Presented By: Faculty Senate
31st Annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom
Lecture by Dima Khalidi, Director, Palestine Legal: A New McCarthyism? Academic Freedom and Palestine

Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal, will deliver the 31st Annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.
Abstract
Amid a nationwide push to curtail the teaching of institutional racism and the dark sides of US history, we can learn important lessons from another subject on which campus communities have long experienced attacks on free speech and academic freedom: Palestine. In what can only be characterized as a “Palestine Exception to free speech,” academics, students, and others who speak out for Palestinian rights are routinely falsely accused, investigated, surveilled, harassed, and sometimes suffer severe consequences to their reputations and careers. Right-wing efforts to dictate what academics can and can’t say, teach, or write are proliferating. Is this a “new McCarthyism”? What is at stake? What can we learn from Palestinians and their allies whose histories, narratives, and experiences are constantly denied, erased, and criminalized, even in academia? How can we ensure that universities can be bastions of academic freedom, and not enforcers of corporate, lobbyist, and governmental litmus tests?
Palmer Commons, Forum Hall
100 Washtenaw Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI
via Zoom Webinar
via Livestream
Visit https:facultysenate.umich.edu for details.
Abstract
Amid a nationwide push to curtail the teaching of institutional racism and the dark sides of US history, we can learn important lessons from another subject on which campus communities have long experienced attacks on free speech and academic freedom: Palestine. In what can only be characterized as a “Palestine Exception to free speech,” academics, students, and others who speak out for Palestinian rights are routinely falsely accused, investigated, surveilled, harassed, and sometimes suffer severe consequences to their reputations and careers. Right-wing efforts to dictate what academics can and can’t say, teach, or write are proliferating. Is this a “new McCarthyism”? What is at stake? What can we learn from Palestinians and their allies whose histories, narratives, and experiences are constantly denied, erased, and criminalized, even in academia? How can we ensure that universities can be bastions of academic freedom, and not enforcers of corporate, lobbyist, and governmental litmus tests?
Palmer Commons, Forum Hall
100 Washtenaw Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI
via Zoom Webinar
via Livestream
Visit https:facultysenate.umich.edu for details.