Earlier essays in this series point to a collision between universities’ actions when responding to Title VI complaints and the First Amendment and free speech values that these institutions profess to uphold. These posts also observe that campus administrators are deciding how to reconcile competing legal obligations and values amid intense external pressure to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. This pressure is only expected to intensify when the Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled Senate and House assume power.

I want to focus on an internal challenge to the fair adjudication of Title VI complaints related to the Palestine/Israel conflict at U.S. colleges and universities—a challenge that is linked to the current pressure on universities but that is also both more institutional and longer-standing. Many Title VI complaints are about speech, whether in classrooms, at events, on social media, or during protests: statements about Israel’s actions in Gaza or its identity as a Zionist state, the expression of Palestinian slogans or symbols, or the assertion of various political claims related to events in the region. But Palestinian and Arab voices, as well as the voices of scholars of Palestine, are scarce within the faculty and the administrative leadership of many colleges and universities. As a result, their perspectives are not heard when administrators face pressure to equate speech associated with Palestinian political movements or the war in Gaza with bias or harassment.

There is little systematic data on the representation of Palestinians on faculties and in administrative leadership, or on related but distinct identity categories, like Arabs or Muslims. (I note that these categories are too often conflated, with the assumption that all Palestinians are Muslim or that the conflict is a religious rather than a political struggle.) There is also little national data on U.S. scholars or academic programs addressing Palestinian history, literature, politics, law, or culture. But there are good reasons to suspect that both representation and scholarship are limited in much of higher education—and that both are threatened by a “Palestine exception to academic freedom.”

At Stanford, I served on a committee created last fall to assess the experience of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities on campus. Finding enough members to serve on the committee was itself a challenge, given the institutional demographics and the fear surrounding the issue. I was one of only two tenured/tenure-track faculty members on the committee and the only faculty member who identifies with any of the three categories. (I am Muslim but neither Palestinian nor Arab.) In the course of our work, we were not able to identify a single tenured Palestinian faculty member at the university and found only three on the tenure track. Of the three, only one focused on Palestine or Palestinians in his research, and he has since left Stanford, thus leaving the institution without a single faculty scholar of Palestine (of any background). Our report concluded that, while Stanford had hired in Islamic studies over the past two decades, it needed to invest far more in Palestine and Arab studies.

But within academia, there is significant political pressure to avoid studying or speaking out on Palestine. In other words, the same pressures that are incentivizing universities to crack down on Palestinian speech today have, over a longer period, stymied the development of the expertise and resources that universities need to navigate this moment.

Anthropologists Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar have argued that attempts to suppress teaching and activism on Palestine on U.S. campuses date to the late 1960s, with the initiation of a “decades-long offensive to combat the hiring of faculty of Palestinian and/or Arab backgrounds, silence Palestinian perspectives, and prevent criticism of the Israeli state from appearing in campus events or curricula.” These early campaigns responded to the exposure of U.S. audiences to Palestinian American intellectuals, such as Edward Said, and to the formation of alliances between anti-war, Black liberation, and indigenous rights movements. In the early 2000s—and again in response to renewed campus activism following Israeli military attacks on Gaza in 2009 and 2014—new organizations formed to monitor and intimidate faculty and students “deemed to be anti-Israel, unpatriotic, and complicit with terrorism, as well as those identified as Muslim and/or Arab.”

These kinds of pressures resulted in both suppression and self-censorship in teaching and scholarship long before October 7, 2023. For instance, the Stanford Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee heard from faculty who did not teach, research, or speak about Palestine before receiving tenure for fear of career repercussions; graduate students who were advised not to work on Palestine because it would hinder their academic job prospects; staff who felt compelled to hide their Palestinian identity or expressions of solidarity with Palestinians; and students afraid to take classes with the word “Palestine” in the course title for fear of employers seeing it on their transcripts. Students, staff, and faculty from a variety of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds experienced these chilling effects so long as their work or activities could be deemed sympathetic to Palestinians.

These long-standing pressures have limited the growth of internal expertise within colleges and universities on Palestine and Palestinians. When administrators meet among themselves and with faculty colleagues—in the many informal conversations that shape people’s views on the meaning of speech and the boundaries of legitimate debate—there is often no one in the room who identifies as Palestinian or Arab or who can speak with credibility about the political claims and expression of Palestinians.

The problem of limited representation in higher education is compounded by similar dynamics in the media sector, which influences what information, framing, and perspectives are available to campus administrators. Communications scholar Marda Dunsky’s 2008 study of U.S. media coverage concluded that, “to a significant extent American mainstream journalism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict toes the lines of U.S. Mideast policy,” which has directed massive military and diplomatic support to Israel over decades. More recently, historian Maha Nassar found that, of the thousands of opinion pieces about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The Washington Post from 1970 to 2019, less than two percent were authored by Palestinians. In some outlets, Nassar found that the picture was even more lopsided: Of the nearly 500 pieces about Palestinians published in The New Republic over 50 years, not a single one was authored by a Palestinian.

The scarcity of Palestinian perspectives and expertise, both within colleges and universities and in mainstream media, means that administrators are often not hearing any informed counterpoint to the vocal insistence that pro-Palestinian speech creates a hostile environment. In the past year, political pressure came not only from university donors and Republicans in Congress but also from the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which too often conflated contested political speech with harassment. For instance, it investigated Lafayette College for incidents that were alleged to constitute a hostile environment, including the inclusion of a sign at a protest that bore the slogan, “from the river to the sea.” The college had denounced the slogan as antisemitic in a campus-wide email and summoned the student who held the sign to multiple meetings with administrators. The college’s actions affixed a singular meaning onto a historic protest slogan that is at odds with how many Palestinians themselves understand its meaning. But the OCR concluded that the college did not satisfy its Title VI obligations because it failed to investigate a student’s subsequent use of the slogan on social media.

To be clear, not every incident of challenged speech involves difficult questions of interpretation. For instance, it does not take an expert to see that an allegation that Israel is engaging in “apartheid” is a claim about its systematic discrimination against Palestinians, not hate speech. The Stanford medical school administrators who denied a registered student organization use of standard resources to host an event on “medical apartheid in Palestine” could easily have learned why human rights groups apply the term without becoming experts in international law or on the region. Similarly, it does not take special expertise to recognize that “Israelism,” a film by young Jewish Americans reflecting on their disillusionment with Israel, is not an expression of antisemitism. When the president of Barnard College reportedly told a faculty member not to screen the film for fear of generating Title VI complaints, it did not stem from a lack of information or knowledge.

Moreover, the presence of Palestinian voices and expertise at a university does not rule out repression instigated by outside pressure. At Columbia, the presence of Professor Rashid Khalidi, a renowned historian of Palestine, did not dissuade administrators from threatening to discipline students for pro-Palestinian political speech, just as the objection of faculty governance bodies did not prevent administrators from cracking down on protests. Higher education leaders who fear congressional overseers or donors more than they respect their institutions’ faculty or core values may be unmoved by internal opposition.

But in some cases, the presence of diverse perspectives and grounded expertise within college campuses can create productive friction and slow down moves to reinterpret disfavored political positions as instances of bias. In addition to the slogans like “from the river to the sea” or terms like “intifada” that have generated attention, administrators will be faced with complaints alleging that other political statements or expression contribute to hostile environments.

In such a context, colleges and universities should ensure that they are reaching out to those who do have expertise on Palestine within their institutions—and championing their academic freedom against outside threats. They should also affirmatively seek out resources in which Palestinians speak for themselves on their political and cultural speech and symbols, as well as material on anti-Palestinian racism. Over the longer term, they should also be investing in hiring and retaining scholars of Palestine and Arab studies to build additional institutional expertise. While cultivating these resources will not remove the external power dynamics influencing Title VI decisions—such as political and donor threats to defund universities—they may provide an additional epistemic foundation for resisting the mandating of institutional orthodoxies.