness, it is not only morally reprehensible but also intellectually irresponsible that they never did make any statements criticizing the colonial occupation of Palestine, while intentionally and falsely conflating such critique with anti-Semitism. Neither President Mahony nor Provost Summit showed any recognition of the widespread and well known anti-Zionist Jewish scholarship and organizations who have been criticizing such racist conflation in mainstream media. Those also include several teach-ins and events on our campus, including two panels during the 40th anniversary conference of the College of Ethnic Studies and the recent open classroom on “Who Owns Jewishness?”, organized by Dr, Abdulhadi. Jewish anti-Zionist public intellectual and organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, SFSU student group, Jews Against Zionism, our own panelists, Ronnie Kasrils from South Africa, and Laura Whitehorn from NY JVP, along with many others, have published on this subject and wrote to President Mahoney about the shutting down of the open classroom. However, President Mahoney continues to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and negate the existence of this widespread movement in her collusion with Zionists and pro-Israel groups. 

The two feminist scholars have also uncritically used language that reflects the post-9/11/2001 Islamophobia and that implies that we are terrorist sympathizers (Abdulhadi 2003; Abdulhadi 2018). Educators and academics like yourselves can appreciate the depth of visceral and epistemic violence we experienced, when our meticulously planned classes were publicly misrepresented and our framing of anti-colonial narratives for justice was silenced and defamed not only by external groups but by the feminist leaders of our own institution. SFSU has shown no respect to my deep intellectual collaboration with Dr. Abdulhadi as well as our commitment to innovative justice-centered pedagogy and our labor of love for our students. The administration’s dismissive devaluation of the open classroom with revolutionaries and great thinkers of our time was both insulting and embarrassing. We were forced to counter the epistemic violence that challenges our academic authority and damages our reputation among our colleagues. We wrote extra lecturers and organized an emergency meeting with confused and anxious students, in a desperate effort to save a unique teachable moment from violent destruction of what would have been an extraordinary class.

SFSU’s public collusion with Zionist groups, in turn, emboldened an outright Zionists and right wing attacks. For example, a report from the rightwing tabloid, NY Post, published an article after emailing me that “the US Department of Education [is] asking two other federal agencies – the Treasury Department and the Justice Department – to review SFSU’s Sept. 23 event.” Other right wing and Zionist media, including Campus Reform, also reported that right wing Colorado Springs Congressman Doug Lamborn, asked the Attorney General and and FBI Director to investigate whether our classroom violated Material Support for Terrorism laws. In the volatile Trump political climate, this hate campaign took an additional toll on us, draining us emotionally and physically and demanding around-the-clock attention and the accompanying labor. 

The consistent attempt to gloss over the facts and belittle our labor and intellect was evident both during Dr. Abdulhadi’s grievance hearing and President Mahoney’s review and veto. SFSU not only violated our academic freedom as the co-instructors, but that of SFSU’s students who were deprived of the opportunity to learn from and meet face-to-face, albeit virtually, with such luminaries. To this day, SFSU refuses to acknowledge that both co-instructors and students in our classes were directly harmed by the silencing. SFSU administration continues to question and dismiss my academic credential as instructor and author of the syllabus, when they allege that “live streaming” is unusual, in order to deny that our open classroom warrants the support of Academic Technology, while insisting that the university has no responsibility to ensure the protection of our classes from external Zionist and right wing attacks and private corporations’ censorship. SFSU administration pressured me to make the open classroom optional, amplifying white supremacist, imperial and colonial feminist mindset (Abdulhadi 2018) that sees Palestine, AMED, and people of color feminisms merely as “optional” at best and an oxymoron at worst.  

To this day, the only sign of SFSU administration’s recognition of my existence on campus is Provost Summit’s threatening email that criminalized us. Even in its continued repression of Dr. Abdulhadi and AMED, SFSU Administration has erased and trivialized my collaboration with Dr. Abdulhadi as though I were merely doped. This is totally disrespectful of my credentials and agency as a feminist and queer scholar activist.

I deserve full respect as a faculty member and an academic. I demand SFSU to fulfill all the remedies in my grievance and protect my academic freedom. Thank you.

Closing Statement (4/12/2022)

In my opening statement, I pointed to the systematic pattern of administrator’s failure to protect us and uphold our academic freedom and strongly stand against interference in the content of our classroom, including by the private tech giant Zoom. Unfortunately the pattern continued in this hearing today. For example, the exhibits presented by SFSU misrepresented my grievance, cutting off part of it in their presentation and making it sound as if I was grieving about the April 23rd event on which we collaborated with professor Sean Malloy at UC-Merced. Such misleading presentation not only seeks to dismiss the seriousness of my grievance and the harm SFSU administration has inflicted on me. But it also presents me as someone who does not know what I was doing or how I should grieve. This insults my intelligence and intellectual integrity, and reflects the disdain with which the administration treats us as faculty. It is also an offensive dog whistle that draws upon Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti-Asian, homophobic and sexist tropes.  

My colleague, Dr. Rabab Abudulhadi (2014) points out that New McCarthyism operates upon unfound false charges and accusations, whereby institutions accept and legitimize as valid, matter of fact business as usual. As a result, the wider community on and off campus starts to behave out of fear. This not only causes a chilling effect and self-censorship on the part of our colleagues; it produces devastating unrecognized unpaid labor– emotional, intellectual, and physical, that is never optional nor a matter of choice but is necessary to counter the massive epistemic and visceral violence aimed at discrediting our academic authority, criminalize our work, and assassinate our characters. Going through one grievance process alone has affected my health and taken so much of my time that I could have used to build up my teaching and research resume, which are crucial to secure a full-time position with job-security. After over one and a half years, our ordeal is nowhere near to being over, evident in how the SFSU administration has continued to reject and disrespect the decisions of the faculty hearing panels, refuses to be accountable to our campus community and shared governance and the harm they caused us, and to protecting our academic freedom. Grieving what we lost has taken over my life, produced constant overwork with no gains, and deprived me of the time I need for my professional growth and achievement as a contingent faculty. I am constantly worried about what future I have in the academy.

Our ordeal has also exposed how the silencing of our open classroom is only the tip of the iceberg, reflecting the external and internal attacks against Dr. Abdulhadi that she had to resist and counter without pause over fifteen years. In fact, the silencing of our open classroom on Sep 23 2020 reflects a consistent pattern over decades, in which SFSU, in collusion with pro-Israel advocate groups, attempted to police the teaching of Palestine, to dismantle AMED studies, and silence and crush Dr. Abdulhadi. SFSU administration has consistently failed to protect Dr. Abdulhadi and AMED students from multiple assaults, including death threats, hateful posters, hate mails and voicemail, and multiple baseless audits for the sole purpose of discrediting Dr. Abdulhadi and placating pro-Israel lobby groups. In resisting repression, with an astronomical labor of love for students, communities, and colleagues, Dr. Abdulhadi guarded AMED and Teaching of Palestine as an intellectual and pedagogical praxis framed within the indivisibility of justice. Speaking truth to power, Dr. Abdulhadi has filed several grievances against SFSU through the SF chapter of CFA, for which SFSU Administration continues to punish and retaliate against her. 

On June 6, 2021, as co-organizer of the censored open classroom, I joined Dr. Abdulhadi, filing my own grievance against SFSU administration for violation of my academic freedom. Despite our repeated requests for support, SFSU had refused to offer any alternatives that would allow us to hold our censored open classroom. As for the April 23, 2021, event, despite Zoom’s deciding to pass on the decision-making power over content to the universities on April 13 2021, and even though UC faculty vetted our April 23, 2021 open classroom and found it not to be in violation of any laws, including “Material support for terrorism.” Zoom decided to reverse its earlier decision and to shut down our open classroom on April 23, 2021. We are convinced that President Mahoney’s statement justifying Zoom’s shut down on September 23, 2020, as “a private company Zoom was entitled to its terms of service,” has emboldened Zoom to censor our second open classroom. As the top University Official, what President Mahoney did was to provide the official stamp of approval to Zoom’s censorship by sanctioning the right of a private tech company to exercise control over the content of our classroom. That President Mahoney paid us lip service by claiming support for academic freedom is even more insulting. It stands hollow and disingenuous in contrast to President Mahoney and her administration’s actions. Deeds are the test of the sincerity of lip service. In our case, President Mahoney’s deeds speak louder than words and for that she and the administration must be held accountable. They should not be allowed to get away with censorship, the harm they caused on all levels, whether in our careers, standing among our peers, tainted  reputation, intellectual isolation, undue burden of working to clean up what fell out of the administration’s violation of our academic freedom, or the serious physical and emotional toll it had on our health and well-being. 

Over a year after the silencing of our original open classroom, we were finally vindicated by our colleagues like yourselves. On October 14, 2021, the Faculty Hearing Committee unanimously ruled in favor of Dr. Abdulhadi over SFSU’s complicity in silencing and criminalizing our open classroom. The panel held SFSU administration accountable for its violation of our academic freedom, and recognized the dire impact of SFSU administration’s collusion with Zionists and hostile work and study environments for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim faculty members, students and staff over decades. 

The FHP’s October 14th unanimous decision made me think that perhaps I should withdraw my grievance. However, on November 4, 2021, in a total disdain for faculty shared governance, President Mahoney rejected the FHP’s unanimous decision. Undemocratic and disrespectful, President’s veto reinforced the university’s collusion with Israel lobby group. Our institution’s refusal to support us and our students left me no choice but to proceed with my grievance hearing today. 

Most recently on Feb 18, 2022, Dr. Abdulhadi achieved another major victory when she was once again vindicated by her colleagues. A second faculty hearing panel unanimously sided with her grievance and instructed the university to honor her job offer and fulfill its outstanding commitment to build AMED studies by hiring two additional tenure-track faculty members, and to apologize to Dr. Abdulhadi, stop the attempt to dismantle AMED, and put an end to the hostile work environment to which Dr. Abdulhadi has been subjected for at least 13 years for her directorship of AMED and her refusal to abandon it.

President Mahoney, however, yet again rejected the faculty panel’s unanimous decision. The most recent veto is consistent with her earlier rejection to prolong our ordeals, embolden Zionists, and maintain the hostile environment at SFSU.

In President Mahoney’s veto of the FHP’s unanimous agreement with Dr. Abdulhadi’s grievances, as well as the Level One response to my grievance, SFSU administration has attempted to use technicalities to delegitimize our grievances alleging, for example, we were not harmed by the silencing, that we passed the statue of limitation, or that we are overstepping management.

In protest, I join Dr. Abdulhadi, who carries on justice-centered education based on the principle of the indivisibility of justice, and resist and fight back against SFSU’s repression and collusion with right wing Zionists and private donors, in the spirit of the ‘68 SFSU strikers, led by the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). As a faculty lecturer, SFSU is not invested in my career. The university does not grant credit or recognize my unpaid labor for my work outside the minimal requirement of teaching a class, and certainly not for grieving as a form of resisting injustices. On the contrary, SFSU has attempted to push out scholars and activists such as Dr. Abdulhadi for their resisting injustices. 

Dr. Abdulhadi’s grievances and mine must then be understood as a part of the larger and growing movement led by Dr. Abdulhadi and supported by student, alumni, faculty, union, labor, and community leaders to hold SFSU administration accountable for its complicity in suppressing AMED Studies and Teaching Palestine. Led by the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, colleagues and students at several universities held solidarity webinars on October 23 2020. Resolutions were passed by multiple academic, professional and community groups, led by our union, SFSU Chapter of the California Faculty Association, including the Professional and Staff Council of the City University of New York. Also on February 28, 2022, San Francisco Labor Council unanimously voted in favor of a resolution condemning the university for its censorship and collusion with Zionist groups and demanding that President Mahoney and SFSU reinstate the AMED faculty lines and end the harassment and discrimination against Dr. Abdulhadi and AMED students and community. At the rally on November 17, 2021, SFSU current students and alumni, including the ‘68 strikers, faculty members, as well as our union, and community leaders spoke in solidarity with Dr. Abdulhadi and AMED.

Restoring our academic freedom and ending violence and the hostile environments on our campus, demands that SFSU immediately sever its ties with the apartheid state of Israel, rightwing Zionist and white supremacist organizations, and private donors, prevent private tech companies from censoring our classes, respect faculty shared governance, stop its dismissiveness and disregard for students and lecturers, and be accountable to our communities.

As we wrote right after the 4/23 silencing, “As activists and scholars, we remain committed to place at the center of our work the voices of oppressed peoples who speak and act in support of their own liberation instead of using them as secondary props or photo opportunities to universities and corporations. Palestine is no exception to this notion of justice-centered knowledge production. We are more resolute than ever to our scholarly accountability and ethical commitments”.

We cannot allow academia to remain silent as it did during the McCarthy witch hunt era–an unfortunate abdication of academic integrity which took decades to rectify (Abdulhadi 2014). The actions of Zoom and the failure of decisive supportive response by the SFSU administration is a slippery slope at a time of renewed challenges to academic freedom and pedagogical practice, including attacks on critical race theory and ethnic studies. SFSU’s rejection of FHP’s ruling over our grievances would set a dangerous precedent in academia.

To conclude, I demand SFSU full respect to me as a faculty member and an academic, and fulfill all the remedies in my grievance and protect our academic freedom. Thank you.  

Stand in Solidarity with Dr. Abdulhadi and the AMED Studies Program

• Sign the US Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (USACBI) petition calling for the resignation of SFSU President Lynn Mahoney here: https://usacbi.org/2021/11/sign-on-protect-sfsu-faculty-members-academic-freedom-demand-sfsu-president-lynn-mahoney-resign/
• Support Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice here:  https://donorbox.org/teaching-palestine