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?
Academic freedom is spoken of with a solemnity in the United States that belies both its relatively short history and its present precarity. The first time the term appeared in a court decision was in 1940, following a lawsuit over a job offer made to the philosopher Bertrand Russell by the City College of New York. A parent sued the city’s Board of Higher Education, arguing that Russell’s views on sex and sexuality might unduly influence her daughter, who couldn’t have attended the City College of New York anyway because at the time it admitted only men. A judge ruled in her favor, and in that ruling outlined what he saw as certain limits to academic freedom, a concept only then coming into clarity in the American consciousness.
“While this court would not interfere with any action of the board in so far as a pure question of ‘valid’ academic freedom is concerned,” the judge wrote, “it will not tolerate academic freedom being used as a cloak to promote the popularization in the minds of adolescents of acts forbidden by the Penal Law.”
Russell easily found a position at another university, but he compared his plight afterward with that of Socrates, a scholar also persecuted for “corrupting the youth” — though with notably more dire consequences. While Socrates taught well before the advent of the Western university, he is perhaps as good an indicator as any that teachers have always been at risk for either unduly influencing or being seen as unduly influencing their students.
For most of early American history, in fact, educators could be fired for espousing dangerous ideas, real or perceived, without much uproar. The first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, lost his job in 1654 for speaking about the then-remarkable decision to not baptize his fourth child. Seventy years later, the rector of Yale was fired after he converted to Anglicanism. And in 1856, Benjamin Hedrick, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, was fired and fled the state after students burned effigies of him and a mob at an educational conference threatened to tar and feather him — all for opposing not slavery itself but the expansion of slavery into the Western territories.
It was only around the turn of the last century that anyone began to talk with earnestness about academic freedom, although there remained disagreements, then as now, about what exactly that freedom entails. In 1885, the American Economic Association became one of the earliest academic groups to endorse what its members referred to as freedom of discussion, a right linked to the German university ideal of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit — freedom to teach and freedom to learn. When an economics professor, Edward Ross, was forced to resign 15 years later at Stanford (ostensibly for his views on Asian immigrants, although more precisely, it now seems, for his opposition to the Asian immigration upon which the railroad industry and the Stanford wealth depended), economists with the association criticized the firing via a committee report and seven professors at the university resigned in protest.
One of those professors, the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, would later be instrumental in forming the American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.), and in helping that organization’s commitment to academic freedom. In a 1915 declaration of principles, it defined academic freedom as three-pronged: the freedom to teach; the freedom to research within a professor’s discipline; and — the most contentious among them — the freedom, as a citizen, to the same speech rights that everyone else in this country had. In addition, the declaration’s authors inserted a few caveats that would later become consequential: Professors needed tenure protections, they wrote, and they also needed to decide among themselves, via committee, when one of their peers had crossed a line — a key part of what eventually became known as faculty governance.
“If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical or intemperate partisanship,” the authors wrote, “it is certain that the task will be performed by others.”
In the decades that followed, the A.A.U.P. would slowly establish this general model as a norm, one that more than 250 colleges and universities now officially accept. It did so despite the inevitable contests to academic freedom: during World War I, when faculty members were fired for pacifism or refusing to buy war bonds and the association would not defend them; with rise of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, when Lovejoy himself argued that communist professors were suspect; during the civil rights era, when professors were again fired for their speech and activism, a form of repression particularly fierce in the South; and in recent decades, as tenured positions at universities have steadily been replaced by so-called contingent ones that promise few of the protections Finkelstein had when she was fired.
While the A.A.U.P.’s influence was pivotal, a number of historical forces converged to cement academic freedom in America. Colleges and universities had diversified; the church lost its hold on the state; and cases similar to Russell’s eventually made their way to the Supreme Court, which in several decisions bulwarked faculty-speech rights. The U.S. government also developed an interest in universities — not only as centers of education but also as armories of research and as inventors, in the years to come, of everything from Gatorade to CT scans. Such support meant more funding for universities and colleges as well as a wider berth for their faculties to manage themselves. In this context, academic freedom was less a moral good than a perk to keep scientists and intellectuals stateside and, with the rise of totalitarianism in Europe over the previous century, one more lure to bring coveted thinkers here: Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich.
“If you want to resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must keep clearly before us what is at stake,” Albert Einstein told an audience in England four days before he left for the United States in 1933. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister.”
The United States offered Einstein a secure academic job and eventually citizenship, but it did so as many elite universities maintained Jewish quotas and barred Black scholars outright. Dismantling these inequalities would come only years later, primarily by way of laws centered on that other German freedom, the freedom to learn. In 1964, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act helped protect students from discrimination and harassment based on race, color and country of origin, and eight years later, Title IX of the Education Amendment extended those protections to sex, followed by, a year later, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which applied to students with disabilities.
With the passage of each of these laws, the federal government gained a level of oversight over universities that it previously lacked — and the funding it directed toward research and development became a potential carrot or stick to bring about change that Joy Williamson-Lott, a scholar of higher education, said felt particularly consequential in places like the South. “That’s what forced changes at those institutions,” she said. “You couldn’t prevent Black people from attending and receive federal funding. I mean, they found creative ways around it, of course. But you couldn’t just prohibit Black attendance. You couldn’t censor faculty’s lectures. You had to play by the rules.”
One rule being: Students have a right to learn without harassment or discrimination. Another rule being: Faculty and scholars have a right to academic freedom. It’s not intuitive that those rules, these twin sets of rights, would find themselves in opposition, but perhaps it should have been.
Finkelstein went public with her firing in September, after she lost her appeal to an outside arbitrator, and almost immediately her story became both news and a means of framing the news. Academics and advocacy groups issued statements of concern and reprobation, the A.A.U.P. announced an “inquiry” into the dismissal and the authors of the Change.org petition posted a victory note.
To some, Finkelstein was the clearest example yet of the “Palestine exception” to campus free speech: a tenured professor fired for pro-Palestinian speech and “another example of weaponizing Title VI for purposes of punishing lawful political speech,” as Brian Leiter, a philosopher and law professor at the University of Chicago, phrased it on his blog that month.
Within this framing, a clear predecessor was Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American scholar who, in 2014, had recently accepted a tenured job at the University of Illinois. That summer, before his position officially started, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed in the West Bank; in what is now known as the 2014 Gaza War, Israel invaded Gaza, killing more than 2,000 Palestinians, including women, children and health workers. Salaita tweeted throughout the violence, writing at one point, “The logic of ‘antisemitism’ deployed by Zionists, if applied in principle, would make pretty much everybody not a sociopath ‘antisemitic.’” Following threats from donors and a petition to block his appointment, the university rescinded Salaita’s job offer two weeks before he was scheduled to start. He later sued for breach of contract and violation of his speech rights and settled with the university for $875,000, but later wrote that he had not been able to find another academic job in the United States.
Jodi Dean was another, more recent parallel. A politics professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Dean was put on leave from her tenured job last spring after she wrote an online essay that began by describing the images of “paragliders evading Israeli air defenses” during the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as “exhilarating.” She was investigated and later reinstated when no evidence was found that either she or her essay had discriminated against or harassed students.
According to data collected by the free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), she and Finkelstein were among more than 40 professors investigated by their colleges and universities for pro-Palestinian speech after Oct. 7. Of those, eight professors without tenure protections were fired; two had tenured job offers rescinded; and one with tenure, Finkelstein, was fired.
Another framing of Finkelstein’s story last September, however, went something like this: Liberals brought this one on themselves. “Everyone upset about the Muhlenberg should acknowledge the long line of tenured faculty fired for protected speech after leftwing outrage,” Jeffrey A. Sachs, a politics professor at Acadia University, in Canada, wrote on X that month.
His list included Charles Negy, who was briefly fired from the University of Central Florida in 2021 after tweeting about “Black privilege,” and Tim Boudreau, a tenured journalism professor from Central Michigan University, who lost his job a year earlier, in part for showing a slide with a racial slur during a lecture on the First Amendment. Sachs then gestured at other unnamed faculty who he said had been fired or punished “for protected speech that pissed off the Left” before ending his thread with a mention of the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.
Suspended last fall with a pay cut following a yearslong investigation and review by that university’s faculty senate, Wax is often cited by those who argue that universities have become hostile to conservative speech. She was punished, according to Penn’s response to a lawsuit she filed in January, for a history of “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including saying that the United States would be better off with more white people and that women are less knowledgeable than men, telling a student that Black people are inferior to white people and publicly discussing the grade distribution in her classes based on race. (The lawsuit is ongoing.)
“Academic freedom’s canary in the coal mine,” FIRE, the free-speech organization, said of Wax in a Sept. 24 article on its website about her punishment. Three days later, the group mentioned Wax again in an editorial about Finkelstein’s firing, situating her case alongside Wax’s and also to that of another tenured professor, Joe Gow, who was fired that same week from the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, for, in part, a series of pornographic videos that he made with his wife.
FIRE, formed in 1999, has been among the most diligent in tracking and denouncing moments of outrage over things said or done on college campuses, from violent tweets to seminars on whiteness to offensive Halloween costumes, but it has also been among the more vocal in arguing that higher education is in trouble and a major cause is what it calls a “culture of censorship” on college campuses.
In a 2022 analysis of publicly reported “sanction attempts” against scholars since 2000, FIRE’s researchers tracked a sharp rise, starting around 2015, in moves by just about everyone — from activists to politicians to students to conservative groups like Turning Point USA — to punish university faculty members for what they say or write, inside and outside the classroom. The number of professors or instructors who have been fired has risen, from 69, including 16 with tenure, between 2000 and 2014, to 156, including 44 with tenure, in the eight years that followed. The data, though far from comprehensive, shows peaks in fury over professor conduct coinciding with major political events, including Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
In their analysis, however, FIRE researchers highlighted one specific finding as particularly troubling: that a majority of “sanction attempts” against scholars came from inside the academy — from faculty, administrators or students. It’s a framing of the data that supports a broader conservative argument: that an intellectual monoculture is growing in the academy and is stifling freedom of speech. This view puts FIRE at odds with the American Association of University Professors, which has long held that there are limits to what faculty members can say or write and those limits should be determined by the faculty members themselves.
Nico Perrino, executive vice president for FIRE, told me that his organization sees academic freedom more as an individual right, but he said it also supports the idea of faculty members’ governing themselves to a certain degree. When I asked who decides when and if those professors have governed badly, he offered Amy Wax as an example. “For the faculty to come out through the disciplinary process and punish Amy Wax is a moral wrong,” he said.
For the A.A.U.P., Wax is also an example but one of trusting the system of faculty governance that has sustained the academy for decades, says Joan W. Scott, a historian and author of a book on academic freedom. The organization, which represents around 50,000 university professors, notes one fundamental difference between Finkelstein’s case and Wax’s: Wax was judged by a committee of her peers, while Finkelstein wasn’t. Sanction attempts, in this framing, are supposed to originate within the academy. If outsiders decide that faculty members can no longer be trusted to govern themselves, then, as the A.A.U.P. founders prophesied in 1915, “it is certain that the task will be performed by others.”
In early October, I began tracking down students from Muhlenberg, whose voices had been notably absent from most of the takes on Finkelstein that fall. I talked to nearly a dozen students over the subsequent months, some of whom didn’t want to be named because they were afraid of being doxxed, or of angering their family, friends or the college. Four of those students were Jewish, two of whom supported the petition to fire Finkelstein.
Many of the students told me that Muhlenberg had been a pretty great place to go to school, at least before Oct. 7. It was also, according to faculty members, a sometimes difficult place to work. Muhlenberg had declining enrollment and a shrinking faculty body — financial pressures the college dismissed, citing its endowment — but that the college paper, The Muhlenberg Weekly, had covered and that faculty members said made them more aware of both student tuition and donor influence.
Katherine Conlon, a student and editor of The Weekly in the fall of 2023 and that following spring, said she saw financial pressures as a factor in what happened with Finkelstein, but so, too, was everything else happening far beyond the college. “Tensions were just running high, especially right after the Oct. 7 attacks,” she said. “And I think people wanted to find some way to take out their frustration and anger and she was a really good person to do that with for a lot of people. And then, it kind of just spiraled.”
Finkelstein arrived at Muhlenberg in 2015, when she was in her mid-30s, after two years as visiting assistant professor at Mills College in the Bay Area. She taught about India, where her first book, an ethnography of Mumbai mill workers, is set, and later about Palestinians, including a class called “The Anthropology of Palestine.” In the classroom, she told me, her aim was to push students “to think beyond the limits of their own imagination” but also, as an influential high school history teacher once did for her, to give them information they may have previously been denied. That high school teacher, James Biedron, had, via mock Middle East peace talks her senior year, first prompted Finkelstein to research historic Palestine and ultimately, she said, to find “a place to land” in her Jewish identity, as an anti-Zionist Jew.
Outside the classroom, Finkelstein was already, as she phrased it, “loud.” She invited Sa’ed Atshan, the head of peace-and-conflict studies at Swarthmore College and a Palestinian Quaker, to campus in 2018 to give a lecture. “It’s very difficult for us to discuss Palestine here in the United States,” Finkelstein told attendees. “This discussion is fraught and uncomfortable, and so we must have it.” She took a trip with other educators to visit Palestinian territories that same year and wrote about the experience in an online essay in which she criticized Hillel, a Jewish student group, for centering support of Israel over “Jewish religious and cultural life” at Muhlenberg and on other campuses. On the door of her office, in a campus building shared with Hillel, there was a whiteboard that read in Arabic, “Long Live Palestine.”
In those years, Finkelstein thought she understood the risks of speaking her mind. She followed Salaita’s case from afar in 2014, and she was a graduate student at Columbia in 2005 during the investigation of Joseph A. Massad, a Palestinian Christian and Middle Eastern Studies professor at the university. She knew it was possible to be investigated, but she hoped that getting tenure, which she did in 2021, and being Jewish herself would insulate her.
She still thought this on Oct. 10, 2023, when Muhlenberg’s president, Kathleen Harring, sent out a campuswide email addressing what took place on the border of Gaza and Israel three days earlier. “The terrorism Hamas perpetrated on Israel and the Jewish people is deplorable,” Harring wrote. “The conflict in the Middle East has played out over millenniums, but no matter the history Hamas’ decision to invade a sovereign nation and murder its citizens was an evil one.”
At many colleges, a professor cannot respond to a campuswide email from an administrator with a reply-all email of her own, but at Muhlenberg such dialogue was still possible — though it would be shut down within a month. Finkelstein replied-all to emails at the college before, and that day she decided to do so again.
“There is no doubt that Saturday’s surprise attacks are devastating,” she wrote. “We must mourn all civilian deaths. These are terrifying times. But we cannot mourn without also acknowledging the fact that Israel is a settler colonial state, Palestinians have been living under occupation since 1948, and Gaza is an open-air prison, the densest and perhaps most dangerous place in the world.”
Finkelstein then emailed students in both of her classes to say she would spend their next meeting discussing any questions they had about Oct. 7. Both classes were small, with 10 to 12 students, and in each Finkelstein said the discussion that day centered on questions students emailed her beforehand, a number of which were some variations on: What is Hamas?
Anna Mikoski, one of three students I talked to in Finkelstein’s urban-anthropology course, told me she later referred to that class period as “the infamous class.” The students arrived that day, and Mikoski remembered looking around and noting at least two students who were known — in the way so much is known on small liberal-arts campuses — to identify as Zionists. “What’s she going to say?” Mikoski remembered thinking, but also, “What are they going to say back?”
In response to one question, Mikoski remembered Finkelstein referring to Palestinian land as occupied territory and linking that idea to concepts in urban anthropology — to questions of borders and checkpoints. She said Finkelstein later talked about the rise of Hamas.
“She actively said: ‘I do not condone Hamas or its actions. I think that violence is horrible,’” Mikoski recalled. “But her caveat to that was, ‘but it’s not unexpected.’”
That caveat, which Mikoski remembered Finkelstein also connecting to concepts in anthropology, formed the seed of what would soon become a quick-moving rumor on campus. “That nugget is what started to spread on campus that she was pro-Hamas,” she said. “It kind of picked up momentum a lot more quickly than I anticipated.”
One student from Finkelstein’s classes complained to the college, saying, according to the eventual Department of Education investigation, that Finkelstein used her class to “continuously push the narrative that Hamas is doing what needs to be done to liberate people in Gaza from Israel” and calling it “the most uncomfortable classroom environment I have ever stepped foot in.” That student was not named in the report, but a student in Finkelstein’s class that semester said on X that he had “horrible experiences” in her class. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Two other Jewish students at Muhlenberg told me they either heard or understood from others that Finkelstein made students uncomfortable in her classes, though they couldn’t connect me with any of those students. One said he had no personal experience with Finkelstein but “1,000 percent” thought she should be fired because she was “brainwashing students with her class full of hate.” Another said he thought Finkelstein had undue influence online, where people might take her comments about the Gaza war more seriously because of her status as a college professor.
Other students said they saw alumni as the primary instigators of both the rumors about Finkelstein and the backlash against her. The most influential of those alumni voices were the Muhlenberg graduates behind the Change.org petition that went up near the end of October. They demanded that the college fire Finkelstein and threatened to cut off donations and send their petition to “every Jewish High School in America to ensure that they know that Muhlenberg is not a safe place for Jewish students.” Among the evidence presented was Finkelstein’s reply-all email on Oct. 10 and several social media posts, including one criticizing a Hillel fund-raiser in her building that used QR codes to direct donations to the relief efforts as well as the Israel Defense Forces.
Within two days, the petition had almost 5,000 signatures. “Why is this person allowed to teach on campus and why is she employed by this academic institution?” wrote one signatory, identified only as “J.” from New York. “Will any other minority suffer the same harassment and lack of protection but Jews?”
The unenviable job of a college administrator like Furge, the provost, or Storm, the director of Title IX at Muhlenberg, is fielding complaints and deciding when and if student learning or safety is threatened — while simultaneously trying to protect the rights of both faculty members and students to speak their minds. I talked to a number of students at Muhlenberg who told me they felt either attacked or uncomfortable on campus after Oct. 7. One Jewish student, the student who told me he thought Finkelstein was brainwashing her students, said he was shaken by signs that read “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” and then even more so by anonymous posts on the social media site Yik Yak calling him racist after he labeled those signs “unacceptable” on Instagram. Other Jewish students said that the discomfort, for them, came mostly from those who were pro-Israel when they weren’t. “It is a horrible time to be a Muhlenberg student right now,” an unnamed Jewish student told The Weekly in mid-October of that year. “If I express my anger about Israel’s actions I am seen as an antisemite and will be socially ostracized.”
Neither Furge nor Storm agreed to talk with me, but in an interview with D. Stafford & Associates, the outside firm hired by the college to investigate Finkelstein, Storm said that she had researched every complaint sent to her office that semester, many of which were anonymous or came from off campus. When she could, she also “drilled down” with students as to whether they felt uncomfortable or unsafe. The answer was always that they were either still going to Finkelstein’s classes or attending Hillel events, which meant to Storm that they didn’t fear for their safety. They were also not being targeted directly.
“It is not unique to Muhlenberg that students and employees may conflate the two,” the D. Stafford investigators wrote. “The marketplace of ideas does not include speech that may be harassing or threatening. It does include speech that may challenge other people’s viewpoints and encourages discussion of these differing views.”
By November 2023, administrators had talked to Finkelstein about the student in her class, and she agreed not to discuss the war in Gaza again that semester. But the report notes that, after Finkelstein’s post about the Hillel fund-raiser, some students and staff members began monitoring her social media, including about 160 members of a Hillel WhatsApp group chat, where screenshots of her posts were sometimes shared, investigators wrote, to see “if she would cross the line into harassment or threatening behavior.”
According to D. Stafford, Finkelstein never crossed a line that semester, but a feeling of being watched spread across Muhlenberg in the meantime. By the end of the semester, Mikoski told me that she and her friends had begun scanning the dining hall to make sure no one was in earshot when they talked about Finkelstein. Both she and Conlon, the editor of the campus paper, said they heard from professors who were afraid they might be fired if they supported Finkelstein or commented on other topics, like Trump’s candidacy, and one professor, Ioanna Chatzidimitriou, told me that she and others began moving any potentially controversial discussions off their work email — out of fear that the administration might be monitoring them.
The semester ended, and over the winter break, someone cut and pasted the Change.org petition into a complaint form with the Department of Education. In January, before classes had even begun, identical bot-generated emails began arriving every 30 seconds in the inboxes of the university president, provost and senior administrators, all with the same subject line: “Stop Jew Hatred on Your Campus and Fire Maura Finkelstein.” Almost a week later, on Jan. 17, the Department of Education announced its investigation into Muhlenberg, prompted, it appears, on the petition alone.
It was one of about 90 such investigations that the department’s Office for Civil Rights opened in the year or so after Oct. 7, a staggering increase over previous years, which typically saw a half dozen. A handful were in regards to anti-Arab bias but a vast majority were about antisemitism. Some came in response to harrowing reports of harassment or discrimination against Jewish faculty members and students, but others were initiated by seemingly scant on-the-ground evidence or at universities whose Jewish faculty, students and staff members later disputed that antisemitism was a problem. In more than a dozen cases, for example, investigations were prompted by a spate of similarly worded complaints from a single conservative activist, Zachary Marschall, the editor in chief of Campus Reform, who is Jewish and who, in an interview last year, linked the broader campaign by him and others against antisemitism to seemingly unrelated goals, including “the return to universities of traditional values.”
The Department of Education’s investigation at Muhlenberg stretched through the spring semester and summer, ending with a resolution in September 2024, the same month that Finkelstein went public with her firing. In a 20-page report, investigators faulted the college for failing to look at “the totality of the circumstances” when considering if its students faced a hostile learning environment, but avoided saying whether such an environment existed at Muhlenberg in the fall of 2023 and also acknowledged that the college “could not discipline protected speech.” The report only briefly mentions Finkelstein’s disappearing story on Jan. 17; investigators said they had little information about it.
A more granular and revealing look at that incident comes from two additional investigative reports about Finkelstein that year: the confidential report by D. Stafford, the outside firm hired by the college to investigate her repost and one by the A.A.U.P. this April, which draws from faculty and administrator interviews and the D. Stafford investigation in describing the culture and events that precipitated her firing.
The D. Stafford investigation includes interview transcripts with administrators, Hillel staff, faculty, Finkelstein and one student, but its findings are largely inconclusive. Finkelstein’s repost was not a form of harassment, investigators wrote. Whether it was discriminatory depended on whether Zionists were considered a protected class under Title VI, and on that question the investigators equivocated.
A secondary issue, raised in both reports, was how the disappearing story found its way to students. Finkelstein told me she assumed that one of the students who had been monitoring her social media over the previous months saw it. But the two reports remap that understanding significantly.
The night Finkelstein reposted Kanazi’s words, a dean at the college, Allison Williams, noticed the Instagram story, according to her interview with D. Stafford, and said that it “felt different” compared to many of the other things Finkelstein posted. Williams sent a screenshot of the post the next morning to Storm, the Title IX director, according to her interview, and also shared it with the director of Muhlenberg’s Hillel chapter, who hadn’t seen it. He said he felt “impacted personally” by it, according to his interview, and forwarded it to the group’s Israeli fellow and encouraged him to have one or two students file a complaint. One of those students, a member of the Hillel student executive board who had never met Finkelstein, did exactly that.
It was a daisy chain of emails and texts that the A.A.U.P. directly condemned, while the D. Stafford investigators specifically questioned the decision by staff to share social media posts with students. “It is unclear why staff members would intentionally share posts that they know will cause distress to their students,” they wrote.
Muhlenberg College officials said that the disappearing story had been “common knowledge” and that they received a “high volume” of complaints about it. They added that the A.A.U.P. report contained “numerous” factual errors. The college’s full response to that report is included in the report itself and does not specify any specific errors related to the chain of emails and texts.
“Without the surveillance and whipping of student sentiment on this issue,” the A.A.U.P. investigators wrote, “it is unlikely that the controversy and resulting crisis over Professor Finkelstein’s social media posts would have occurred and that Professor Finkelstein would have been dismissed from her tenured position.”
In November, Donald Trump was elected president, having promised, among many other pledges, to purge “anti-American insanity” from the academy. In a short statement the day after the election, the A.A.U.P.’s president, Todd Wolfson, called Trump’s election disappointing and promised to fight for the academy, and in particular for academic freedom. The statement was titled “Higher Ed Must Organize to Ensure a Future for American Democracy.”
His words came as others in higher education, including FIRE, the free-speech organization, were urging universities to hold their tongue — advice reinforced by the election but inspired by months of statements and protests and public infighting over the war in Gaza. “By ‘institutional neutrality’ we mean something specific,” the organization wrote in an open letter with two other groups last July. “We mean the university should remain neutral on contested political and moral issues of the day, precisely in order to make space for scholars and students to weigh in on those issues as individuals.”
A rift between the two organizations had long been foreshadowed — FIRE had already criticized the A.A.U.P. for its positions on academic boycotts and diversity statements — but Wolfson’s response to the election seemingly brought it all to the fore. In the following days, in editorials and articles and social media posts, a series of accusations arose: that FIRE was beholden to conservative funders, that the A.A.U.P. has abandoned all but its most liberal faculty, that FIRE doesn’t understand academic freedom and that the A.A.U.P. is itself now a threat to the freedom it helped codify. That last accusation came from FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff, in a long newsletter chronicling what he characterized as “the fall” of the century-old organization — and ostensibly the rise of his group in its place.
Beneath this public sparring lay a familiar but also consequential fight over the definition and shape of academic freedom and by extension the academy itself. Is it a right that should be checked, or even determined, by those outside the university — by judges or by advocacy groups like FIRE? By politicians or by the general public? Or is it one governed, as universities themselves have largely been for decades, by faculty members themselves?
Into this debate Finkelstein found herself inserted once again. Although she was fired in May of last year, she learned in September that she had a small chance of having that decision reversed. An elected committee of Finkelstein’s peers had never reviewed her case, a failure of academic due process according to a letter from the A.A.U.P. to Muhlenberg last year. (The college said they followed policy.) Now the committee had agreed to do so, after having been formally asked to in a letter from Finkelstein. Its members scheduled a hearing for December, one month after the election, and Finkelstein drove to Allentown on a rainy Monday, nervous about the review, worried about her dwindling legal funds and thinking, as always, about Palestinians.
She spent two days answering questions about her teaching and social media and — via a faculty advocate because no lawyers were allowed — asking administrators questions about their understanding of Zionism and their legal reasoning for firing her. Then she drove back to Brooklyn, where she now lives with her partner and tiny dog, and waited for that committee to decide. Its decision would not be final, but it was meant to hold weight; it would be sent to the university president, Harring, as a recommendation, and then she would decide sometime in the new year if Finkelstein should have been fired, or not.
First, however, Trump’s second term began. By the time I reached out to Finkelstein to check in, in mid-February, the president had already issued his executive order on antisemitism, which his administration said would be aimed at “anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” His education department was days away from releasing a “Dear Colleague” letter effectively banning race-based programming or policies in schools receiving federal funds, which John K. Wilson, an expert on academic freedom, would call “the most extensive and repressive imposition of government ideological control over colleges in American history.” Soon, billions of dollars in grants and funding to universities and scholars would be frozen or canceled, some triggered for review, according to a leaked document from the National Science Foundation, by a list of words that included “disability,” “hate speech” and “activism.” Students and scholars here on visas or with green cards were arrested and some deported, while other professors took jobs abroad — a reverse of the brain drain that once brought Einstein and Arendt and other thinkers here. At least 60 colleges were warned they might lose federal funding, and both Columbia and Harvard did — the latter after refusing to make a series of changes, some of which had nothing to do with antisemitism and most of which would have weakened both academic freedom and university independence.
In the shadows of this upheaval, the Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee, that group of five academics at Muhlenberg College, made its decision. Its members sided with their colleague, voting unanimously that the Muhlenberg administrators had failed to prove Finkelstein showed “flagrant disregard” for the rules and norms of the college and recommending that her termination be reconsidered. The committee also faulted Muhlenberg administrators for a lack of clarity regarding how or if Zionism is a protected class.
“I think that it’s really hard to figure out how to feel about good news in the midst of a major crisis,” Finkelstein said when we talked. “I’m trying to hold onto my feeling that at the end of the day, I had the committee look at my case and see that there’s no case there. And no matter what happens, that’s my win. I think.”
On the last day of March, Finkelstein drove back in the direction of Muhlenberg College. Only this time it was to give a talk at nearby Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, one that she has now given repeatedly: “Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis.” Before her arrival, faculty members at Lehigh were told that the university had received tens of thousands of bot-generated emails in opposition. Lehigh was on the list of those 60 universities targeted by the Trump administration, but the college had also withdrawn an honorary degree from the president after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The fear was that he still held a grudge. The event was changed from a speech by Finkelstein to a panel discussion, and police were posted in the room and outside the building.
About an hour before Finkelstein went on, she resigned from her tenured position at Muhlenberg. Harring had not yet released her final determination, but that letter would later show that she intended to reject the recommendations of her faculty and the findings in the A.A.U.P. investigation of Muhlenberg, which determined that Finkelstein’s firing violated academic freedom standards — and warned that it is unlikely to be the last of its kind. Finkelstein told me she couldn’t discuss the details of her resignation, but that now, at least, she can talk about anything else she wants.
“In this moment, I can’t do any of the work that is meaningful to me in the way that I want to do it at a college or university,” she said. “But I can do this work outside of those institutions. And so, in some ways, I feel kind of free.”
Read by Julia Whelan
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Ted Blaisdell
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