A major organizing body for university faculty is pressuring Muhlenberg College to explain its firing of a tenured Jewish anti-Zionist professor for “bias-related conduct” over an Instagram post that encouraged “shaming Zionists.”
The Pennsylvania liberal arts college’s decision to fire Maura Finkelstein, which it has not acknowledged publicly, came after months of scrutiny surrounding her anti-Zionist activism, and complaints from Jewish students and faculty on campus. The complaints resulted in the opening of a federal Title VI investigation against the school.
The Association for American University Professors told the college in a letter dated Tuesday that it was pressing Finkelstein’s case. It posted the letter on its website on Thursday, the same day that The Intercept, a news site that is heavily critical of Israel, published a story alleging that Finkelstein had become the first tenured professor to be fired over anti-Israel activism.
“The dismissal raises serious concerns about academic freedom at Muhlenberg,” the AAUP said in the letter. The organization further accused the college of not following due process in firing a tenured professor.
According to the AAUP’s letter, an investigation at Muhlenberg recommended in early May that Finkelstein be fired “for just cause.” The school told her that her employment would end May 31 and her appeal was recently rejected, according to the letter.
Representatives for Muhlenberg did not respond to a JTA request for comment, nor did Finkelstein. Finkelstein was removed from the school’s website sometime in the last month, according to records preserved by the Internet Archive.
“If I can be fired for criticizing a foreign government, calling attention to a genocide and using my academic expertise as an anthropologist to draw attention to how power operates, then no one is safe,” Finkelstein told the news site Inside Higher Ed in an emailed statement on Friday. “I wasn’t fired for anything I said in the classroom. I was fired because of a charge brought by a student I had never met, let alone taught, who had been surveying my social media account for months.
She added, “This isn’t about student safety, this is about silencing dissent. We are witnessing a new McCarthyism and we should all be terrified of its implications.”
According to Inside Higher Ed, Finkelstein is pursuing an additional appeal and is still drawing a salary from Muhlenberg.
Finkelstein first drew public attention in late October, shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, when pro-Israel Muhlenberg graduates launched an online petition calling for her to be fired. The petition, which now has more than 8,000 signatures, cited her social media posts from shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that criticized student fundraising for Israel. “Students raising money for genocide,” she posted at the time.
She was suspended from the school in January, according to reports in the student newspaper and elsewhere. January was also when the U.S. Department of Education opened its Title VI investigation into Muhlenberg for discrimination related to ethnicity or shared ancestry, which remains active.
The investigation centered solely around Finkelstein, according to the letter that triggered it, which linked to the Change.org petition calling for her firing.
An anthropology professor at Muhlenberg with a PhD from Stanford University who earned tenure in 2021, Finkelstein does not study the Middle East but has been a vocal pro-Palestinian activist since shortly after Oct. 7. Her research focuses on urban and medical anthropology, according to her now-deleted faculty page.
In November she authored an essay titled “Reframing Hamas,” in which she cast doubt on whether the group constituted a terrorist organization; claimed that Israel, and not Hamas, was “the original terrorist organization at play”; denied evidenced-based reports that Hamas militants raped women on Oct. 7, as well as reports of Hamas using hospitals in Gaza as military bases; and claimed, contrary to a litany of evidence, that “eyewitness accounts from Israeli survivors show that, instead, Israel’s indiscriminate attacks were likely responsible for a majority of these casualties.”
Muhlenberg’s decision to terminate Finkelstein rested on her social media activity, specifically a post she shared that called for “shaming Zionists, not welcoming them into your spaces, making them feel uncomfortable, not normalizing Zionists, calling them racists, and not allowing Zionists to take up space.” In the online petition, Muhlenberg alumni also alleged that Finkelstein has harassed pro-Israel students and alums online.
According to the AAUP letter, a Muhlenberg panel determined in May that her posts had violated the school’s code of conduct and recommended that she be fired.
The decision to terminate her raised concerns with the AAUP, which recently relaxed its longstanding stance against academic boycotts as calls for universities to boycott Israel have proliferated.
“In addition to extramural speech, Professor Finkelstein’s case presents additional issues of potential interest to our members and to the academic community at large,” Anita Levy, the group’s senior program director, wrote in the Tuesday letter to Muhlenberg President Kathleen Herring. She added that AAUP would be convening its own group to investigate Finkelstein’s case in more detail.
Levy continued, “These include whether expressions of opposition to Zionism or the government of Israel can be tantamount to antisemitism, discrimination, and harassment of students; how compliance with equal opportunity requirements on a campus intersects with institutional policies governing academic freedom, due process, and faculty governance; and the extent to which controversy stemming from the war in Gaza can affect campus conditions for academic freedom and due process.”
On the social network X, where Finkelstein shared photos Thursday from a New York pro-Palestinian protest at which Lebanese flags could also be seen and chants of “From the river to the sea” could be heard, the professor praised The Intercept for its article about her.
“You either stand with oppressed people and fight for justice and liberation or you align yourself with power & fight in the service of white supremacy and fascism,” Finkelstein wrote.
Also on Thursday, the editor of American Anthropologist, the journal for the American Anthropological Association, announced that Finkelstein had joined the staff as an associate editor. The masthead lists her as an independent scholar — the only one among more than a dozen to lack an institutional affiliation.
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