Inside the campaign to undermine DEI and Palestine solidarity at the University of Minnesota: an interview with Dr. Sima Shakhsari

It’s been hard to keep up with the attacks on Palestine advocates at college campuses in recent weeks, but the case of Dr. Sima Shakhsari stands out as an especially egregious example.

In December, Shakhsari had been interviewing to become the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Minnesota. That process seemed to be going well, but after answering a question about Gaza as part of a public panel, everything changed.

Not only was Shakhsari denied the position, but they also became the target of an ongoing campaign launched by pro-Israel websites, groups, and even faculty. Mondoweiss spoke with Shakhsari about exactly what happened and how the university has responded.

Mondoweiss: Before we get to the public panel, let’s start with the position you applied for. This happened during part of the hiring process, so I was wondering if you could set the stage here.

Shakhsari: In the fall of 2023, I was a finalist for the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University Of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA).

To be honest, I was actually preoccupied with the massacre in Gaza and my organizing work, so I was not thinking of applying for that job at all. However, one of the associate deans sent me an email after the application deadline and said, “Your name has come up a few times in CLA for this position. Would you consider applying?” They said they would extend the deadline, so I sent in my application materials. Soon after I sent my application material, I received an email from the Dean saying, “The committee has overwhelmingly recommended you as a finalist.” There were apparently two finalists for this position, and my interview and job talk were scheduled for December 14th. 

On December 14th, after my interview with the committee, I gave a public talk for the members of the College of Liberal Arts. For the job talk, I was asked to focus on my vision for DEI and the current climate on campus. I talked about my vision both philosophically and politically to reflect on why social justice must be an integral part of DEI work.

In particular, I focused on Minnesota’s relationship to settler colonialism and the fact that our Indigenous studies colleagues have been asking, for a long time now, for reparations that have not been implemented yet. I talked about what it means to practice social justice rather than reproducing neoliberal notions of DEI that simultaneously highlight and erase difference without dismantling inequalities based on difference. I also addressed the attacks on Ethnic studies, Gender studies, and critical race theory across the U.S. and discussed the backlash against racial justice measures at universities. I connected this vision and the university’s recent acknowledgment of participation in settler colonial violence in Minnesota to the second part of the question, which was the current campus climate.

To address the current campus climate, I talked about the existing tensions on campus around Palestine and critiqued the university’s lack of attention to, and its biased approach towards, our Palestinian students. I also talked about the importance of academic freedom in relation to pro-Palestine rallies, the importance of a social justice approach to inequalities of power in Israel/Palestine, and the importance of educating our campus about the settler colonial history of Israel in Palestine.

The interview and job talk happened on December 14th, but tensions had already built up on campus around Israel/Palestine, after the university leadership produced not one but two statements shortly after October 7. In these statements, Interim President Ettinger condemned Hamas and acknowledged Israeli civilian deaths, but failed to say a word about civilian Palestinian deaths. In the absence of a balanced university response, when over 10,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli bombings at that point, a group of faculty issued a statement in support of the Palestinian people (signed by 825 faculty, students, staff, and alums). Two departments also posted statements on their websites in support of Palestine and condemned the Israeli state’s extreme violence against Palestinians. But the university leadership did not do anything to correct their biased approach. A group of faculty from different colleges met with the Interim President, the Vice President, the Chief of Staff to discuss our demands in the statement. They just listened and dismissed us completely. To date, no statement has been published by the university leadership to acknowledge Palestinian civilian deaths.

In response, a few Zionist faculty issued an open letter to Interim President Ettinger, complaining about these statements and the rallies on campus, accusing those who had written these statements and those who had participated in rallies of antisemitism. Also, a tenured faculty member (who, ironically, is on the academic freedom committee) was persistently recording pro-Palestine activists on campus and intimidating the protesters. This person was coming to peaceful protests and events that groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized and made many students, staff, and faculty uncomfortable by pointing his phone in people’s faces and recording them. 

This recording and doxxing was particularly intimidating because of what has been happening across college campuses, and especially after three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont for wearing keffiyehs. In a campus rally a few days before my job talk, this faculty member showed up, making many students uncomfortable again with his intimidating routine of recording the protesters. I said on the mic that the doxxing was endangering students’ lives, especially that those who recorded us for exercising our First Amendment Rights had falsely accused us of antisemitism in their open letters to the President. I brought the example of three Palestinian students in Vermont who were shot just a few days before our rally. One faculty member at the rally suggested that we take out our own phones and record back the person who was doxxing us. So that’s what we did, and that made the doxxer leave. But he immediately filed a complaint against me with the Equal Opportunity Office, claiming that I had accosted him.

There were a couple of other things that happened after the rally, which were used to put pressure on the administration to prevent me from being hired for the AD DEI job. One was an article in the Star Tribune, which reported that a complaint was made with the Department of Education to ask for a federal investigation on antisemitism at the University Of Minnesota. The article cited those who had filed the complaint: Richard Painter, a Law school faculty member and a conservative White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration, and Michael Hsu, a former UMN Regents member who had tried to pass conservative and racist resolutions in the past. Among other things in their complaint, Painter and Hsu accused the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies of antisemitism, and claimed that a Jewish faculty member had been accosted at a “pro-Hamas rally.”

The letter to the Department of Education, to which the Star Tribune article referred, lists a number of incidents to allegedly prove that there is widespread antisemitism at the University of Minnesota. The first bullet point claims that a faculty who is a candidate for a DEI position accosted a Jewish faculty member at a “pro-Hamas rally”! So, without naming me, they gave enough identifiers to accuse me of supporting Hamas and accosting a Zionist doxxer. They also attacked the statements that faculty and a couple of departments had issued in support of the Palestinians on the grounds that the statements were antisemitic. Basically, any critique of the state of Israel and its genocide in Gaza was accused of antisemitism, and any pro-Palestine rally was characterized as “pro-Hamas” in this complaint. All of this was already happening on campus before my job talk.

So then, what happens when you give this talk?

So, the reason I addressed the Palestine-Israel tensions at UMN in my talk was because these tensions were completely related to the question about the current campus climate. During the Q & A, the doxxer, whom I mentioned earlier, told me that 90% of my talk was about Palestine and asked me, “Your department has produced a statement in support of Palestine, but you did not at all mention the rape of Israeli women by Hamas.” 

You can look at the video to see how I responded, but in a nutshell, I responded by saying that the statement was issued collectively by the department and I was not there to represent GWSS, but to speak individually as a DEI job candidate.

I also said that, based on the anti-colonial, anti-racist, and transnational feminist scholarship that some of us practice at GWSS, I could explain that many feminists consider rape to be a tool of power. I explained that for postcolonial feminist scholars, the analysis of rape is not separate from the politics of settler colonialism and racism. I talked about how, in the context of the United States, for example, accusations of rape have historically been deployed to criminalize, lynch, and incarcerate Black men, Indigenous men, and Mexican men. And I explained that in the context of settler colonialism and slavery, rape is often used to justify the incarceration and killing of the colonized and the enslaved, because they are accused of violating and threatening the purity of white women.

I strongly believe that Israel, as a settler colonial state, has historically used similar strategies against Palestinian men to justify killing them, round up Palestinian boys and men and take them hostage, and commit a genocide in Gaza. 

I pointed out that as a former rape crisis counselor who worked at a rape crisis center for a long time in San Francisco, I believe all survivors of sexual assault, no matter if they’re Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. What I don’t believe is a settler colonial state that has lied repeatedly to justify its apartheid and genocide, especially when it weaponizes rape and has a history of accusing Palestinian men of rape.

I also said that the state of Israel had not substantiated its claims, nor had it allowed the UN to investigate the allegations of rape at the time of my job talk. The person who asked the question about rape continued his hostile questions by asking me if I admitted that Hamas chopped up Israeli babies. Obviously, these questions were premeditated and were meant to distract from my presentation. Saying that I have yet to see testimonies from rape survivors (and not staged statements coming from the state of Israel) is different from denying rapes of Israeli women altogether. As it became apparent later, these questions aimed to suggest that I was defending Hamas, or that I was a spokesperson for Hamas, merely for asking the university to be accountable to our Palestinian students.

What happens to you after the talk?

A day after my talk and interview with the committee, on Friday, December 15th, I had an interview with the Dean of CLA, who asked me to elaborate on my vision of inclusion. I spoke in length about strategies of admitting students and hiring faculty and staff from Hmong and Somali communities, which are underrepresented at UMN, despite the large Hmong and Somali populations in the Twin Cities. The dean was very enthusiastic and expressed that she really liked my ideas and could see me leading these efforts, and even joked that she might “steal” my ideas.

I knew that the college and the university were under pressure, because a CLA staff member had informally let me know that they were receiving a lot of calls and emails from pro-Israeli people protesting my candidacy for this job. I actually asked the committee and the dean if these attacks and pressures might impact the hiring process and they said no. The dean told me that she was not going to let them bully her, as she felt like she was being bullied by those who were pressuring her about the GWSS statements. Based on the feedback from the colleagues among the audience, and the conversation with the dean, I got the sense that I had a good chance of being hired for the position. But on Monday, I got an email from the dean saying that even though my interview and talk were strong, after consulting with the committee and others, she decided not to name an Associate Dean of DEI at that time. The other candidate received a similar email.

I wrote back to the dean and thanked her for the opportunity, and asked her why neither candidate was qualified for the position. After a few days, in an email response (which seemed to have been copied and pasted), she said that I didn’t have an implementation plan (the other candidate received a similar response). This was very surprising to me, considering that in our meeting on Friday, the dean had explicitly said that she loved my ideas of implementing inclusion measures. We had even discussed strategies for overcoming obstacles to reaching out to immigrant and refugee communities, given the political contentions in post-war diaspora communities. So, her response about the lack of an implementation plan did not seem consistent with her excitement during my interview.

It became more apparent that the decision to cancel the DEI search was in response to the pressure on the college and the university, before and after my talk.

Talk about the wider campaign against you that you become aware of

On that Tuesday, I received an email from a person who identified himself as a “concerned Jewish citizen.” This email,  with the subject line “I support Sima Shakhsari,” was addressed to the board of regents, the university president, and a number of administrators. The author informed the email recipients of a Facebook group called MACA (Mothers Against College Antisemitism) that had started a campaign to prevent me from being hired for the Ad DEI position.

Apparently, the group had started a letter-writing campaign where people could click on a link to send a pre-written text to the regents, to the president of the university, administrators, and the White House Antisemitism Office. The letters that were sent basically said something to the effect of “Sima Shakhsari is a dangerous antisemitic person who denies rape and supports terrorism and should not be the DEI Associate Dean!” Because I was not able to see this private Facebook group, the person who kindly copied me in his email to the administrators sent me screenshots of numerous posts and comments in which I was demonized.

The forum discussed strategies of putting pressure on the university to prevent me from being hired for the position of associate dean. Shortly after, the Jewish Insider and Times of Israel issued identical articles claiming that I had denied rape, that I shouted “globalize the Intifada” at rallies, and that I was a candidate for a senior administrative position at UMN. Taking what I had said at my job talk out of context, and copying defamatory information from the Canary Mission page, the articles produced a narrative to accuse me of antisemitism in order to stop UMN from hiring me for the associate dean position.

It is very clear from the quotes by the Zionist faculty in these articles that this was a concerted joint effort between the Zionists on campus, Zionist media, and outside groups and vigilantes to put pressure on the university to cancel the search. One wonders how the Times of Israel learned about a job at a U.S. Midwestern university, if those in the university who have been doxxing pro-Palestinian faculty, students, and staff had not actively contacted the right-wing Zionist media and hate groups. 

A day after the Jewish Insider article was published (and a week after my job talk), I woke up to numerous hate mail messages in my work email. These extremely hostile messages attacked me with vulgar and sexist language that used female body parts as an insult. Email messages by people who called me a rape denier, an antisemite, and wished me a painful death or rape. There were also email threats and a very creepy voice message on my personal phone from an unknown caller who read my home address and said that I would be watched. 

I’m not on Twitter, but I started getting calls from my friends who were concerned about my safety because they saw Islamophobic and transphobic Twitter posts attacking me for “denying rape.”

I also received hate messages on Facebook from people with whom I am not Facebook friends. People telling me that they were after my job, calling me evil, calling me vulgar names, wishing me death, and sending me violent videos. There were also messages from far-right Christians saying that they wanted to exorcise the evil out of me and convert me to Christianity or sending me videos of those who had denounced Islam and condemned Hamas.  

So, to sum up, the campaign included rampant hate mail, email and voicemail threats, online harassment, social media trolling, a defamatory website using my legal name, and attempts to damage my intellectual reputation through negative ratings on my book, among other measures that have caused me emotional distress and harm, all because of my stance on justice in Palestine and my insistence on an end to the genocide in Gaza. I continued to get hate mail and threats until the CLA publicly announced the appointment of a staff member to the Associate Dean position–a position that is reserved for faculty (and not staff). 

I forwarded most of the Islamophobic and violent messages I received to the university administration. The university leadership did nothing besides telling me to call 9-1-1. I did. This is the response I received from the Saint Paul police officer who reluctantly showed up at my door: “We cannot do anything until something actually happens to you. Technically there is no crime here.” Why? Because an email that said, “I will find you, antisemitic cunt!” or a voicemail saying “Are you still at [my home address]? You will be watched”; or an email to the President warning him that hiring me for the AD DEI will turn out poorly for UMN and ending the email with “we will deal with that scum”; or other emails suggesting that I should be raped, do not count as real threats. Because in the officer’s words, “they say they will find you, but they do not say what they are going to do to you.” 

Instead, I was told by the officer in a very dismissive tone that he knew how I felt, because as a police officer, he too was scared that someone might attack him because of his job. He told me that he understood how I felt because he had been in Iraq when he was in the military, and he too feared that people wanted to kill him because “they thought their religion was better than ours.” He felt threatened by Iraqis in Iraq because “they did not understand that they need to be tolerant of difference!” The police officer refused to file a criminal report, and after I asked him to call and talk to UMNPD’s officer, who had passed me to the St. Paul Police after a few rounds of phone calls, he reluctantly gave me a case number so that I could call them in case something happened to me.

Of course, I cannot expect more from a St Paul police officer, but I expected more from the university leadership. I (and many UMN faculty, staff, and students) have asked the university multiple times to issue a statement acknowledging the lives of Palestinian students and their loved ones. We have asked the university to show care for Middle Eastern faculty, students, and staff the same way that it does for others. I have asked the university to condemn the hateful attacks and threats against me and other pro-Palestinian members of the university. The response from the leadership has been silence, or at best, “I am sorry this is happening to you.”  To be fair, the CLA HR staff showed concern and checked on me via email when threats and hate mails were flooding in. And the CLA dean has shown the courtesy and respect that a colleague deserves by responding to my request for a statement. But her response was, “Colleagues at University Relations have found that statements increase rather than decrease the number and intensity of the communications. As such, the University does not intend to issue a statement.”  This response is ironic, because the lack of public response from the university did not necessarily decrease the intensity of threats. It culminated in a campus-wide shooting threat.

On January 11th, all UMN members received a security alert about someone threatening to carry out a shooting on campus. These alerts portrayed the suspect as someone with a history of mental health issues, but did not mention anything about the racial hate motivations of the shooter. It was only after the suspect was arrested that we learned, through non-university media, that he had made explicit threats against Iranians. On his social media, the suspect had warned, “Here we go AMERICA, I am heading out from watson Mn to the U of M Minneapolis mn to start killing kids this am as Joseph mark rongstad.” “If this government don’t have the total lock down of ALL university’s of Minnesota by this morning sun up watch out PARENTS what happens to your KIDS from IRAN in 2 weeks…. see something say something…. Kids will die for real amongst them u of m students.”   

Of course, given the background of what has been happening in the world, and what has been happening at the UMN campus, this threat was not just about “kids from Iran.” Orientalism conflates all people from the region, making one replaceable with another (and we saw this during the hate crimes against Muslims and Sikhs alike after 9/11/2001). This threat that specifically mentions Iran is not unrelated to the threats and hate mail that I received (wherein my nationality was explicitly referenced). And it is not unrelated to anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate that has been on the rise on our campus and across the U.S. Despite this very specific reference, no Iranian, Palestinian, Muslim, or Middle Eastern student, faculty, or staff that I know received any communication from the university to make sure that we were safe. None of us were notified of this racially motivated hate crime. It was portrayed as a random threat by a lone wolf with mental health issues. 

I and many of my Middle Eastern colleagues, staff, and students cannot help but to think that in the context of what is happening in Palestine/Israel, had this been a threat by an antisemitic person (which most likely would have been made by a white supremacist and not by a Muslim, but would very likely be blamed on Muslims), there would have been multiple statements by the university leadership condemning anti-Semitism (as there should be). There would have been statements about hate and threats, had a non-Muslim, non-Iranian, non-Palestinian, non-Middle Eastern faculty member been receiving such threats systematically.

Yet, the university has not made any statements condemning Islamophobia or racism. Instead, an Afghan queer Muslim staff member was fired for posting a photo of herself at a pro-Palestinian protest on her personal social media. Two Palestinian students were racially profiled and escorted off an airplane at the Minneapolis airport for making a passenger uncomfortable, because they spoke Arabic. This lack of response from the university compelled a group of us to form the UMN chapter of Faculty, Librarians, Alumni, Graduate Students, and Staff for Justice in Palestine. 

We are still waiting to see whether the university leadership is going to show any kind of care for its faculty, staff, and students who are Palestinian, Muslim, or Middle Eastern. Despite this silence, what has been extremely heart-warming to me is the support I received from my friends and the community. I have been humbled and moved by the support from the UMN SJP and SDS, graduate students, faculty and staff, Palestine Legal, and feminist colleagues at other universities. Of course, this support shows that no matter how they try to silence us, our love for each other and for our Palestinian relatives sustains us. No matter how many people they kill in Palestine, seeds of resistance will continue to grow until there is an end to Israeli apartheid and genocide and until Palestine is free.