Sarah Viren writes:

In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots.

As Finkelstein prepared to go home, she noticed a text from someone claiming to be the college’s provost, Laura Furge. “I had just done the online phishing training,” she told me later. “And I was like, ‘I know that if the provost texts me on an unknown number, it’s spam.’” She deleted and blocked the message. Then she checked her email. There was a message from the provost there as well.

“So, I unblocked her number and called her,” she said. Furge told Finkelstein that the Department of Education had opened an investigation into Muhlenberg for potential civil rights violations. The college had yet to receive the underlying complaint, but they knew a professor had been named, and campus administrators assumed that professor was Finkelstein.

It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only,” below which she had written “Free Gaza, free Palestine, stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli and American war machines.” In another, on Oct. 26, she wrote, “ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITS OCCUPATION.”

Furge didn’t have many details to share with Finkelstein. “She was like, ‘I wanted you to know so you didn’t hear it from the press first,’” Finkelstein recalled. “And — this is so me — I was like, ‘Laura, I am always trying to help the college have different experiences.’” Furge, Finkelstein said, “didn’t really laugh.”

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.

Two days later, on a Friday, Finkelstein got an email from Jennifer Storm, the director of equity and Title IX at Muhlenberg, asking her to come to a meeting the following Monday — with a lawyer if she wanted one. It was not the first time Finkelstein had met with either Storm or Furge about a complaint, but it was the first time the college mentioned counsel. “I was a nervous wreck,” Finkelstein said. “I didn’t sleep.” It never occurred to her that the Instagram story was the cause.

But the meeting, which took place a week later on Zoom with Finkelstein’s lawyer present, was entirely about her repost. Finkelstein was told not to return to campus and locked out of her email. Her classes would be reassigned to an adjunct professor while the college hired an outside firm to investigate. Six days later, Finkelstein and her lawyers received an update with a specific student named in the complaint. That student wrote that Finkelstein’s “hate-filled Discriminatory statements that clearly say she will discriminate against Zionists affect me personally because I am Jewish and Israeli.” (The student did not respond to requests for comment.)

The investigation stretched over the spring semester. Then, in May, Finkelstein received a new letter from the college: She was being fired, with cause. This despite her having tenure, a historic form of academic job protection meant to insulate scholars from the steamrolling power of both politics and public opinion. Less noticed at the time, but arguably more prophetic, was how the mechanics of her firing trammeled yet another longtime standard in the academy, that of professors’ deciding among themselves when and if a colleague should be fired.

To those who sympathized with her activism around the Gaza war, this would feel like a grim turning point. But in the year since — as the Trump administration, in the name of fighting antisemitism, has arrested graduate students and scholars, threatened entire departments and colleges and siphoned support from some of the country’s most prized universities — her story has taken on the weight of an omen. At the center of the chaos and fear swirling around the administration’s dismantling of the academy is the same question that animates Finkelstein’s case: Will the freedoms guaranteed to professors for generations survive? [Continue reading…]