The United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) stands with Hobart and Smith Colleges Professor Jodi Dean, who has been “relieved” of her teaching responsibilities by the school administration for her public support of the Palestinian struggle.
Dean is a long-time advocate for Palestinian liberation, anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles, and the rights of oppressed people. She has recently co-edited with Charisse Burden-Stelly Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing. This kind of scholarship along with her numerous works on global digital media and technology have been integral to the incisive social justice theory for which she is well known and internationally respected.
Dean was relieved of her teaching duties after writing this piece for the Verso blog: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone. In it, Dean calls for people everywhere to recognize Palestinian liberation as a common struggle. This only one in a series of attacks targeting speech and advocacy about Palestine that is serious about Palestinian political organizing and self-determination and clearly recognizes the Palestinian right to resist occupation, colonialism and genocide.
This sudden disciplinary action by Dean’s long-time employer is part of a nation-wide wave of repression against faculty and students speaking up for Palestine. This draconian turn includes arrests of 19 students at Pomona College, the cancellation of events featuring Palestinian writers, lecturers, filmmakers and artists like Samia Halaby at Indiana University, and new attempts to restrict the right to assemble and protest on college and university campuses, such as at Columbia University where Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters were suspended.
As Dean herself posted on Twitter, “McCarthyism is real.” The racist, Islamophobic attacks on American professors and students is at one with the state of Israel’s massive destruction of Palestinian universities, and its assassinations of Palestinian scholars and students.
We in USACBI call for Professor Dean’s reinstatement to her teaching position. We join her call for an end to the brutal assault on Occupied Palestine and on those who support them around the world, including within the United States.
