Continuing Sanctions Against Faculty for Palestine Activism and Scholarship at US Universities
- Endangered Scholars Worldwide
- Dec 30, 2025
- 4 min read
Sang Hea Kil became the first tenured professor to be fired from a public university in the US over Palestine activism since October 7, 2023. Kil was fired from San José State University (SJSU) in California in November of 2025. An associate professor in the university’s Justice Studies Department, Kil was the faculty advisor of the SJSU chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine. The university fired Kil for having encouraged students to start an encampment, in violation of university policy, and having participated herself in said encampment. The university policies in question are the “time, manner, place” policies that the university adopted in Spring 2024 to introduce additional restrictions on campus protests. Similar policies were adopted by other universities across the US, which have been, and continue to be used to silence on-campus pro-Palestine protest activity.
An October 2025 internal review by a faculty committee argued that Kil’s termination over university policy violations were unjustified. Despite these findings, the president of the university, Cynthia Teniente-Matson proceeded with the dismissal, claiming that Kil’s actions placed “the education and physical safety of [their] students at serious risk.” Speaking to The Guardian, Kil described her dismissal as an example of a “New McCarthyism, where geopolitical interests interfere with constitutional rights and academic freedom on campuses across the nation and on this campus.”
In a letter to President Teniente-Matson in June 2025 (when the university initially decided to fire Kil), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) protested the university’s decision, stating that her dismissal over campus protest policy violation is “grossly disproportionate and sets a very dangerous precedent that undermines the foundations of a democratic society.” The letter further stated that her dismissal is a violation of the collective bargaining agreement between the California Faculty Association and the California State University system since the agreement requires that there be “strong and compelling evidence” to fire a tenured faculty member. Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist organization active across many US universities, also condemned the university’s decision in a December 10, 2025, statement, calling attention to the fact that the university’s accusations of harassment against Kil were based on the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism “which conflates pro-Palestine speech with antisemitism.” The JVP stated that university’s decision constitutes “an undermining of faculty governance and abandonment of [the university’s] responsibility to preserve and protect academic freedom.”
Across the country, another faculty member has also been recently penalized for their scholarship and activism related to Palestine. At Harvard University. Mary T. Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights (FXB Center) at the Harvard School of Public Health, was asked to resign on December 9, 2025. The school’s dean Andrea Baccarelli announced that Bassett would step down without mentioning that he himself asked her to resign and vacate her office by January 9, 2026, just before sending the announcement.
Mary T. Bassett has worked on public health in a variety of settings including academia, government, and the non-profit sector. Her work has focused on disease prevention, combatting racism in policy implementation, food regulation, and health inequalities. For the past seven years, under her leadership, the FXB Center studied the public health consequences of structural inequality and violence, including the impacts of occupation on childhood health in the Palestinian West Bank. The FXB center also had a partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank to foster such work.
Since October 7, 2023, this work has been drawing reactions from internal critics, such as former Harvard president Larry Summers, who is now on leave after his longtime friendship with convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein surfaced in a recent release of the Epstein files to the public. In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Summers targeted the FXB Center in a social media post on October 23, claiming that the center “platforms supporters of terror, foments anti semitism, willfully ignores Hamas atrocities and distorts plain facts” and that he was “disgusted” by the lack of action taken by the university against the center. In July 2024, a group of Republican legislator also wrote to Harvard University, urging it to end its partnership with Birzeit University. Under a regular internal review of the center by Dean Baccarelli, the partnership was discontinued in March 2025. An April 29, 2025 report by Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias listed the academic events of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at the FXB Center as examples of “politicized instruction that mainstreams antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.”
Following these developments, in the email that announced Bassett’s removal from her role as director of the FXB, Dean Baccarelli stated that the center will move away from focusing its studies on the public health impacts of “oppression, poverty, and stigma” and towards “children’s health in early development.”
A petition organized to protest Bassett’s removal from office, which has reportedly surpassed 1,500 signatories, described it as a “targeted dismissal” that should be placed in the context of “a series of politically motivated terminations of leaders at Harvard’s scholarly centers that include programming on Palestine.” Eric Reinhart, a political anthropologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who wrote for The Guardian about Bassett’s dismissal, also noted the irony in Harvard’s internal restriction of the academic work of its own faculty while also seemingly taking on the role of a leading actor in protecting academic freedom against the Trump administration.
Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) condemns the ongoing campaign of censorship and retribution against scholars for their work on and activism in support of Palestinians across US universities. We call on San José State University and Harvard University to reverse their decisions to dismiss faculty from their positions in attempts to render advocacy and academic work in favor of Palestine invisible on their campuses. We invite the global community to join our call.