Indiana University Caves to Political Pressure by Suspending a Tenured Professor

These claims about Sinno are baseless. I was his department chair from 2003 to 2009, have been on the political science department’s personnel committee at least 15 times, and served as the committee’s chair for the past two years, during which time the committee has engaged in an extensive pre-promotion review of his record. The questions about Sinno’s character and professional responsibility have never come up, and seven peer reviewers have praised his classroom teaching, which focuses on Middle Eastern politics. Indeed, as I noted in a letter to the vice provost, which she has ignored, Sinno was recognized for his teaching with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award as recently as 2020.

The vice provost announced Sinno’s suspension as a fait accompli with no involvement of his two home departments, political science and Middle Eastern languages and cultures. According to university and campus policy (ACA-33, Section 5e, and BL-ACA-D27), the vice provost is required to refer the matter to the campus Faculty Misconduct Review Committee before making a decision. Instead, she acted on her own purported authority, brazenly disregarding policies that had been carefully crafted by faculty and administrators on the Bloomington Faculty Council.

The IU administration pretends that the suspension is a normal personnel matter involving the enforcement of commonsense university rules regarding space allocation and campus safety. It also pretends that the public pressure from Representative Banks, the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana, and others has played no role in its doing exactly what these political actors have demanded.

Meanwhile, university administrators across the country are doing similar things in response to similar pressures to limit pro-Palestinian campus advocacy on their campuses. This is now so widely reported as to require no documentation here. But one example is worth noting. On November 10, Columbia University suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. According to The New York Times, “the action was justified because the two groups had repeatedly violated university policies requiring them to get permission and give 10 business days’ notice before holding an event.” This is exactly the official rationale for the suspension of Sinno.

There is now a perfect storm of political repression rolling over American college campuses, generated by an unholy alliance of far-right Republican politicians like Banks, Representative Elise Stefanik, and former vice president Mike Pence; Jewish groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana, and similar organizations elsewhere; and well-connected alumni mega-donors. This alliance has succeeded in pressuring university administrators across the country, leading to the constriction of campus space, the suspension of student groups, and, the deposing of two university presidents, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill.

As far as I am aware, Indiana University higher administration can now claim the honor of being the first major university in the United States demonstrate its commitment to “fighting antisemitism” by suspending a tenured professor who is also a Lebanese-born faculty adviser of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Muslim Student Association.

The suspension of Abdulkader Sinno is an injustice for him, his family, and his students. And with strong faculty support, he is pursuing a formal grievance, along with other legal measures, in the hope of restoring his status.

The suspension is also an affront to the entire IU community. It places into question the university’s commitment to academic freedom, civil liberties, and the free exchange of ideas about controversial matters that is at the core of any first-class public university. The IU Bloomington AAUP chapter has drafted a powerful public statement (see here). And a faculty group (of which I am a principal) is circulating an IU Faculty Letter in Support of Professor Abdulkader Sinno that criticizes the administration and demands our colleague’s immediate reinstatement. (The letter garnered more than 200 IU faculty signatures in the first 24 hours.)

But the issues extend far beyond academic freedom at Indiana University or indeed American higher education more generally.

The closure of public discourse about the current Israel-Hamas war and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is behind it threatens democratic politics itself. It is being driven by right-wing political forces, but it is working only with the passive acceptance if not complicity of many centrists, including many Democrats, who are either afraid to stand up in defense of academic freedom and open debate about the Middle East or are in fact willing to sacrifice democratic principles in the name of their partisan or tribal identities.

It is thus imperative that those of us who care about civil liberties, democracy, and human rights act locally while also thinking globally. We must work where we live to defend colleagues and students who are being punished for their advocacy while also working to defend democratic public spaces and institutions that are under attack. Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists who sound the alarm about the MAGA threat to democracy are willing to turn a blind eye to the wave of repression that is now overtaking all too many American campuses. This is an enormous mistake. Without academic freedom, there can be no meaningful democracy.