Pro Palestinian tenured college professor fired

The Guardian -  A tenured professor at San José State University in California is fighting for her job after the university fired her last month over her pro-Palestinian activism – the first tenured faculty member fired from a public university in connection to campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

Sang Hea Kil, a longtime member of the university’s justice studies department and a faculty adviser for its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, is the latest in a growing list of university professors and staff who have been suspended, investigated and in some cases dismissed or forced out in connection to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that swept US campuses in the first year of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Kil, who is contesting her dismissal, was the second tenured faculty member dismissed from a US public university over pro-Palestinian activism after Steven Salaita, who was fired in 2014 from the University of Illinois over a series of social media posts critical of Israel’s bombing of Gaza that year. Maura Finkelstein, another tenured professor, was fired from Muhlenberg College, a private liberal arts college, following her criticism of Israel’s most recent war in Gaza, while Katherine Franke, a Columbia University law professor and longtime advocate for Palestinian rights was forced out amid what she called a “toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine”.

Kil’s firing adds to mounting concerns about academic freedom and campus free speech at a time when universities are facing unprecedented pressure from the Trump administration – but her case also raises questions about faculty’s free speech rights when engaged in so called “extramural” speech outside the classroom.