A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia?
In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college's Lutheran roots.
As Finkelstein prepared to go home, she noticed a text from someone claiming to be the college's provost, Laura Furge. 'I had just done the online phishing training,' she told me later. 'And I was like, 'I know that if the provost texts me on an unknown number, it's spam.'' She deleted and blocked the message. Then she checked her email. There was a message from the provost there as well.
'So, I unblocked her number and called her,' she said. Furge told Finkelstein that the Department of Education had opened an investigation into Muhlenberg for potential civil rights violations. The college had yet to receive the underlying complaint, but they knew a professor had been named, and campus administrators assumed that professor was Finkelstein.
It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for 'dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric' and 'blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.' As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein's posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read 'Anti-Zionist Vibes Only,' below which she had written 'Free Gaza, free Palestine, stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli and American war machines.' In another, on Oct. 26, she wrote, 'ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITS OCCUPATION.'
Furge didn't have many details to share with Finkelstein. 'She was like, 'I wanted you to know so you didn't hear it from the press first,'' Finkelstein recalled. 'And — this is so me — I was like, 'Laura, I am always trying to help the college have different experiences.'' Furge, Finkelstein said, 'didn't really laugh.'
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