In Defense of Academic Freedom Session 12
The Frontlines of Educator Resistance
Featuring:
Sang Hea Kil
Moderators:
Anna Feder
Bassam Haddad
Organized by DC, Maryland, & Virginia Faculty for Academic Freedom and Gaza in Conrtext Collaborative Project; Cosponsored by MESA Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom, Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network (140+ chapters nationally)
The assault on academic freedom is intensifying on University campuses. This series takes note of cases of defamation, intimidation, and suspension that faculty are being subjected to in the United States and beyond. We aim to raise awareness regarding the conditions and pretenses under which such violations occur.
Join us in conversation with Sang Hea Kil, the first tenured Full Professor to be fired from a public university in connection to campus protests against Israel’s Genocide. The story of Professor Sang Kil is not unfamiliar, but the details highlight the unprincipled nature of higher education today and the abrogation of the University’s mission in relation to political power. Sang also addresses the role of unusual suspects.
Join academics, activists, and educators to discuss how we organize workers across positions in higher education and K-12 in advance of the school year to push back against the repression at our institutions. We will discuss a variety of tactics, including leveraging internal processes with the support of unions, legal avenues, public pressure campaigns, and boycotts.
This event is Co-Sponsored by the Gaza in Context Collaborative Project
Featuring
Sang Hea Kil (she/they) is a professor in the “Justice” Studies Department at San Jose State University (SJSU). She is a scholar-activist whose research focuses on the criminalization of immigrants, media analysis of the militarization of the border and immigrant bans/exclusions, and the discourse of whiteness and the nation. Their book titled ‘Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Race, Crime, Nation and the USA-Mexico Divide’ (Lexington books 2019) won the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title: Media and Communication. One of her empirical chapters of her book won a top paper award in Ethnic and Racial International Communication Section (Co-sponsored with Global Communication and Social Change) at the International Communication Association conference in 2019. She was the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine at her campus when she was fired for supporting SJSU students protesting a Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people in November 2025. AAUP believes she is the first full tenured professor fired for Palestine. They are the co-founder and member of SJSU’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine as well as the tri-chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi caucus of her faculty union, the California Faculty Association (CFA) of the California State University system. She is co-founder, former co-chair and member of the Palestine, Arab and Muslim (PAM) Caucus of the CFA. She won a SJSU Lifetime Faculty Service Award from her college in 2018-2019.
Anna Feder spent nearly two decades in higher education, with the last twelve years dedicated to running the Bright Lights Cinema Series, a free public exhibition program that emphasized social justice films at Emerson College in Boston. Her termination and the cancellation of her series have led to a lawsuit claiming that Emerson violated her free speech rights. Additionally, Annais an organizer with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network, a platform that builds solidarity among educators on the frontlines of resistance. She is currently collaborating with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the AAUP to document the experiences of educators who have faced repression for their support of Palestinian liberation.
Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).