A Conspicuous Firing

On November 16, 2023, students in “Women & Madness,” an undergraduate course at The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), received an online message from their graduate student teaching assistants. As the students opened the message, no doubt expecting to be informed of an updated homework deadline, changed office hour schedule, or some other classroom minutiae, they instead were met with a message whose stated purpose was to “acknowledge the mental health implications of the current escalation of violence in Gaza.”

In the message, the teaching assistants expressed frustration with the silence of university administrators, who had been quick to offer support for the Jewish community in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood but conspicuously silent in the weeks after, as the body count in Gaza began to rise and images of orphaned and brutalized children spread across the Internet. After providing mental health resources, the message to their students ended by stating that the teaching assistants “support the rights and autonomy of Palestinians, Indigenous people, and displaced peoples across the globe, knowing that oppression results in trauma and negative mental health outcomes that can span generations.”

The two teaching assistants, Parham Daghighi and Callie Kennedy, were masters students in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at UT-Austin. The course they were serving as teaching assistants for was a UT signature course—an eighteen-student class for first-year students that, in addition to teaching students how to do university-level work, is designed to expose students to student resources at UT-Austin, including mental health support. Prior to sending the message, they had been approached by a student in their class asking them to provide support for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students. They had also discussed the matter with the professor of the class, Dr. Lauren Gulbas, who had helped them craft the statement, although she ultimately left it up to her teaching assistants to send it out. Ostensibly, they assumed that this context would help insulate themselves from any repercussions they would face for expressing displeasure with the university administration and acknowledging the Palestinian people, whose very existence as human subjects has long been a matter of intense political controversy. Or perhaps they simply assumed that the small number of students in the class and the generally liberal composition of social work students would preclude any objections from the students.

They were wrong. Just days after sending the original message, Parham and Callie were notified by Dr. Gulbas that a Jewish student in the course had complained to the Dean of the School of Social Work, Dr. Allan Cole. As a researcher, Dr. Cole, who received his PhD in Practical Theology from Princeton University in 2021, focuses on care for people with chronic illnesses, with a particular passion for the care of people with Parkinson’s disease. As Dean of the School of Social Work, his duties include supporting the School’s mission to “provide national leadership to promote social and economic justice.”^[1] He is also a close friend and appointee of the university president, Jay Hartzell, and in the ensuing months would prove dogged in his pursuit of “law and order” at the expense of pro-Palestinian activists at the university.

On November 22, six days after their message to the class, Parham and Callie received a termination letter from Dr. Cole. In the letter, Dr. Cole decried Parham and Callie’s message as “unrelated to the course,” “inappropriate,” and lacking in professional judgment. It was also claimed that the message was sent without Dr. Gulbas’ approval, directly contradicting the accounts of Parham and Callie and text message evidence showing that Dr. Gulbas was aware of the message before it was sent. It remains unclear if Dr. Cole, who had not talked to Parham and Callie before firing them, was aware that his claim was untrue, or if it mattered to him. Parham and Callie were immediately barred from any access to their former students and were told that they would not be allowed to serve as teaching assistants during the subsequent semester.

Within hours of their firing, Parham and Callie put out calls through activist networks at UT-Austin, notifying the community of what had happened and announcing that they hoped to use the spotlight the event placed on them in service of the pro-Palestinian movement. A motley collection of campus activists, referred to here as the ‘November 22nd Coalition,’ soon formed in service of the cause. The group was primarily composed of undergraduate and graduate students at the university, including members of the UT-Austin FED UP Coalition, a labor organizing group in the School of Social Work that both Parham and Callie participated in. Other participants included members of Students for Revolution, a “decolonial Marxist” coalition whose stated mission is to “join the black and indigenous struggle against settler-colonialism and imperialism,” organizers with Underpaid@UT, a graduate student worker organization, members of the UT-Austin chapter of Revolutionary Marxist Students (including the author of this essay), a student organization with ties to the Maoist Communist Union, and various other left-leaning campus activists. Members of the university’s flagship pro-Palestinian organization, Palestine Solidarity Committee, were also present, but would prove to be otherwise occupied in the weeks that followed. Rounding out the group was Dr. Karma Chavez, a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

The AAUP, through Dr. Chavez, would be the first group to weigh in on the firing of Callie and Parham. On November 26 they sent a letter protesting the decision to Dr. Cole and the university provost, Dr. Wood; the letter would be publicly released six days later.^[2] The letter begins by devoting a full paragraph to a bureaucratic issue: the provost was not copied on the termination letter sent to Callie and Parham. The majority of what follows is dedicated to arguments from Dr. Chavez and other members of the local AAUP branch that the message Callie and Parham were fired for was prompted, approved, and relevant, and thus their firing was a violation of “academic freedom.”

In recent decades, academic freedom has become a widely referenced concept in bourgeois rights discourse and is ubiquitous in the academic discourse surrounding Israel and Palestine. The AAUP, in particular, has long championed the concept, with their 1940 declaration on academic freedom and tenure serving as a foundational document in rights discourse among academics in the United States.^[3] In much of their public-facing work, the AAUP uses the term as often as possible, framing the issues they weigh in on in terms of the concept and declaring it a universal value that should garner widespread support from all classes and strata of society. In reality, the broader masses have shown little interest in the concept; as Hamilton notes, even university professors tend to “poorly defend” the concept in the face of repression.^[4] This fact is often bemoaned by the AAUP and its supporters, who cite the ignorance of society as a whole to the importance of academic freedom as the reason why this is the case (see, e.g., Hamilton’s work).^[5]

In this essay, I trace the trajectory of both the ‘November 22nd Coalition’ and the concept of academic freedom. In doing so I argue that, as with many other bourgeois concepts, the attempt to appeal to the universal needs and interests of society when defending academic freedom is but a convenient mask for the historical role academic freedom has played in the dialectical interplay of class forces that compose the totality of societal relations. In reality, academic freedom, despite historically being a progressive force, can no longer play such a role as it is currently defined. Further, this reality does not stem from simple discursive mistakes, but is instead fundamentally a consequence of the inability of university academics and the class interests they represent to muster the social forces necessary to aid the struggles of oppressed peoples. Even consigned to the far more modest goal of protecting academics from persecution, the concept flounders. It is only from outside academia that a new, progressive, definition of academic freedom can be defined and used in the struggles to come.

The Origins of Academic Freedom

The origins of the modern conception of academic freedom can be traced back to the high Middle Ages in Europe.^[6] During this period, the ruling aristocracy controlled both the church and the state, and through these institutions, they limited the freedom of scholars, with Galileo’s imprisonment by the pope serving as perhaps the best-known example of the repression faced by those who pushed back against the dominant ideological currents. This repression cannot be understood in terms of the backwardness of feudal societies alone. Rather, the aristocracy was rightly fearful of the knowledge being produced by these scholars, whose subsequent development of liberalism and enlightenment ideals would form the intellectual basis for the overthrow of the aristocracy in the bourgeois revolutions to come. The demand for academic freedom during this period was thus a historically progressive demand, and it gave rise to two new university models that attempted to realize it.

In the first model, pioneered in Bologna, Italy, autonomy was understood in terms of the control of the university by the students, with the faculty only in charge during examinations. In the second model, which was first introduced in Paris, autonomy was understood in terms of the freedom to study and teach by both faculty and students. In both cases, the universities unsurprisingly faced repression from local authorities and were forced to move multiple times, underlining their role as a force in opposition to the ruling class.^[7] It was the Paris model that would go on to spread widely, proving foundational in the development of universities such as Cambridge in Britain and Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in the United States. However, the Paris model still represented a pre-modern conception of academic freedom, as in practice the academic freedom of the Paris model tended to be narrowly focused on the “right to interpret scripture” and other doctrinal concerns.^[8]

The modern conception of academic freedom would not emerge until centuries after the Paris model, and did not originate in England, France, or any other country that had already undergone a progressive bourgeois revolution by the year 1800. Instead, it was in early nineteenth century Prussia (now part of modern Germany), with its relatively weak bourgeoisie and a state under the control of the nobility, that one finds the origins of modern academic freedom in the Prussian Reform Movement. Devastated by their defeat at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian nobility launched this effort, which included changes to the state bureaucracy and educational institutions as well as economic liberalization, in order to facilitate economic and military development, as well as unify the nation.^[9] The hope was that the limited reforms associated with the movement would enable them to compete with the new bourgeois powers, including France and England. These countries were flourishing after their revolutions unleashed the development of the productive forces, and the German nobles hoped to replicate this, although they were anxious to avoid the same fate that had befallen their colleagues in France. In fact, similar reforms in Germany had been proposed earlier, in the late eighteenth century, but the French Revolution and the fears it aroused caused these plans to be scrapped at the time (As Marx put it a half-century later, “the direct political antagonist of the King of Prussia, in his role as politician, is to be found in liberalism.”^[10]). However, with the differences in development between the two countries laid bare by war and their position on the global stage threatened, the German nobles acquiesced, and the reforms began.

The Prussian Reform Movement was wide-ranging and had impacts in areas including the Prussian tax system, bureaucracy, and agricultural system. Reforms in the academic sector were led by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had ties to both the lower nobility and the bourgeoisie. Von Humboldt helped to found the University of Berlin in 1810, which is widely viewed as the first modern research university.^[11] Key to the structuring of the university and its foundational principles was the German concept of “lehrfreiheit, lernfreiheit and freiheit der wissenschaft” [“freedom of teaching, learning, and science”]. Under this principle, university professors were entitled to freedom in teaching and inquiry. However, unlike civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, academic freedom “was not, as the Germans conceived it, an inalienable endowment of all men… rather, it was the distinctive prerogative of the academic profession, and the essential condition of all universities.”^[12]

At first glance, it may seem surprising that the German nobility would allow the institutionalization of this principle, which corresponds to the Paris university model of the high Middle Ages and had historically fulfilled a progressive role. However, von Humboldt and his contemporaries, influenced by German idealist philosophy, thought the freedoms would promote greater national unity through the cultivation of an enlightened subject, rather than intensifying the class struggle. So while in France intense class struggle led to the denial of freedom of teaching and state control of education,^[13] the weak bourgeoisie and the relatively low level of class struggle in Germany at the time created grounds upon which academic freedom could be understood as contributing to societal “unity.”

Academic Freedom in the United States

For more than two centuries after the founding of the first college in the American colonies in 1636 (i.e., Harvard), the structure of universities in the colonies and, later, the United States was borrowed from conservative academic institutions in Europe. These institutions were compatible with the old European feudal societies and had narrow aims: namely, training both the clergy and the ruling elite of the given society in order to enable effective governance and social control. There was thus no systemic interest in academic freedom during this period.

It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that academic freedom began to emerge as a concern in the American setting due to the embrace of the German research university model, with its attendant emphasis on freedoms. This university model found fertile ground in the US for two reasons. First, thanks to the success of the German model, the university began to be understood as an important location for the production of the knowledge needed to facilitate capital-intensive production and change the organic composition of capital. Second, like Germany, the US lacked the history of intense class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility characteristic of countries like France, as the feudal nobility were non-existent in the US context (Engels once described America as a country with “purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants or monarchical traditions.”^[14]). Concerns about the US university’s role in class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were also minimal, as the unique features of US economic and superstructural development slowed and constrained the development of a strong workers movement.^[15]

With the rise of imperialism and monopoly capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, class struggle in the US began to intensify. During this time, US universities came under the increasing control of the monopoly capitalists, who, while still invested in the development of technical knowledge, increasingly understood even bourgeois liberal ideas in the humanities to be a threat to their hold on state power. In his 1923 book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, Upton Sinclair uses the University of Iowa as a case study for this phenomenon, a university which he describes as being “controlled by the railroads,” with a president whose “main job is to get funds from the state legislature,” which was of course controlled by the same railroad interests that Sinclair references.^[16]

As monopoly capitalism asserted its power in the US, the rise of Bolshevism heralded an existential threat to this order, with the triumph of the Russian Revolution in 1917 sending shockwaves around the world. The US ruling class became fearful of the role that intellectuals had played in the Russian Revolution, where the kernels of the Bolshevik party were formed in study circles at universities. They reacted by clamping down on the freedoms of the university, discarding the notion of academic freedom in the process, just as the Prussian nobility had initially scrapped their liberal reforms in the face of the French Revolution.

The AAUP, which had been founded only two years earlier, in 1915, would present no obstacle to this repression. In fact, Johns Hopkins University philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, who served as secretary of the AAUP at the time, declared that “the American college, if it maintained the kind of neutrality, with respect to the present struggle, which the Nation regards as essential to academic freedom, would, in fact, be not merely tolerating but facilitating the efforts of those who would repeat in America the achievement of the Lenines and the Trotzskys [sic] in Russia.”^[17]

Lovejoy’s comments represent an articulation of allegiance with capitalism and the bourgeoisie in the face of an international workers movement, one that goes so far as to support limiting the liberties of one’s colleagues in order to maintain existing class structures. In the eyes of the AAUP, this stance was understood to be consistent with their self-conception as an organization that does not have any “trade-unionism,” with its “selfish insistence on personal rights and interests,” as the AAUP president at the time put it.^[18] Lovejoy himself had a similar understanding, stating that “the professional investigator of social problems ought to avoid entangling permanent alliances with any of the purely economic groups which are now struggling with one another.”^[19]

The idea that Lovejoy and his fellow academics existed above the class struggle is patently false and is but another example of the sort of self-aggrandizement that academics tend to be so fond of. In reality, the “society” that Lovejoy and his compatriots claimed to represent has no independent or fixed existence outside of the class forces that comprise it. This truth was being violently asserted at the time by the reality of a war in which millions of proletarians all over the world would die while the bourgeoisie of the US enriched themselves.

Far from representing the interests of society as a whole, then, the totality of Lovejoy and the AAUP’s comments embody key elements of bourgeois (ruling class) ideology; namely, that society is composed of individuals, not classes, that the ideological and political struggle in the superstructure can be neatly cleaved off and demarcated from economic struggle, and that class struggle in the ideological and political spheres is the gravest threat to civil liberties and therefore must be limited and repressed.^[20]

This bourgeois perspective is unsurprising given that the academy at the time was the more or less exclusive domain of the progeny of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie (the father of the AAUP president at the time owned a newspaper),^[21] and was thus steeped in bourgeois ideology, and that the period surrounding World War I was a time of pronounced class struggle, with the bourgeoisie circling the wagons. The endorsement of the repression of fellow academics, should they embrace the class struggle and the Bolshevik party, was of little consequence to them. On some level, the AAUP itself, despite protests to the contrary, seemed to recognize these facts, as their founding document states that academics are “likely always to exercise a certain form of conservative influence” but for them to function effectively the public must not believe that “they are the expression of the interests, or the timidities, of the limited portion of the community which is in a position to endow institutions of learning, or is most likely to be represented upon their boards of trustees.”

The anti-communist crusade in academia that began during World War I did not end with the war. The period that followed World War I constituted “a continuous Red Scare” for academics, with the level of repression varying but never completely disappearing.^[22] This repression was targeted not just at those who expressed proletarian or revolutionary ideas, but also those who pushed for the realization of the bourgeois liberal ideal, which was the ideological basis for the bourgeois’ conquest of power in the first place but of little use to monopoly capital, who generally relied on appeals to base populist notions (e.g., reactionary nationalism) over refined bourgeois humanism.

This tension within the ruling class manifested itself as a class struggle between the academics (who are largely petty-bourgeois in class status due to their position in production relations) and their ruling class bosses. As a tool in this struggle, the AAUP begrudgingly began to embrace academic freedom as an ideal. This embrace was at first tentative, as some AAUP members rightly recognized that by making academic freedom a signature issue for the organization, claims to represent universal interests and values, in the form of enlightened bourgeois humanism, would be more visibly in tension with their narrow class interests.

The solution to the apparent dilemma was to conceptualize defending one’s class interests, in the form of an embrace of academic freedom, as a defense of the “free” markets at the heart of the capitalist project. Here the realities of control and oppression in the sciences in the West, which was a byproduct of the very nature of capitalism, and in particular its mature imperialist form, with monopoly and finance capital ascendant, were ignored. Instead, arguments were made that attempted to contrast the state control of science in the USSR with an academy in the US that was supposedly structured as a free and pure market. An example of this kind of “academia qua free market” argumentation can be found in the works of Michael Polanyi, a prominent Western scientist at the time. He argued that “scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization” and that “any attempt to organize the group of helpers under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their cooperation.”^[23]

This is the classic bourgeois argument for free markets, as first spelled out by Adam Smith and later refined and triumphed by the likes of Hayek and Friedman, applied to the sciences, with Western scientists supposedly free to do what they please and great societal benefits arising from this anarchy. Any attempt to intervene in this Eden of knowledge production would in their view spell the demise of this “efficient” system and be an affront to the “universal” value of academic freedom and other lofty moral concepts. The use of economic power and political repression by the ruling class to structure the academy in the US and direct it in its interests (e.g., technology that would increase the rate of profit, or the development and the propagation of bourgeois ideology), which Sinclair saw clearly, is ignored in this idealized conception, while the narrow interests of academics become an embodiment of the very values that structure US political economy as a whole.

The AAUP’s slow embrace of academic freedom in the 1920s and 30s would find an enduring expression in their 1940 declaration on academic freedom and tenure. In the statement, the AAUP declares that teachers are “entitled” to full freedom in research and publication, and should have freedom in the classroom as well, although notably they “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.”^[24] Here we find an expression of academic freedom in a form that protects the interests of academics as a profession while still maintaining some crucial ambiguity regarding the exact limits of academic freedom, an ambiguity characteristic of wavering petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It is from this perspective that the AAUP continues to operate to this day, a perspective that informs their work on issues related to the Palestinian genocide, including the firing of Parham and Callie.

A Losing Fight

Three days after the AAUP statement on the firing of the teaching assistants, the ‘November 22nd Coalition’ published a press release that echoed the claims in the AAUP letter and concluded with a list of demands, including reinstatement of the TAs, a public commitment to protecting freedom of speech, and unspecified material protections for Palestinian students. A series of interviews with the local media soon followed; a Daily Beast writer also wrote an opinion article on the subject that sided with the fired students.^[25] Against Parham and Callie, the AAUP, and their supporting coalition’s narrative that the message was relevant to the class and should be protected speech, the university’s public response was simple: Parham and Callie had sent a “personal political message” and this was unprofessional.

Within a matter of weeks, an issue that was supposed to center the pro-Palestinian movement had devolved into a narrow debate regarding the precise limits of protected academic speech. Attempts to push back on this within the student movement were met with retorts that this strategy was needed to maximize the likelihood of support from faculty, university administration, and the UT community, as well as to avoid jeopardizing any potential legal recourse on Parham and Callie’s part. However, even this limited and “strategic” approach of fighting on the terrain of academic freedom alone was doomed to fail.

During the eighty-odd years since the publication of their signature document on academic freedom, the AAUP has succeeded in making academic freedom a widely accepted value in the abstract among academics and many members of the ruling class. The AAUP has regularly used it to fight for academics who have lost their jobs around various controversies. They have also expanded their operative definition of academic freedom to encompass remarks made outside the classroom, in addition to the research and teaching freedoms derived from the German Lehrfreiheit concept.^[26] However, their track record demonstrates only modest success in these fights.

The reason for this stems from the fact that academic freedom is simply a more narrow, occupational version of broader civil liberties like freedom of speech, and civil liberties in general are routinely placed in contradiction with bourgeois right (i.e., the right to private property) under capitalism. In other words, while individuals enter into market interactions under capitalism as formally “free and equal” members of society, the power dynamics induced by differing relations to the means of production summarily crush the ability of those without access to sufficient capital to exercise their civil liberties without impacting their subsequent market interactions. What begins as “free and equal” thus becomes “freedom for the capitalists.”^[27] Over time, the severity of the contradiction between private property and civil liberties and its functional forms (i.e., modes of indirect and direct repression through which the interests of the dominating capitalist class are violently asserted) have evolved, but the underlying contradiction remains in place.

As a public university, one of the forms of bourgeois control in place at UT-Austin since its founding is direct governance by the state. In particular, the president of the university answers directly to the board of regents, who are hand-picked by the state governor. This has important ramifications for pro-Palestinian organizing at UT-Austin, as the capitalist class in the United States has been ardent in its support of Israel since at least the Six-Day War in 1967,^[28] and the Texas government strives to position itself as the most passionate supporter of the genocidal regime. The current state governor, Greg Abbott, has declared that “an enemy of Israel is an enemy of Texas,” and has overseen the purchase of over 60 million dollars in Israeli bonds since October 7.^[29]

Further, the board of regents, many of whom are donors to Governor Abbott and are themselves prominent capitalists (including Kelcy Warren, a leading force behind the Dakota Access pipeline, and Kevin Eltife, who is partially responsible for a proposed 75 million dollar right-wing think tank originally referred to as the “Liberty Institute” that is in the works at UT-Austin) have marched in lockstep with him on this issue.^[30] In the weeks following October 7, university president Jay Hartzell made it clear that he represented the interests of his bosses, even while attempting (and failing) to appear more even-handed. For example, in a series of emails he sent to the UT community after Hamas’ operation, he focused on clamping down on perceived anti-semitism on campus and offered explicit support for Jewish students and institutions, but did nothing when men called middle eastern students on campus “fucking terrorists” and boasted that they were going to Israel to kill Arabs, an incident which received national news coverage.^[31]

In addition to direct governance by the imperialist state, a new form of capitalist influence on the university has emerged in recent decades in the form of the military-industrial complex. The University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), which manages the finances of the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, has over 50 million dollars invested in military contractors as of August 2020,^[32] including United Technologies, which produces Blackhawk helicopters for the Israel Defense Force,^[33] and many others that are profiting from selling weapons to Israel, their drones and missiles raining down indiscriminately on the Palestinian people.

Perhaps more important, however, is the money flowing in the other direction, with millions of research dollars funneled into the university from the military through Department of Defense subunits such as DARPA and the Minerva Research Initiative (whose mission is “supporting social science for a safer world”!). In 2022, a partnership with the US Army Futures Command was announced.^[34] UT-Austin also boasts entire departments dedicated to “Naval Science,” “Air and Space Force Science,” and “Military Science,” all of which are inexplicably housed in UT-Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. The above connections represent just the tip of the often deliberately opaque iceberg that is UT-Austin’s relationship with the military. It does not require an active imagination to assume that these relationships have a significant bearing on the decisions of Hartzell and the rest of UT-Austin’s administration.

As the university’s ties with the military have strengthened, so too has its position in the economic struggle with its employees. Over the last couple of decades, the number of tenure-track positions at UT-Austin and in academia broadly has fallen sharply, with the percentage of US academic faculty in full-time tenure-track positions dropping from 39% in 1985 to 24% in 2020.^[35] This has coincided with an increase in the number of workers with graduate degrees, leading to intense competition for tenure-track positions—it is not uncommon for there to be well over one hundred applicants for a single job at UT-Austin. This has induced a state of pronounced precarity among academics without tenure-track positions, who are no longer guaranteed a privileged position in the organic composition of labor by virtue of their graduate degree. What was once a collection of professions worthy of their own special designation in the analysis of a given society (the “intelligentsia” of Russian society were a distinct category in Bolshevik class analysis, Ghassan Kanafani devotes an entire section of his “The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine” to the “intellectuals,” etc.) are being proletarianized, all the while gasping with indignation as the status supposedly guaranteed as a result of all their “hard work” disappears like a mirage. And as they often have no union or other “purely economic group” (to quote Lovejoy once again) to protect them, when they are threatened their defense often falls into the hands of the AAUP, who are woefully positioned to exert any kind of real pressure on the university administration in question.

An illustrative example of the grim reality facing academics who venture out beyond the bounds of acceptable bourgeois thought can be found in the case of Steven Salaita, a former (tenured!) professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, he tweeted “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing.” Soon after he found himself unemployed. The AAUP responded to the firing in a manner consistent with what seems to be their standard operating procedure: they compare the details of the given controversy at hand with the 1940 statement and various bylaws and internal documents in support of the 1940 statement, and from this analysis decide if the particular controversy represents a violation of “academic freedom” and is thus contrary to the principles of the AAUP. In Salaita’s case, this involved a meeting with a local chapter of the AAUP, in which an AAUP representative read through the tweets in question and compared them to relevant sections of the AAUP manual, with no consideration of the geopolitical context of the tweet; Salaita would later describe the events as a “kind of inquest.”^[36]

Summarily expelled from the academy for political speech, academic freedom revealed as an empty phrase without content, Salaita was in a unique position to see academic freedom for what it is—an “inhumane” concept that “cannot provide the very thing it promises: freedom.”^[37] By 2019, he was out of academia and working as a bus driver.

No Liberal Solutions

The historical analysis of academic freedom provided in the previous sections demonstrates that academic freedom under bourgeois capitalism is inherently limited as part of a general contradiction between private property and civil liberties—a contradiction that can never be completely abolished under capitalism, only occasionally mitigated. Further, as capitalism in the United States has developed, academic freedom has undergone a striking evolution, with the rise of both monopoly capitalism and the international communist movement abroad transforming the demand into an ideological weapon used in defense of the bourgeois state during the Cold War.

From this denigrated position as a blunt weapon in the class struggle against the proletariat, academic freedom has become increasingly restricted over the last couple of decades as the economic situation of academics deteriorates and the underlying contradictions that restrict academic freedom strengthen. On an ideological level, academic freedom has also been weakened, with the term redefined in conservative circles to require a “balanced” presentation of ideas, where “balance” means the inclusion of some of the most vile ideas bourgeois thought has ever produced along with the pseudo-progressive postmodernism in vogue in the academy today—the reactionary response to the decadence of current bourgeois society.^[38]

While cognizant of the dismal state of affairs that is their current reality, contemporary academics have proven woefully incapable of marshaling strong arguments in defense of academic freedom. In the final analysis, they inevitably fall back on arguments that are unable to address the underlying material factors that determine the overall trajectory of their condition. An instructive example of this kind of thinking can be found in the essay “The academic field must be defended: Excluding criticism of Israel from campuses,” which appeared in the collection Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel and was written by David Landy, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.^[39]

The piece gets off to a good start, acknowledging that “the degree to which academic autonomy ever existed can be questioned” and that the academic field is increasingly “oriented towards the concerns of the economic field and structured by the logic of bureaucracy.”^[40] The bulk of the argumentation, though, builds off of a theoretical foundation provided by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who views society as “made up of a set of competitive games called fields,” each with their own rules and stakes.^[41] From this perspective, Landy is able to provide insightful analysis regarding how conservatives use the term academic freedom to their own advantage; this is because the field metaphor is “highly applicable to academic life” in of itself.^[42]

However, Landy fails to account for the limitations of Bourdieu’s field metaphor: he ignores the primary role that the economic base has in the dialectic of base and superstructure, and thus sidelines class from its role in defining the overall structure of all social life. Landy’s analysis views the university administrators as primarily individuals within the “fields” of academic and scholastic life instead of members of a definite economic class with interests shaped by the class dynamics of society. This erroneous perspective leads to a flawed understanding of the reason why university administrators in the US (or in parts of the world under US hegemony) support Zionism. According to Landy, these administrators have simply been convinced by argumentation that views “criticism of Israel as non-academic”;^[43] they just happen to have been convinced by Zionists that there “is validity” to the Zionist position, despite the fact that there is a “vast gulf” between the Zionist position and that of the university administrators.^[44]

In other words, Landy believes that society is composed of individuals, not classes, and that the good folks in university administration simply have not heard the right argument yet. The primacy of class, and in particular the fact that the ruling class in the US has a material interest in the continued existence of Israel—and has strong weapons at their disposal to ensure that university administrators fall in line—^[45]is sidelined. This reinforces the idea that the university is an “impartial” institution, and can therefore be relied on to produce the knowledge and technologies needed in the Palestinian liberation struggle.

The influence of Bourdieu on Landy’s arguments is also clear in the focus of Landy’s piece, which views academic freedom as an end-in-itself. Although ostensibly written in the context of Israeli-Palestinian discourse, it pays little attention to the role that academic freedom might have in bringing about Palestinian liberation. This perspective has intellectual roots in a theme of Bourdieu’s work, in which the “fundamental political value is autonomy, particularly the autonomy of sociology, rather than freedom or equality.”^[46] It is not surprising that academics like Landy have embraced this perspective, with all the corresponding self-aggrandizement it implies.

While other academics analyzing academic freedom in the context of the Palestinian genocide have paid more attention than Landy to the relationship between the concept and material reality, their analysis still ultimately fails to provide a path forward. Here it is illustrative to consider the essay “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom” by Judith Butler, the famous third-wave feminist.^[47] In the essay, Butler raises a number of important points that many of her fellow academics do not, including that academic freedom debates generally “deflect from the broader political problem of how to address the destruction of infrastructure, civil society, cultural and intellectual life” during the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.^[48] She also briefly brings up the distinction between rights that “can be exercised” in the hypothetical and the actual power to “exercise these rights,” an important distinction in rights discourse.^[49]

However, the conclusions she eventually draws from her analysis fall short of providing a meaningfully progressive understanding of academic freedom. This is due to two key issues with her analysis. First, while gesturing towards the need to couch academic freedom discourse within a larger materialist understanding of society, she ultimately fails to explicitly name the key common enemy of academic freedom both in Palestine and in the US (i.e., imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism) or provide a path towards defeating this enemy, which necessarily involves class analysis; she is content to gesture vaguely towards the need for “mutually supportive political projects.”^[50]

Second, while she mentions the need to move beyond a “restrictively liberal” conception of academic freedom, ultimately she understands this to mean the removal of some of the more overt barriers (here it is worth emphasizing that her analysis of the structural reasons these barriers exist in the first place is seriously lacking) to the ability of academics to “teach and to learn, to think, travel, and communicate”; if individuals are able to do this, she states, they “might plausibly be called ‘free’.”^[51] So, ultimately, Butler’s conception of freedom is still freedom at the level of the individual, one that simply wants to create (somehow) the material conditions in which classical civil liberties can be effectively exercised.

The above analysis shows that Butler, Landy, and other academics inevitably rely on classical liberal arguments, and are stuck in a defensive position that tries to protect bourgeois rights won decades ago, despite some gestures towards materialism (Butler) and intellectual sophistication (Landy). Trapped within the confines of bourgeois discourse, their arguments reproduce the very circumstances they are supposedly fighting against. They are thus stuck fighting an ever-losing war, as their position never goes beyond defending civil liberties while simultaneously participating in the reproduction of the very circumstances that produce the need to defend civil liberties in the first place. Led by academics and those trapped within the confines of liberal academic thought, the ‘November 22 Coalition’’s efforts to extract meaningful pro-Palestinian concessions from UT-Austin became just another lost battle in this doomed war.

Violent Defeat

The last meaningful effort from the coalition as a whole consisted of a protest outside of the School of Social Work in mid-December of 2023, during which a list of demands was delivered to Dean Cole. Four students who participated in the delivery were investigated by the university and eventually received “deferred suspensions” from UT-Austin, including the author of this essay.^[52] Callie and Parham, despite having been an integral part of the planning of this protest, publicly asserted that they had nothing to do with it; in private they justified this as necessary to maximize the chance that their legal efforts against the university, as well as an internal appeal of the firing, would succeed. Despite these claims, unsurprisingly, the legal efforts were eventually abandoned.

The internal appeal of the firing, meanwhile, was summarily dismissed by University President Jay Hartzell, a procedure which required suspending the university’s normal appeals process.^[53] A sincere belief in the fairness of the university procedures, which attempt to mimic the bourgeois legal system in the shallowest possible simulacrum, thus fell flat in the face of a university administration that correctly understood these things to be only a means to an end.

In April 2024, during the same academic year as the firing of Parham and Callie, pro-Palestinian protests erupted on university campuses across the country, with many of the most prestigious US universities leading the way. UT-Austin soon followed suit. The Palestinian Solidarity Committee at UT-Austin initially attempted to ape the language of encampment style protests at other universities while keeping the content of the planned events more benign. Hundreds of students showed up, full of passion and determination to fight for the Palestinian people but with little leadership or direction. Governor Abbott and UT-Austin’s administration responded to these plans, which included a day of events designed to end with a pizza party, by sending in dozens of heavily armed state troopers, armed with riot shields, pepper spray, and countless other technologies of war to be directed at groups of college students, as well as the other progressive Austin-based elements who inevitably joined the protests. What followed was a brutal beat-down, one in which the protesters lacked even a sporting chance of something that could be called a victory. All of this was officially sanctioned by Governor Abbott, who declared that the protesters “belong in jail.”^[54]

University administration, while avoiding such strong language in their description of the protesters, did not hesitate to support and facilitate the repression of the protests and lie to the public to justify their actions (among the most egregious of which included the suggestion that a pile of bricks found nearby the protests were strategically placed weapons).

The final notable protest of the semester at UT-Austin was a May Day protest rallying workers for Palestine, which was postponed from May 1st to May 5th due to fears of more university sponsored violence. At the protest, which was ostensibly about workers and Palestine, it was the students and their historical role who were often subject to the most praise; one faculty member speaker went so far as to declare that it was students who ended the war in Vietnam. Apparently, the best thing anyone could do for Palestine was to just keep protesting. With the righteous passion and energy of the students channeled into a cloud of idealist fantasy, and this fantasy standing in blatant contradiction with the power and the violence the state had exercised during the April protests, the optimism that characterized the April protests began to wane.

This Fall, I watched the undergraduate students return to UT-Austin after the break, covering campus like a swarm of ants set loose on the world. I watched as they walked by the place where I was pepper-sprayed for the first time in my life. Where an empty shotgun shell was set off mere feet from me. Where my fellow students were beaten and terrorized, the eyes of the state troopers filled with hatred as they attacked students and dragged them off to jail. And I watched as the student movement fell into nihilism—a nihilism not officially acknowledged but rather marked by the loss of interest of many student activists and a return to hopeless reformist strategies by those who have remained. And I thought: the Palestinian masses deserve more. The students who were willing to put their bodies on the line for the Palestinian masses deserve more.

A Path Forward

As we have seen, liberal arguments and tactics have failed to marshall the remarkable recent upsurge in pro-Palestinian activity into the social forces necessary to impact the increasingly dire status quo in Palestine. Consigned to the far more modest goal of protecting the few meaningfully progressive voices present in academia today, purveyors of these arguments, confronted with an increasingly inhospitable financialized higher educational model, are still fighting a losing battle. For those in the United States (and throughout much of Western Europe under US hegemony) whose aims include, at minimum, the complete end of the racial oppression of the Palestinian people, it is thus imperative that we seek new ideological weapons and organizing strategies.

What then, is the path forward for the Palestinian movement in the United States? Here I cannot claim to have all or even most of the answers, for inevitably the path forward will be influenced by the situation in Palestine and more generally abroad, as well as developments here in the US that are impossible to predict ahead of time. However, we have seen that continuing to uncritically support the US pro-Palestinian movement in its current state, which in the university setting has plunged us into narrow battles over occupational demands that distract from the principled fight against the Zionist genocide, would be an affront to the Palestinian people and their history of disciplined struggle. What follows is an attempt to find, in the rich and intertwined traditions of Marxism and the Palestinian liberation struggle, the kernels of a viable path forward,

As we have seen, when academics speak of Palestine and, in particular, the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, they are wont to use the language of freedom. When the bourgeois academic speaks of freedom, however, they mean freedom in its purely negative form, i.e., freedom from various forms of state and/or institutional repression. If a proletarian intellectual cannot get a job at a university because their ideas are too radical and are thus poorly regarded by many of their peers, if their scholarship does not conform to the diktats that dominate the academy at the time, then so be it, for this has nothing to do with freedom. Similarly, if fervent supporters of Palestinian liberation fall under the leadership of academics with narrow occupational concerns who will not contribute to Palestinian liberation, then this is also not a question of freedom, for the supporter has been perfectly “free” to support any political movement they choose. So the negative form of freedom, which is ubiquitous in liberal democracies under capitalism and is revered in bourgeois thought as a principle that is foundational to liberal democracy, scientific progress, and so on, reveals itself as incapable of solving many of the problems that arise in human social relations.

This is no accident, but rather a consequence of using a definition of freedom that is based on an understanding of the human as an “isolated monad, withdrawn into himself,”^[55] which in practice becomes the freedom to use one’s property as one wishes, with other human beings serving as an obstruction to this freedom. Other prized values in bourgeois thought are also of little use in resolving the issues in the Palestinian liberation struggle due to the same problem. For example, equality in bourgeois society is defined in terms of equality under the law. But since the law gives everyone the freedom to dispose of their private property as they wish, and ownership levels of private property vary dramatically under capitalism, this notion of equality simply reinforces the definition of freedom qua negative freedom; everyone is an isolated monad equally.

We can escape the limits of these bourgeois concepts only through a different definition of freedom, one that defines freedom in positive terms. Broadly, positive conceptions of freedom define freedom in terms of the ability one has to do something, whereas negative freedoms only guarantee the ability to be free from state restriction on action and are not concerned with the material conditions and knowledge required for a person or class to do the thing in question.^[56] In the positive conception, someone who has a goal but fails to accomplish it due to ignorance of the actions required to accomplish the goal becomes unfree. In other words, freedom does not consist of independence from natural laws, but, as Engels, following Hegel, put it in Anti-Dühring, “in the knowledge of these laws,” and “the possibility of making them work towards definite ends.”^[57] To Marx and Engels, it was essential that this definition of freedom be championed, as critiquing negative freedom could only serve to condemn the current society, not provide a path forward. In contrast, by taking the positive definition of freedom and applying it to the ends of the Palestinian masses, freedom becomes synonymous with the knowledge, coordination, and material conditions required to end their oppression, and the path forward can be understood in terms of fighting for this freedom.

If, following Marx and Engels, we take the positive definition of freedom as primary, then I believe a general strategic outline for the orientation of the pro-Palestinian movement towards academic freedom follows. The theoretical basis for this strategy is the understanding that the demand for academic freedom in the United States will only become aligned with the objective interests of the Palestinian masses if academic freedom is redefined to correspond with the positive definition of freedom, and that the interests of the Palestinian masses are intertwined with those of workers in the United States through a common enemy: the ruling class in the United States, who both funds the genocide of the Palestinian people and exploits the workers. With this understanding, academic freedom must be understood as incomplete as long as workers do not have the freedom to direct universities toward definite ends in the interests of the proletariat. The eventual goal becomes an academy that maintains the progressive aspects of bourgeois academic freedom (e.g., freedom from limits on research) while foregrounding these new, positive, aspects of academic freedom, enabling the production of knowledge, technologies, and people at the university that will work with and for the Palestinian masses.

From this theoretical basis, the question of how to realize this expanded definition of academic freedom naturally follows. In particular, the critical question that pro-Palestinian activists must face is whether this expansion, and the broader shift in the balance of class forces in the US it implies, can be accomplished through an academic-led struggle, or whether the forces required for change must come from without. This is not an idle academic question, but rather one that has urgent implications for those students and academics who are contemplating how they can best advance the pro-Palestinian movement. Is it enough to be a radical within academia, or is it necessary for those passionate about Palestinian liberation and real academic freedom to recognize the contradictions between their political aims and their personal career goals and cast off the privileges that come with academic life under capitalism?

I believe the answer to the above question is clear, embedded in the historical record of past liberation struggles. Ending US imperialist policies and reconfiguring the university to work in the interests of the masses is not possible without revolution, and this revolution must be led by the working class. The rich histories of the Russian and Chinese liberation struggles, where revolutionary movements began in embryonic form within academic circles but only flourished when those academics abandoned their privilege to work for and with the working class, are particularly instructive on this matter. These struggles teach us that there is only one criterion for evaluating whether or not someone is a revolutionary—whether they are “willing to integrate [themselves] with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice.”^[58] This is because “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”^[59]—we have to transform ourselves to be capable of transforming the world. Intellectuals who remain in academia will be, at best, an island within a sea of bourgeois thought, and at worst, compromised by the material incentives and ideology that surround them, unable to adopt the class stand of the masses both here in the US and in Palestine.

The path forward outlined above is not an easy one. The brevity used in describing some of its aspects is in no way intended to conceal its difficulty and the level of sacrifice it will require from those who are committed to seeing the struggle to its end, as well as the fact that ultimately it will be the Palestinian masses themselves who determine the overall trajectory of Palestinian liberation. However, as people living within a state that supplies critical military and economic support to Israel, we have the potential to play an important role in bringing about Palestinian liberation. Revolutionary history—as synthesized by communist revolutionaries like Marx, Lenin, and Mao—teaches us that this potential will only be realized if we are willing to cast off class privilege and adopt the class stand of the working class and the Palestinian masses. Now is the time to marry the remarkable recent upsurge in enthusiasm and passion for the Palestinian cause with the knowledge and actions required for victory.

1. Since the original draft of this essay was written, the School of Social Work’s mission statement has been modified and no longer contains any reference to social or economic justice. The unmodified mission statement can be found here.

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2. The full letter can be found online here.

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3. "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” 1940, https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure#4.

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4. Neil W Hamilton, “Buttressing the Neglected Traditions of Academic Freedom,” William Mitchell Law Review 22 (1996): 549.

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5. Ibid, 551-554.

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6. Terence Karran, “Academic Freedom: In Justification of a Universal Ideal,” Studies in Higher Education 34, no. 3 (2009): 263–83.

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7. Guy Neave, “On Being Economical with University Autonomy: Being an Account of the Retrospective Joys of a Written Constitution,” in Academic Freedom and Responsibility (Open University Press Milton Keynes, 1988).

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8. Ibid, 34.

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9. Matthew Levinger, “The Prussian Reform Movement and the Rise of Enlightened Nationalism,” in The Rise of Prussia 1700-1830 (Routledge, 2014).

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10. Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on the Article: `The King of Prussia and Social Reform: By a Prussian',” 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/08/07.htm.

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11. Robert Anderson, “The ‘Idea of a University’ Today,” History & Policy 1 (2010): 22–26.

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12. Richard Hofstadter and Walter P Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (Columbia University Press, 1955).

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13. Edward Shils, “The Modern University and Liberal Democracy,” Minerva, 1989, 430.

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14. Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky in Zurich,” 1886, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_06_03.htm.

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15. A discussion of these unique features, which have played a fundamental role in determining the trajectory of American history, is beyond the scope of this work. See, e.g., Allen’s The Invention of the White Race (1994) or Wolfe’s Marx in America (1934) for different perspectives on this question.

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16. Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (Self Published, 1923)

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17. Arthur O Lovejoy, “Academic Freedom in Wartime,” The Nation 106, no. 2753 (1918): 401–2.

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18. Frank Thilly, “Report of the President,” AAUP Bulletin, 1917.

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19. Arthur O Lovejoy, “Annual Message of the President,” AAUP Bulletin, 1919.

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20. The last point is true to the extent that class struggle leads to the necessity of suppressing those pesky proletarian ideas that threaten the structure of bourgeois society.

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21. Richard Hull, “Biography: Frank Thilly,” in Presidential Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 1981–1990, 2013.

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22. John Karl Wilson, “A History of Academic Freedom in America” (PhD Diss., Illinois State University, 2014).

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23. Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory,” Minerva 1 (1962): 54–74.

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24. “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure#4.

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25. Robert McCoy, “University of Texas at Austin Silences 2 Graduate Students for a Pro-Palestine Message,” The Daily Beast, December 6, 2023, https://www.thedailybeast.com/university-of-texas-at-austin-silences-two-graduate-students-for-a-pro-palestine-email.

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26. Shils, “The Modern University and Liberal Democracy."

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27. As Marx put it in “On The Jewish Question” (1844), his polemic against Bruno Bauer, “the practical application of man’s right to liberty [under capitalism] is man’s right to private property."

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28. See, e.g., Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine (2020) for an honest, albeit bourgeois, account of the history of US support of Israel.

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29. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, “Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar Announces $45 Million Purchase in Israel Bonds,” 2023, https://comptroller.texas.gov/about/media-center/news/20231102-texas-comptroller-glenn-hegar-announces-45-million-purchase-in-israel-bonds-1698872583849.

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30. Lily Kepner, “UT System Chairman Kevin Eltife on Pro-Palestine Protests: 'Divestment Is Not an Option',” Austin American-Statesman, May 9, 2024, https://www.statesman.com/story/news/education/202405/09/ut-austin-pro-palestine-protests-system-chairman-kevin-eltife-divestment-not-an-option/73618821007/.

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31. Rich Shapiro, “Muslim Students Feel Abandoned by U. Of Texas After Israelis Disrupt Palestinian Event,” NBC News, November 11, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/muslim-students-feel-abandoned-u-texas-israelis-disrupt-palestinian-ev-rcna122793.

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32. "UTIMCO Weapons Manufacturer Investments Report,” (Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, 2020), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1paHX3wpiiQ6RN2ho5tdHEbhDVLVTcmKJ/view.

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33. Jonathan Orta and Christina Noriega, “Draw the Connections: UT, The US and Israel,” The Daily Texan, November 29, 2012, https://thedailytexan.com/2012/11/29/draw-the-connections-ut-the-us-and-israel/.

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34. Karen Adler and Robyn Mack, “UT System, U.S. Army Futures Command Announce Partnership to Accelerate Innovation in Trauma Care,” The University of Texas System, April 19, 2022, https://www.utsystem.edu/news/.

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35. Glen Colby, “Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education,” American Association of University Professors, 2023, https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/AAUP%20Data%20Snapshot.pdf.

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36. Steven Salaita, “My Life as a Cautionary Tale,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 28, 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-life-as-a-cautionary-tale/.

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37. Ibid.

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38. See Ajith’s “On Postisms’ Concepts and Methods” (2020) for an excellent overview of postmodernism and its many expressions in academia today.

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39. David Landy, “The Academic Field Must Be Defended: Excluding Criticism of Israel from Campuses,” in Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).

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40. Ibid, 94.

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41. Dylan Riley, “Bourdieu’s Class Theory,” Catalyst Journal 1, no. 2 (2017).

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42. Ibid.

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43. Landy, 93.

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44. Ibid, 109.

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45. Here I am referring to the various modes of direct and indirect repression the ruling classes have at their disposal (some of which were discussed in the previous section), as well as the privileged position they have from which to dispense ideology due to their control of the superstructure.

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46. Riley, “Bourdieu’s Class Theory.”

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47. Judith Butler, “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom,” Radical Philosophy 135 (2006): 8.

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48. Ibid, 10.

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49. Ibid, 11.

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50. Ibid, 9.

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51. Ibid, 16.

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52. Becky Fogel, “Four UT Students Will Not Appeal Punishments for Pro-Palestinian Protest in a Dean’s Office,” KUT News, February 14, 2024, https://www.kut.org/education/2024-02-14/four-ut-students-facing-sanctions-for-pro-palestinian-protest-will-not-appeal-their-punishments.

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53. Lily Kepner, “Why UT President Dismissed Tas Grievances over Work Reassignments After Pro-Palestinian Note,” Austin American-Statesman, March 21, 2024, https://www.statesman.com/story/news/education/2024/03/21/pro-palestine-message-ut-tas-reassigned-offered-no-relief-after-greivance-process/72775581007/.

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54. Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Patrick Svitek, “Criticism, Praise of Texas Governor After Dramatic Use of Troopers on Protesters,” The Washington Post, April 25, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/25/protests-texas-abbott-gaza/.

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55. Marx, “On the Jewish Question.”

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56. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Clarendon Press, 1958).

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57. Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Dühring,” 1877, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/.

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58. Mao Tse-tung, “The Orientation of the Youth Movement,” 1939, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_14.htm.

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59. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Preface,” 1859, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.

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