WASHINGTON: Academics, lawyers and activists have voiced support for a law professor who says she was pressured to leave Columbia University for her advocacy for pro-Palestinian students.
“Effective today, I have reached an agreement with Columbia University that relieves me of my obligations to teach or participate in faculty governance after serving on the Columbia law faculty for 25 years,” Katherine Franke, a tenured law professor at the Ivy League university in the United States, said in a statement on Thursday.
“While the university may call this change in my status “retirement,” it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.
“I have come to the view that the Columbia University administration has created such a toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine that I can no longer teach or conduct research,” Franke said.
Protests against Israel’s war on Gaza erupted on Columbia’s New York City campus last April and inspired similar encampments at other institutions across the US and beyond. Students demanded that the university divest from Israel, which has been accused of war crimes and genocide in Gaza. They also called for a ceasefire to end the war that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians and turned Gaza into rubble.
The prestigious Ivy League school, however, attempted to push back against the students’ protests – a crackdown that brought criticisms from rights organisations.
Some critics argued that the crackdown on pro-Palestinian students and groups put a damper on free speech on the college campus, while others allege the university administration has allowed a hostile atmosphere to thrive.
Commenting on Franke’s resignation on Saturday, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Franke has become “another victim of the pro-Israelism that is turning universities, and other spaces of public life, into places of obscurantism, discrimination and oppression”.
On Sunday, Noura Erakat, a professor at Rutgers University and human rights lawyer, called the university’s mistreatment of Professor Franke “egregious”.
“She has resigned after 25 years of an illustrious academic career and commitment to her students because she decided there is nothing to return to – it is far too hostile,” Erakat posted on the social media platform X.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), described Columbia’s actions as “truly shameful” and said on Saturday that the AAUP stands with “Professor Franke and against this repression of pro-Palestinian speech”.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy organisation, said on Thursday that Franke’s resignation represents “an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy”.
Agencies
Activists back US professor ‘forced’ from Columbia over Palestine advocacy
