By SHANNON O. WELLS
Jabeen Adawi was among 49 Pitt faculty who signed an open letter to Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel in April 2024 expressing solidarity with students who had established a “liberated zone” supporting Palestine on Schenley Plaza represented by dozens of small Palestine flags and large signs that read “Stop the Genocide” and “Ceasefire Now.”
Acknowledging her doubts about the true effectiveness in “writing another letter,” Adawi, clinical assistant professor in the School of Law, said she came to realize that such actions at least “showed people who their allies were.
“Because that initial letter that we wrote, as it started to get distributed around the University, faculty realized, ‘OK, here’s the other (pro-Palestinian) people in my department … and all the other departments in the University.’ So it allowed us to build a lot of connections.”
As faculty members became more organized, Adawi said she found herself asking questions like, “Are we here to just rubber stamp whatever actions the students want to have? Are we going to be independently taking action in the movements?” and thinking about the faculty’s “unique role” and the challenges that accompany it, including the safety and security of faculty members.
“One of the challenges that we often run into as faculty is that some of the faculty that want to get up and do the work are also the most vulnerable: contract faculty, women of color.
“The ones who are more likely to get cut and face repercussions are the ones who are available first,” she observed. “I think one of the challenges and one of the strategies that needs to be thought about is, ‘How do you work with everybody’s different levels of protection to make sure that you move forward’” on publicly expressing beliefs and concerns.
Adawi shared her thoughts and experiences as part of the World History Center’s roundtable forum, "Global Perspectives on the Role of Faculty in an Age of Campus Repression," on Feb. 7 in Posvar Hall.
Roundtable guest David Lurie, a Columbia University collegiate professor of Asian humanities and associate professor of Japanese history and literature, engaged with Pitt faculty members in what was described as a “global, historical and comparative conversation about strategies for maintaining campuses as vital spaces for faculty democracy and dissent during difficult times.”
The forum, which drew about 25 attendees, was moderated by Ruth Mostern, Pitt professor of history and director of the World History Center. Aside from Adawi and Lurie, panelists included Nancy Condee (Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies), Keila Grinberg (Center for Latin American Studies), and Kay Shimizu (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs).
At Pitt, “there’s no shortage of people who care. It’s always a risk assessment,” Adawi explained. “And also thinking about how much work people have put into even getting into these positions as faculty members. How do you kind of protect them and be able to keep doing the (free speech-oriented) work?”
Adawi said allying with Students for Justice in Palestine is not just about supporting a movement, but also supporting and advocating for academic freedom and free speech, “including disruptive action recognizing that that is part of our free speech and part of academic freedom that we might have a role as faculty to protect.
“And one of the really, I think, powerful conversations that we’ve been having is also embracing our role as educators and recognizing that as faculty members, we also do have a responsibility to promote awareness about these topics … including educating others on the role of academic freedom and free speech.”
Being watched
Nancy Condee, professor and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and director of graduate studies in Pitt’s Slavic Languages and Literatures department, referred to herself as a “recovering Sovietologist.”
“In the Soviet Union and in Russia, even to quite recently, I was a very visible figure,” she explained. “I was on television from time to time. I was regularly in the media. People would ask me for interviews and so forth.
Noting that she spoke “beautiful Russian,” Condee said she was “very committed” to her field, which includes contemporary Russian cinema and films that haven’t been made yet “that are going for funding but will or will not get funding and (asking) why were they allowed or not allowed funding to see it.”
Back in the U.S., people, upon learning of her background, immediately start to ponder, “ ‘(Is she) a spy for this side? Am I a spy for that side.’ They can’t imagine that maybe you actually do research, and you live and breathe your research, and you want to keep doing your research.”
What her life was like in Russia, Condee explained, would “sound completely like mental illness” to those who haven’t experienced such repression.
“For example, we would never, my partner and I, leave our apartment without checking the wastebasket to make sure that nothing is (in it) that might be used to make us available for something, for a project,” she said. “We would not mention friends’ names on the phone.
Using nicknames for all their friends, “We would not name anything on the phone, in a crowd of people. We would never name anybody, even necessarily acknowledging them when they would walk into the room,” she said. “You (purposely) come late to a scholarly meeting so that you can choose where to sit.”
Simply engaging in one’s academic research and work — or otherwise minding one’s own business — was not enough to be free from intense scrutiny.
“Again and again, we learned that you keep your head down and do your work … still won’t help,” she said. “There will be provocation after provocation. You will be called in for questioning. Things will be staged against you. You have to keep an eye out all the time for why people are talking to you, why someone would come and sit down next to you and chat you up.”
Acknowledging this “very strange” way to live, Condee said it’s been difficult “to extrude that from your system metabolism” when returning to live in the West.
Her takeaway to share in a Pitt-based forum? That it’s worthwhile to “value the diversity of our different forms of oppositional behavior,” because people below the radar and not calling attention to themselves bring great value to the academic environment.
“There can be things that you don’t know about, and that doesn’t mean espionage,” she said. “That can just mean ‘You could count on me … because I won’t call attention to myself in X or Y situation.’”
Competitive academics
Offering a perspective from Asian universities, Kay Shimizu, assistant professor in GPSIA, noted that in Japan, “administrators are faculty and faculty are administrators,” creating a different dynamic from the structure of most U.S. universities.
In the years following World War II, younger academic faculty in Japan often joined students in anti-U.S. occupation protest movements. When police were called in to quell uprising, “they also were able to include or drag in many of the younger faculties who are close in age, who had experienced similar … anti-U.S. occupation sentiments in the late 1940s into the ‘50s and were, in many ways, their cohort, the same generation.”
That led to faculty “who were maybe in their late 20s or early 30s who joined the students in these protests against older faculty who were part of the university administration,” Shimizu said. “In the case of Japan, it was more about a generational divide, in part because of the war, in part because of the U.S. occupations that followed,” as well as whether to support the U.S. as its involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in the late 1960s.
Now, as Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution renounces war and use of force in dealing with international disputes, Shimizu said there’s “not really an output for this sense of whether Japan is going to participate actively in a military manner or not. And as a result, a lot of it is (channeled into) bickering on university campuses about whether or not Japan is actually pacifist or only enabling it.”
Because of low fertility rates and shrinking populations in many Asian countries, including South Korea and China as well as Japan, “the number of universities and the number of seats in universities far outweighs the number of students coming into universities,” she observed. Universities are therefore “in competition for getting more students to pay tuition to keep universities financially viable.
“And inevitably, that does become more of a customer service,” than a purely academic situation, she said. “Because the faculty are the administrators, it is becoming more and more like catering towards the demands of students.”
Political vulnerability
Lurie, who is past president of the Columbia University American Association of University Professors chapter, said demographic shifts, tuition rates and resulting financial strains are among factors that increasingly complicate free speech and expression on campuses.
“I’m not sure what the picture looks like for public universities, where the in-state tuition/out-of-state tuition is a big difference, but with a place like Columbia, the fact that these students from abroad are not getting financial aid is an enormous financial piece of the puzzle,” he said. “And in recent years, they’ve been primarily students from (China).
“And there’s a geopolitical kind of vulnerability there.”
If that population stops coming to pursue higher education in the U.S., “we’re potentially going to see an entire new wave of sort of destruction of the universities. And certainly our current (political) climate is basically endeavoring to create that situation,” he added. “So I think that the tuition part of it is very important.”
Noting Columbia’s “highest sticker prices” among comparable universities, a “perfect storm” emerged last April when then-Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on university campuses.
“It doesn’t look very good when our president is called before Congress to try and explain — especially if that president is willing to concede to the narrative that the students are antisemitic, like, evil people — then they’re like, ‘Why are people sending their children to Columbia to pay all this money?’”
In August 2024, Shafik resigned as Columbia’s president to focus on her role in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords.
The reliance of universities on federal funding and wealthy donors, as well as tuition, creates vulnerabilities that are exacerbated when faculty members’ free-speech expressions collide with different philosophies and political ideologies, Lurie noted.
“Once you take the money, you can’t substitute it,” he said. “Columbia could not decide tomorrow that we’re going to cut the tuition, because the budget wouldn’t work. You can’t decide that you’re going to proof your institution against the vulnerability of the federal government, because the current institution can’t (support it). Like, a third or half of its budget is coming from the federal government.”
“I mean, I would love it if we could have a cheerful conversation,” he quipped.
Following the roundtable event, moderator Ruth Moster said she found the forum “constructive and uplifiting.”
“It permitted colleagues to come together at a difficult time to learn from each other by focusing on global and historical stories about the role of the university during challenging political circumstances,” she said. “Although we currently face circumstances in the United States that may seem unprecedented, many faculty members have lived experience and scholarly expertise related to how to navigate repressive politics around the world.
“We have a lot to learn from them.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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