A Muhlenberg College professor who was the subject of a protest campaign over her views about the Israel-Hamas conflict has been fired, according to a report.
Maura Finkelstein, a nine-year, tenured professor at the college, was fired in May for sharing on her personal Instagram account a post written by a Palestinian poet, The Intercept reported Thursday. The post was shared to a temporary story slide.
The Intercept reported that Finkelstein was suspended after sharing the post in January, and was fired by the college in May.
A message sent to Muhlenberg College requesting comment was not returned Thursday afternoon. The college declined to comment to The Intercept, and noted that it does not comment on confidential matters.
In a post late Thursday morning on X/Twitter, Finkelstein shared The Intercept’s article, and thanked the news site and the article’s author. She wrote, “As Israel & the US continue genocide in Palestine/escalate ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, we must continue to fearlessly fight for liberation & unapologetically condemn & work to dismantle Zionism & all forms of fascism” as part of a series of six posts.
She did not reply to messages left for her on social media Thursday.
Finkelstein was an associate professor of anthropology, according to her faculty profile, which remains on the college’s website.
Finkelstein, who is Jewish and has been vocal about the plight of Palestinians, was the subject of an online pressure campaign calling on the college to remove her. That campaign involved thousands of emails being sent to school administrators, local politicians, and media outlets, including The Morning Call. A spokesperson for Muhlenberg College told The Express-Times in July that the emails appeared to be bot-generated. Thousands received by The Morning Call were identical.
There was also a Change.org petition calling for her removal, which gained more than 8,000 signatures. That petition claimed she should be removed for “Pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “classroom bias” against Jewish students.
The post she shared in January was that of Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian poet, who wrote, “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
The American Association of University Professors said it has opened an inquiry into Finkelstein’s dismissal.
In a statement Thursday, the AAUP said Finkelstein was suspended, then dismissed after a student filed a complaint about her speech. The dismissal, the AAUP said, raises concerns about academic freedom at the college.
“It also appears that the Muhlenberg administration has not followed its own regulations regarding dismissal, or incorporated a crucial element in the AAUP’s understanding of academic due process—that a dismissal action must be preceded by an adjudicative hearing before an elected faculty body in which the administration bears the burden of demonstrating just cause for dismissal,” the statement reads in part.
A tenured professor can only be fired “for cause or under extraordinary circumstances,” according to the association’s website. That protects academic freedom, it says: “When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge.”
The AAUP, in a letter to college President Kathleen Harring, wrote that a panel convened to adjudicate the case determined Finkelstein was responsible for “bias-related conduct” in reposting that post on Instagram. That panel recommended she be terminated, according to the AAUP.
She appealed the dismissal and that process has not proceeded in the months since she was dismissed, according to the AAUP.
A dismissal action has to be preceded by a hearing, the letter states.
The AAUP also noted that her case presents issues of interest to members of the academic community, including whether expressions of opposition to Zionism or Israel’s government can be equivalent to antisemitism, discrimination or harassment of students; how equal opportunity requirements on a campus intersects with institutional policies; and the extent to which the controversy around the war in Gaza can affect academic freedom and due process on campus.
Allison Mickel, an associate professor at Lehigh University and a founding member of the Lehigh Valley chapter for the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, which describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world,” said she and Finkelstein went to graduate school together at Stanford University. She criticized Muhlenberg’s firing of Finkelstein, highlighting the importance of academic freedom, and said Finkelstein is an expert in her field.
“It feels really scary to think that we can’t be advocates against war and against oppression, and that that’s a fireable offense,” Mickel said. “She comes at this issue from scholarly expertise and from her Jewish values. It is a Jewish value to heal the world. It’s called ‘tikkun olam.’ That’s where Jewish Voice for Peace comes from with its advocacy, that’s the value that we’re rooted in.”
Mickel added, “There’s an irony to the fact that the claim is that she, in any way, made Muhlenberg less safe for Jewish students, and that the response was to fire a Jewish faculty member who was engaging in social activism rooted in Jewish values. There’s something really twisted about that.”
A representative for the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley declined to comment.