Recently, a professor at DePaul University was fired because of an assignment she gave to students that made reference to the Gaza war and because of her discussions in class about the student protests on the DePaul Campus.
This is the headline (and sub-headline) from the Inside Higher Education article about the case:
DePaul Adjunct Ousted for Optional Gaza Assignment
Colleges have punished several professors since Oct. 7 for out-of-classroom speech. Now a faculty member has been fired for a task description that referenced “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “a decolonized future.” (BTW – all quotes below are from the IHE article).
Without reading further, one might reasonably assume that the course was a class in Political Science or perhaps Sociology and is a clear case of a faculty member’s academic freedom rights being violated to an extreme degree. And indeed, the AAUP (American Associate of University Professors) is supporting the faculty member on academic freedom grounds. Not so. The quotes below are all from the Inside Higher Education article.
A university fired a faculty member almost immediately not for out-of-classroom speech but for an optional course assignment. DePaul University dismissed adjunct Anne d’Aquino midway through her first quarter teaching Health 194: Human Pathogens and Defense.
That’s right. The course was not a Political Science class or Middle Eastern Studies class or even a Child Development class. It was a health sciences class focusing on microbiology. As IHE reported:
The one-paragraph online course summary says “This course will introduce students to the diverse microorganisms” that harm humans and “focus on the mechanisms of viral and bacterial infection and spread.” The course is supposed to examine antiseptics and other matters, it says, and students are to spend time in the lab identifying species and practicing other “standard microbial techniques.”
This does not sound like a course that would include a (very biased) discussion of Gaza, but in d’Aquino’s class, it did. The week’s topic was infection and epidemiology, and the original assignment was on the recent, first-known case of a human catching avian flu from a nonhuman mammal. But d’Aquino emailed students an optional alternative assignment:
“Today, Israel rejected a ceasefire deal and continues to bomb Rafah, where over 600,000 children are currently sheltering,” read the description she sent. It went on to state that “many view this as the last phase of the genocide/ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian people,” and added: “I encourage students to use scientific analysis and critical thinking to understand and communicate the impacts of genocide on human biology, and the creation of a decolonized future that promotes liberation and resists systemic oppression.”
If d’Aquino had done nothing more than send out an assignment asking students to “understand and communicate the impacts of genocide on human biology” she *might* have a bit of a leg to stand on in defending the appropriateness and legitimacy of the assignment in a microbiology course (although the main impact of real genocide is, of course, the death, by killing, of a large number of people). However, that minimally reasonable assignment was presented to students in the context of highly contentious political statements. The assignment not only focused solely on Israeli actions (and not even fully accurately about those), it called what Israel was doing a genocide but without defining the term (and a point disputed by many, who have pointed out that if Israel’s goal was to commit genocide against the Arab population in Gaza, they could have done that in a very short time and without the loss of any Israeli military lives), described Israel’s actions as “ethnic cleansing” (which it is not by any definition of the term, although it is clear that Gaza itself was ethnically cleansed of Jews in the past), and finishes with a Marxist-fridge-magnet-set combo of terms: “creation of a decolonized future that promotes liberation and resists systemic oppression”. NOTHING in that final phrase has any relationship at all to the course content. Nothing. It is a statement that simply reflects d’Aquino’s own Marxist political views.
But that’s not all. According to Kristin Mathews, DePaul’s senior director of strategic communications “students brought forward evidence that the faculty member was devoting a significant amount of class time discussing her support of the encampment [the protest encampment on the DePaul campus], unrelated to the objectives of the course.”
But Aquino has her defenders. Again, from the IHE article:
Those who track and defend academic freedom say the firing of d’Aquino has few if any precedents among the post-Oct. 7 controversies. “I believe this is the only one that we’ve seen that the dismissal has been on the basis of teaching about Palestine,” said Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance. She said the majority of disciplinary cases that have come to the AAUP’s attention since Oct. 7 have related to extramural speech.
The important point, however, that Levy does not note is that d’Aquino was not supposed to be “teaching about Palestine”; it was a microbiology course! d’Aquino has no particular expertise in the assessment of the morality of military actions, and there is no accepted conceptualization of “academic freedom” that gives a faculty member the right to expound on political or ethical issues that are both not germane to the subject matter of a course and not within the faculty member’s very particular domain of expertise.
Nonetheless, the legitimacy of the assignment was also defended by Amanda Nordstrom, a program officer for campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Nordstrom (according to the IHE article) “said last week that the situation at DePaul “smells of violations of academic freedom.” Faculty members should have “breathing room to sort of determine how and when and whether they want to tackle material that’s germane to the course,” Nordstrom said. And d’Aquino’s optional assignment, she said, is “clearly germane when I look at it here.”
I’m not sure how much of the case Nordstrom is familiar with. I hope her statement related solely to the least contentious element of the assignment and that she was not claiming that Nordstrom has the right, in a microbiology course, to talk about Israel as having engaged in ethnic cleansing and to ask students in that class to opine about “the creation of a decolonized future that promotes liberation and resists systemic oppression.”
Professor’s have a great deal of power over students; we (yes — I’m a professor, albeit retired now), after all, are the ones who hand out grades. And for a few hours every week, we hold students captive in our classes (obviously, not literally “captive”, but if a course has an attendance policy, then the cost of non-attendance can be severe, and even if there is not an attendance policy in a class, it is usually the case that something a professor says during each class period will appear on a test). Academic freedom grants us considerable leeway regarding exactly what we talk about during each class period. There is not, for example, any kind of firm requirement that information be presented and discussed by the professor in an unbiased manner. However, along with that power and freedom come certain responsibilities. Students pay (sometimes a very large amount) for the right to take our classes, and it is our responsibility to not waste their investment in time and money; thus, it is incumbent upon us to maintain our expertise in the subject matter of the classes we teach and to be well prepared to further our students’ knowledge of that subject matter during each class period of every course that we teach.
We also have a responsibility to not abuse our power by using it to make students listen to our views on topics unrelated to the subject matter of any given course, and we have no right to inflict on our captive audiences of students our views on moral or ethical issues unrelated to the subject matter of a course. For example, it would be abuse of a professor’s power if a professor, in a Spanish Language course, began a class with a rant about the irrationality of creationists – even if, on that day, there was a group of creationists protesting on campus. It would be an abuse of a professor’s power if a math professor teaching a calculus course posted a running total on the classroom blackboard of the number of lies that Donald Trump had told since the beginning of the semester; just because this activity involved “numbers” in a math class does not make it sufficiently germane to the topic of the course to make it acceptable. And in any class, the embedding of a class assignment within the larger context of the expression of political and/or moral views that are not germane to the subject matter of the course would also not be acceptable.
d’Aquino herself has stated she does not think she did ANYTHING wrong. She believes the principles of academic freedom grant her the right to do what she did. She is wrong. She was not hired to teach about moral issues related to conflicts in the Middle East (or anywhere else), and the fact that she thinks it IS her job to indoctrinate students in a particular moral ideology (in addition, presumably, to teaching them a bit about microbiology) suggests that she thinks: (1) that academic freedom grants her the right to discuss ANTHING she wants in her classes, regardless of its relevance to the subject matter of the course, and (2) that she believes HER particular moral judgments related to the war in Gaza are the ones that should be adopted by her students.
She’s wrong. d’Aquino had no right to embed an assignment within the context of the expression of deeply contentious views about the Gaza war, and she had no right to spend class time discussing the student protests on her campus. She abused her powers as a professor. She abused her students by subjecting them to her views about the war. What she did is not close to being protected by academic freedom. She deserved to be fired, and AAUP is making a huge mistake if it defends her.
She’s seems to be something of an activist. From a bio:
“Outside of the lab, d’Aquino is a passionate volunteer and advocate for STEM outreach. She and her sister pioneered HerStory, an annual outreach event at the Museum of Science and Industry that encourages young girls—particularly minorities—to pursue science in academia and beyond.”
https://www.alumni.northwestern.edu/s/1479/02-naa/16/landing.aspx?pgid=32093&gid=2&cid=33514
I agree she has no business discussing Gaza in a microbiology course.