We stand with Rabab Abdulhadi

Editor’s note: Below is a letter penned by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, director and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at San Francisco State University, as well as a public statement of support for Dr. Abdulhadi by the The International Committee to Defend Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi. The letters address the recent policies of the SFSU administration in undermining Abdulhadi, her colleague Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa, and the AMED Studies program — the result of collusion with Israel lobby groups to silence dissident voices and perspectives championing Palestinian liberation.

Response to President Mahoney: You can do the right thing if you want to

Dear Colleagues:

I hope my email finds you in good health and spirit. Now that the new fiscal year is upon us I would like to respond to President Mahoney’s May 25th message to the faculty. Three main issues stand out. First is to thank you for your support and to affirm that President Mahoney’s message is a clear testament to our decisive victories and the power of our collective solidarity as faculty, staff, students, along with our broad-based AMED communities of justice. Secondly, while a step in the right direction, President Mahoney’s admission of the violation of our academic freedom and her announcement of the authorization of one AMED faculty hire is insufficient to remedy the harm that she and her administration have caused both of us as well as SFSU’s long standing reputation as a beacon of social justice, inspired by The Spirit of ‘68.

To be clear, three Faculty Hearing Panels (FHP) composed of our colleagues have unanimously ruled in our favor on October 14th, February 18th and April 26th. Convening on February 4th, our FHP colleagues, Professors Rita Melendez (Chair), Elahe Essani, and Hui Yang unanimously found SFSU to be in breach of my 2006 contract and to have harmed me by creating a hostile work environment that intellectually isolated me, and by systematically seeking to dismantle the AMED Studies program for which I was lured away 15 years ago from my position as the Director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The February 4th FHP ordered the University Administration to apologize to me and remedy the constant attacks against AMED as an independent and self-standing program by immediately hiring the two tenure-track faculty, one of whom must at least be tenured at the associate or full professor level. Our colleagues have logically reasoned that had the two tenure-track professors been hired at the assistant professor level in 2007, they would by now each have been promoted to associate or full professor. 

If President Mahoney is indeed serious about matching her words and deeds, she must immediately and fully implement the decisions of the February 4th and the April 26th FHP instead of vetoing them as well. Challenging white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism (the latter two are once again conspicuously absent in her message, in a similar manner to her September 14, 2020, Jweekly op-ed)—phenemonea that are not recent at SFSU or in public and official government discourses, cannot take place in a vacuum. As we are all aware, structural problems require structural remedies. On our campus, this means that President Mahoney and Provost Sueyoshi provide AMED Studies with the necessary institutional support, such as the immediate hiring of at least 2 other faculty members that I/we were promised and that continues to be sorely crucial for institutional building. In practical terms, this calls for the immediate hiring of at least two AMED Studies tenured faculty  at the associate or full professor level to ensure the stability of the program and its growth into what it was intended and promised to be, a full-fledged department in the College of Ethnic Studies. 

This also means an end to the Administration’s (in all its forms and manifestations) undermining of me and my decision-making authority as AMED director and senior scholar, by unambiguously affirming their support for my role as chair of AMED’s combined search committee for the two positions, and respecting my right and authority to determine the needs of the program and its courses, projects, scholarship, and direction  before, during and after my sabbatical. It is therefore unacceptable for President Mahoney and Provost Sueyoshi  to apply any delaying tactics, including the good intentions of the Senate Academic Freedom Committee, to subvert the Collective Bargaining Agreement that governs the Statutory Grievance Process or to attempt to undermine the decisions of the three Faculty Hearing Panels. Their first order of business at the beginning of the fiscal year that starts today is to set up a meeting with me, my union representative, and the authentic representatives of AMED communities, as soon as possible to finalize such modalities and plans for AMED, including the hiring of an interim director who will be responsible for running the program during my sabbatical. 

Third, President Mahoney, Provost Sueyoshi and SFSU Administration must immediately stop attempting to undermine the decisions of the two other FHPs which also ruled in favor of myself and Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa. On October 14th, our colleagues, Dr Andreana Clay (Chair), Dr. Sandra Rosen, and Dr. Dayna Herbert Walker; and Dr. Nicholas Conway (Chair), Dr. Julia Maxwell, and Dr. Christopher Yost-Bremm) on April 26th, unanimously found that the SFSU administration harmed me and my colleague, Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa, by violating our academic freedom, colluding with Israel lobby groups such as the Lawfare project, threatened us with imprisonment, refused to provide us with legal support, leaving us to fend for ourselves in the face of a massive New McCarthyist smear and bullying campaign, and failing to provide us with an alternative venue to hold our open classroom, “Whose Narratives: Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” in exactly the same manner in which management would ordinarily respond to a broken water pipe in a physical in-person classroom. 

In fact, President Mahoney’s labeling of the censorship of Professor Kinukawa and myself, along with our international luminary guests, as “deplatforming,” is telling. It betrays President Mahoney’s mindset and her political and ideological Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, which she probably views as business-as-usual in everyday administrative politics.

Selecting a term that has been repeatedly employed by Israel lobby groups and their right-wing and white supremacist allies — to camouflage the silencing, bullying, and big private tech veto over the content of our classroom — sadly signals in no uncertain terms where our university president situates herself intellectually and politically. As such, the call for her resignation by many intellectuals  is warranted, despite her attempt to sugarcoat her bias by citing statements by groups who had no idea that her actions directly contradicted her words. Unfortunately, and not unlike what she did on September 23, 2020, when she joined groups that vilified us, alongside the Israeli Consulate, and simultaneously issued a statement justifying Zoom’s censorship, President Mahoney reproduced white supremacist, Orientalist and colonial feminist tropes — a similar pattern to the new Provost from whom we expected better, given her past position as the Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies, and thus the custodian of anti-racist practices and actions in all their forms.

Several of us took risks by exercising our agency when we spoke up during the public comments before the CSU Board of Trustees, only a day before President Mahoney’s statement, and ahead of SFSU commencement. It is perhaps noteworthy that we were not alone in our call for accountability on our campus. Colleagues and students on other CSU campuses also demanded that CSU Board of Trustees act responsibly and practice transparency and accountability. Reflecting our collective sentiments, our CFA President Charles Coombs argued, CSU Board of Trustees better do its job or resign.  

If President Mahoney is serious about changing her course of action and turning over a new leaf in her relationship with us, we challenge her and the Board of Trustees of the largest public university system in the US, to cease the administration’s scorn for shared governance, faculty labor, and institutional integrity. This applies equally to President Mahoney as well as other high CSU/SFSU officials. Will they do the right thing?

Our demands: 

1. President Mahoney must immediately rescind her three vetoes of the October 14th, February 18th and April 26th FHP decisions. CSU must ratify that decision.
2. President Mahoney and her Administration must apologize to me and my colleague, Dr. Tomomi Kinkukawa, for the harm that they inflicted upon us and facilitate the immediate convening of our open classroom that was censored on September 23, 2020
3. President Mahoney, Provost Sueyoshi (and SFSU Administration) must immediately authorize the hiring of two, not one, AMED tenured/tenure-track faculty, provide us with an appropriate institutional budget and qualified staff to grow the program, and authorize the hire of an interim AMED director during my sabbatical in consultation with me and AMED authentic faculty and community representatives. 

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Public Statement in Support of Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and AMED Studies

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OUTRAGE!

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founder and director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program at San Francisco State University (SFSU) will not be intimidated, marginalized, or silenced by SFSU administrators.

As world-renowned Professor Rabab Abdulhadi attempts to begin a much-deserved year of sabbatical leave, the administration of SFSU has combined its pattern of systematic discrimination with one of mendacious and punitive hostility against Dr. Abdulhadi and the AMED program she founded and has led for the past 15 years. Apparently, it is not enough for the university and its anti-Palestinian allies to have committed multiple violations of Dr. Abdulhadi’s academic freedom and disability rights throughout the years, as attested by two independent Faculty Hearing Panels (FHP). They appear bent on destroying the integrity of Dr. Abdulhadi’s intellectual work and the AMED Program itself. We will not watch this happen in silence. 

In June 2022, Dr. Abdulhadi embarked upon a year-long sabbatical leave in order to complete her book-in-progress and develop her Teaching Palestine project, and Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian Communities. SFSU has since taken a series of injurious actions in order to seize control of and diminish the AMED program, undermining Dr. Abdulhadi’s sabbatical leave in the process. These actions, all of which compromise the autonomy of the AMED program, include:

• Initiating a tenure-track AMED faculty search (a search Dr. Abdulhadi fought long and hard to win) either to fill the position in her absence with someone more congenial to the SFSU administration and its external allies (e.g., the Lawfare Project) or by including Dr. Abdulhadi in the search process in order to rubber stamp the negation of AMED’s autonomy while overworking her with administrative tasks during her sabbatical leave;
• Refusing to provide funding for a long-promised second tenured/tenure-track AMED faculty line as mandated by the FHPs and by Dr. Abdulhadi’s contract, or to hire an interim director to run AMED during Dr. Abdulhadi’s sabbatical in consultation with her and authentic AMED community representatives; 
• Altering the AMED website without Dr. Abdulhadi’s consent, including the removal of the Arabic language banner and the correct links to Teaching Palestine; 
• Delaying the approval of nine AMED courses for Fall 2022 for over four months, then canceling all but three of them on the excuse of low enrollment; and refusing to approve Spring 2023 courses to allow Dr. Abdulhadi to focus on her sabbatical leave;
• Firing or retaliating against five qualified AMED Faculty Lecturers, including Dr. Abdulhadi’s co-grievant Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa, and PhD Student Saliem Shehadeh, who has team-taught courses with her; 
• Failing to provide Dr. Abdulhadi with a necessary computer and other technical support during her sabbatical leave to accommodate her disabilities; and 
• Threatening Dr. Abdulhadi with disciplinary action for listing her academic affiliation with AMED in conjunction with two conferences on Teaching Palestine which she is organizing or co-organizing, and in which she is participating as an SFSU faculty member.  

In all of this, SFSU continues to act in collusion with pro-Israel lobby and lawfare groups, which systematically monitor and report on Dr. Abdulhadi’s activities on social media. Such practices constitute a pattern of administrative abuse that further violates Dr. Abdulhadi’s civil rights and academic freedom and exacerbate an already hostile work environment, with ensuing negative effects on Dr. Abdulhadi’s health and well-being.

Indeed, Dr. Abdulhadi has withstood and fought valiantly against deleterious actions such as these for well over a decade. Her health has been heavily compromised by the ongoing harassment, and her sabbatical–the first in all these years–is a much-needed opportunity to pursue independent scholarship away from administrative antagonism. It is clear that the SFSU administration’s ongoing negative actions are unethical and amount to a stepped-up attempt on the part of SFSU and the outside Zionist pressure groups with which it is collaborating to remove entirely the serious study of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas from the SFSU curriculum and community. Given these conditions and the fact that Dr. Abdulhadi is already well into her sabbatical leave, the SFSU Administration must honor her hiatus from administrative duties and other campus responsibilities. As such, Dr. Abdulhadi will not be engaging with SFSU on these and related matters until her return from sabbatical leave. In her stead, the California Faculty Union will be communicating with SFSU and its parties on Dr. Abdulhadi’s behalf, as she moves forward to complete the scholarly and organizational tasks long planned for her sabbatical leave.

As iterated in her June 2022 letter to SFSU President Lynne Mahoney, Dr. Abdulhadi demands that decisions made by three successful FHPs that deliberated and ruled on grievances she filed against the university – decisions that were overturned by President Mahoney – be implemented immediately.  These demands are as follows:

1. President Mahoney must immediately rescind her three vetoes of the October 14th, February 18th and April 26th FHP decisions in Dr. Abdulhadi’s favor.  California State University must ratify the rescission;

2. President Mahoney and her administration must apologize to Dr. Abdulhadi and her

colleague, Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa, for the harm inflicted upon them by SFSU, and facilitate the immediate convening of their open classroom that was censored on September 23, 2020;

3. President Mahoney, Provost Sueyoshi (and the SFSU administration) must immediately

authorize the hire of two, not one, tenured/tenure-track AMED faculty, according to Dr. Abdulhadi’s Memorandum of Understanding, an agreement that was part of her job offer, and provide her with an appropriate institutional budget and qualified staff to grow the AMED program. Meanwhile they should authorize the hire of an interim AMED director during her sabbatical in consultation with her and authentic AMED community representatives.

Dr. Abdulhadi reiterates her gratitude and appreciation to all members of the Palestine solidarity, academic freedom, and labor communities for supporting her throughout many years of struggle against the SFSU administration for its multiple violations of her academic freedom, for harassment, and for racial and disability discrimination against her. She will continue to advocate for the AMED program and expose the hypocrisy of the SFSU administration.

For those interested in sharing this statement via email and twitter, here is a media kit.

Suggested hashtags: #WeStandWithRababAbdulhadi, #IStandWithRababAbdulhadi

With thanks, respect and solidarity,

The International Committee to Defend Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi