CUNY’s Political Purge and the Fight for Academic Freedom (HELU Blog)
August 18, 2025 / HELU Blog /
By Corinna Mullin, one of the “fired four” adjuncts at City University of New York, PSC delegate
In mid-June, the City University of New York carried out what our union has called a “political purge,” targeting the fired four — three adjunct faculty members, including myself (after 8 years of teaching at CUNY), who were non-reappointed without explanation, and another whose appointment was terminated. These dismissals defied unanimous departmental recommendations and were executed without due process. They represent not only a grave violation of academic freedom, but also a dangerous encroachment on faculty governance.
The administration’s decision to override faculty judgment represents a sharp break from established practice at CUNY and from widely accepted norms in higher education. The American Association of University Professors’ 1994 statement On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom is clear: “The governing board and president should, on questions of faculty status, as in other matters where the faculty have primary responsibility, concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.” CUNY has provided no such reasons.
As adjuncts, we occupy structurally precarious positions in the neoliberal university — a system that treats contingent faculty as disposable, stripping us of real job security and leaving us especially vulnerable to political retaliation. Tenured faculty are also increasingly targeted. Students are being disciplined for speaking out against the genocide and organizing in solidarity with Palestine. The chilling effect reaches everyone. These firings are the canaries in the coal mine: if adjuncts can be purged for their political speech, anyone can be next.
On July 15, 2025, CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce during a hearing titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” This McCarthyite spectacle was designed to divert attention from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the growing authoritarianism at home — marked by an accelerating crackdown on dissent, extreme austerity, attacks on labor, and the targeting of Black, Brown, migrant, and LGBTQ communities, including ICE raids, detentions and mass deportations. During the hearing, I was named by Florida Representative Randy Fine — who notoriously called for Israel to “nuke Gaza” — and the Chancellor threw me under the bus, effectively admitting my firing was political.
I have also been doxxed by far-right and Zionist organizations such as Betar and Canary Mission, harassed online, and targeted by smear campaigns. Rather than defending my constitutional academic freedom rights, CUNY’s administration aligned itself with these attacks, reinforcing the message that political dissent will be punished.
The repression we face is not just about individual faculty members. It is bound up with the undemocratic governance of CUNY itself. The Board of Trustees — dominated by Wall Street financiers, corporate lawyers, and real estate moguls — does not represent the interests of the largest urban public university in the country, which serves a largely working-class, largely immigrant, Black and Brown student body. Its priorities are aligned with the political and economic elite, not the communities CUNY serves.
As PSC-CUNY President James Davis warned at a recent press conference, Republican legislators are seeking to “ambush university leaders yet again, to smear faculty and students yet again, to threaten to defund our institutions yet again, and to dismantle higher education.” Instead of resisting, CUNY has joined in, helping to suppress anti-colonial and anti-racist speech, pedagogy and scholarship.
The destruction of every single Palestinian university in Gaza and the silencing of Palestine solidarity across our universities are connected. The same forces that erase academic life in Palestine are working to criminalize truth-telling here.
CUNY now stands at a crossroads: it can double down on administrative overreach and political suppression, or it can recommit to its mission as a people’s university rooted in justice, critical inquiry, and the free exchange of ideas. For the fired four, reinstatement is the immediate demand. But the deeper fight is for a university — and a society — where dissent is not punished, and truth is not a fireable or suspendable offense.
Because what happened to the fired four is not the end. If left unchallenged, it is only the beginning.
