In what the Center for Constitutional Rights has called an “egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy,” longtime law professor Katherine Franke has been pushed out of her post at Columbia University. Professor Franke was basically coerced into an “agreement” to leave her teaching position. As she said in a January 9 statement: “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.” 

Katherine Franke is an accomplished scholar in law and gender studies. She has taught at Columbia for 25 years. She was on the executive committee of the Center for Palestinian Studies at Columbia. She has been courageously outspoken in support of students protesting the genocide in Gaza. For this, Franke has been targeted and investigated by congressional fascists and the kowtowing “liberal” administration of Columbia... and subjected to hate campaigns and threats by some pro-Israel professors and students, and Zionist thugs.

As recounted in her January 9 statement, she has been followed from the subway by law school colleagues who yelled false accusations at her; had students enroll in her classes for the express purpose of creating situations that can provoke discussions that they record online and then use to file complaints against her; and has received death and rape threats. Most recently, the university conducted an investigation with an unjustified finding that public comments Franke made violated the campus's non-discrimination policy. 

Regarding the “agreement” with Columbia, Professor Franke stated 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.”

The harassment and persecution of Katherine Franke is part of the wider repression against students and professors speaking out against and protesting the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. This repression is being carried out under the banner that anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism—a lie that equates political opposition to a state based on Jewish supremacy with hatred of the Jewish people as a people. And all this is part of wider moves to establish new draconian rules and disciplinary threats on campuses to squelch dissent, critical thinking, and meaningful protest; to impose Nazi-like thought control over what can be taught and by whom; and to isolate the universities from the rest of society. 

As Bob Avakian has emphasized, “Trump/MAGA fascism aims to make all this more openly and aggressively monstrous.” (from @BobAvakianOfficial social media message REVOLUTION #110, “Trump and Netanyahu—Nazi Madmen on a Mission of Destruction”). And as pointed out in the revcom.us analysis of this latest wave of repression: “The time for everyone to get off the sidelines and resist is NOW—before the fascists are able to fully shut down opposition to Israel's genocide and, along with that, turn campuses into political, moral, and intellectual dead zones.”