An NYU professor’s comments about Oct. 7 were abhorrent. It was still wrong to suspend him
We must stand up for academic freedom, even for views we find abhorrent
Posters of people kidnapped by Hamas in Israeli are displayed on a pole outside of New York University. New rules at some colleges would prohibit posting such posters directly on school property. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Laura E. Adkins January 26, 2024
A New York University professor’s comments appearing to excuse Hamas atrocities and question well-documented horrors of Oct. 7 were made public Thursday by The Free Press.
By evening, he had been suspended.
Amin Husain, a part-time faculty member since 2016, had defended the violent “resistance” of Hamas and other Palestinian liberation groups during a Students for Justice in Palestine teach-in held Dec. 5.
“These groups are fighting for the liberation of the people and their land. That’s a right,” he said. In a video clip, Husain also waved away well-documented instances of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, which he characterized as “not true,” and called New York a “Zionist city.”
An NYU spokesperson told Louis Keene, a Forward reporter, that Husain has been suspended and is not currently teaching any classes at NYU. (The Free Press article notes that his class has not been on the schedule since 2022.) His part-time faculty member page was also removed on Thursday from the NYU website. The New School, where Husain also previously taught, for their part told the New York Post that Hussain’s comments were “outrageous and offensive,” characterizing them as antisemitic.
For many pro-Israel folks, this swift suspension of Husain might seem like a clear victory. And the positions he shared at the teach-in are little more than Hamas talking points dressed up with an academic veneer.
But as noxious as I find Husain’s justification of violent resistance against Israelis to be, I believe NYU made not only the wrong decision, but a dangerous one.
Checking free speech at the campus gate
When I read the news of Husain’s suspension, something felt off to me. The Free Press article centered on a short video clip stripped of its context, and while Husain’s apparently casual dismissal of well-documented evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7 was upsetting, among prominent anti-Israel activists it’s not a unique position.
Even if Husain did violate university policies, I felt weird that NYU, my alma mater, was apparently punishing someone without doing an independent investigation into the specific circumstances of his remarks.
So I called Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and a leading expert on constitutional law and civil liberties, to help me make sense of it.
“I don’t see any basis for professional discipline based on the facts that have been in view so far,” she told me.
Employers can put limitations on their employees’ speech when they’re working in a professional capacity, she said. But when someone like Husain is “not specifically carrying out his professional responsibilities as a scholar or teacher, he has exactly the same free speech rights that students have, that you have, that I have,” Strossen said.
In other words: Although Husain would likely not be allowed to propagandize or indoctrinate students in his classroom, he can say almost whatever he wants when not acting as a professor. Crucially, Strossen said, “that includes the right to make general pronouncements that are false, dangerous, hateful and discriminatory.”
“Even advocacy of genocide, even express advocacy of genocide, is constitutionally protected,” she added.
She stressed that such speech should also not be used to evaluate someone up for tenure or a re-upping of their adjunct contract. All universities will look at community involvement, she told me, but “that is supposed to be content neutral and viewpoint neutral.” Husain’s publication record and scholarship could be scrutinized, but political speech outside of his official duties should not be.
“You don’t give up your usual free speech rights as the price of being a faculty member,” Strossen said.
And while New York University, as a private university, is not bound by the First Amendment, all universities should strive to preserve academic freedom and consistently apply their own speech policies.
So why was he suspended?
“This is par for the course,” she told me with a sigh. “For so many years now, universities have been violating the First Amendment, their own free speech standards,” and enforcing “extremely overly broad concepts of harassment.”
Husain’s comments might feel like a personal attack, but universities should really not be treating it that way. Though today, their doing so might help some Jews feel vindicated, tomorrow, we could be the targets.
When I took issue with a Jewish organization’s attempts to restrict anti-Israel speech on social media platforms in 2021, I asked Forward readers to imagine a different lobby working to censor pro-Israel or Zionist speech, and how they would feel about that work.
A similar scenario comes to mind today, but one far less abstract. Columbia professor Shai Davidai has been an outspoken critic of pro-Palestinian campus groups and how their actions are treated by the university since Oct. 7. He’s faced tremendous criticism for doing so.
What if tomorrow, Columbia caved to calls to treat the Israeli professor’s private speech as harassment and incitement? Would you feel equally gleeful?
“It is easy to appreciate the rage over today’s blatantly antisemitic rhetoric, particularly when our society wouldn’t tolerate, much less celebrate, similar expressions of delight after the brutal slaughter of other minorities,” Strossen and Pamela Paretsky wrote in The Free Press on Oct. 18.
“We feel that anger personally. But when it comes to calls to silence, fire, or even deport those who express such noxious views, we are also clear: We must resist it,” they wrote. “As Jews and as free-speech advocates, we believe that as painful as it is to hear speech that calls for our elimination, we must resist the impulse to silence it.”
I’ve learned from those who, like Strossen and Paretsky, have shown a path toward honoring commitments both to the expression of Jewish pain and to the protection of free speech, and I have grown to see the wisdom in standing up for both. I am inspired by their courage, and hope the rest of us can summon the same moral clarity.
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