Reporting from The Baffler describes how a tenured political science professor at Indiana University, Abdulkader Sinno, was suspended from the university, ostensibly for reserving a room for a pro-Palestine student group. Sinno believes the administration suspended him as retaliation for his criticism of the administration’s immediate response to October 7.
Sinno’s colleagues assert that the university’s investigation of him has “violated numerous university procedures” and “signals a new status quo hostile to the independence academics have traditionally enjoyed at the university.”
In Indiana, a new law was passed this spring by the Republican supermajority in the state legislature, effectively abolishing tenure by subjecting tenured faculty at public universities to tenure review every five years.
SHILPA JINDIA; @shilpajindia
Jindia is a journalist and a legal fellow at the Campaign Legal Center.
Jindia told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I was appalled by [Professor Sinno’s] suspension on this technicality. It is emblematic of the crackdown on free speech at universities after October 7. Sinno was completing a student request to have a discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it heralds the rise in the suspension of free speech. The suspension of a tenured professor is unusual… and Sinno was suspended in violation of university procedure.
“More broadly, universities have responded with punitive measures toward students [for pro-Palestine actions]: breaking up the encampments with riot gear and military force, banning students from campus, suspending them. Yet it’s a concerning sign that a university would leap to suspension of a tenured professor.”
Indiana’s new law requires tenured faculty to be reviewed every five years and, Jindia wrote, requires “institutions to adopt disciplinary actions once unthinkable.”
Jindia says that the new law “revises the tenure review process to ensure that faculty are adhering to ideological tenets. The state is commandeering the [tenure review] process and also subjecting the university to an onerous process of having to undertake reviews more often. That puts a significant burden on the administration for a university of Indiana’s size with a large faculty… The bill is indicative of the state’s agenda to erode academic freedom.” The situation mirrors one at the New College of Florida, a progressive college that was taken over by a right-wing agenda in 2023, when “Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the [thirteeen]-member board of trustees, including Christopher Rufo… The new board then eliminated New College’s diversity offices and pushed out adjacent personnel.”
Jindia says that what is happening at IU “borrows from that playbook.”
But “when it comes to the Gaza protests,” she added, “it’s not just red versus blue states. Blue states are still taking measures to crack down on free speech… Universities are a place for students to learn how to think critically, where they get enraged about what’s happening in the world. Students are key to sustaining these movements, so it makes sense that [universities] become targets. Public universities are much easier for politicians to control.
“The media needs to keep looking outside Ivy League universities at why students are protesting. The mainstream media has taken a dismissive view of student protests. They need to look critically at how colleges are cracking down on students’ right to free speech… We’ve forgotten that the public university is a good that we’re all entitled to, that is key to a developed and flourishing society. I would hope that along with what’s happening in Gaza, the crackdown on campuses doesn’t become normalized––that it remains the story.”
