Executive Board Statement on Academic Freedom and False Accusations of Antisemitism
by Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union
On March 5, 2025, the Executive Board of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union voted in favor of the following statement:
On February 25, 2025, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered Hunter College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting she declared antisemitic. CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez promptly complied, stating “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses and combat hate in all of its forms.”
The Executive Board of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and the union Academic Freedom Committee, echoing calls from the CUNY Professional Staff Congress Academic Freedom Committee and the Hunter College Committee on Academic Freedom, CUNY for Palestine, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), strongly condemn this assault on academic freedom, as well as the Governor and Chancellor’s blatantly false accusation of antisemitism.
The job listing—since taken down—specified that Hunter College was seeking “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”
This language is central to a wide range of disciplines, from history to political science to Holocaust studies. Misrepresentation of this discourse as anti-Jewish is another example of the ongoing campaign to muzzle those—including Jews—who speak out for Palestinian liberation. Palestinians, Muslims, and international faculty and student advocates are especially at risk. The attack on the listing also mirrors the broader onslaught on DEI and progressive pedagogies.
Hunter College is the canary in the coal mine. In the wake of the listing’s removal, the head of the Department of Justice’s antisemitism task force, referring to campus anti-genocide protesters, declared, “We are going to put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years.” Earlier, President Trump served notice that his administration plans to deport “resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” claiming that college campuses “have been infested with radicalism like never before.” At Rutgers, we have witnessed a spate of similar politically-motivated smears and threats from powerful officials.
Educators cannot stand idly by in the face of these fascistic attacks on their and their students’ freedoms. Nor can they stay silent as legitimate academic discourse and demands for justice are maligned and criminalized as hate speech.
We call on Chancellor Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees to immediately repost the job announcement—with the original language—and to reject any further attempts, from inside or outside the university, to silence the truth-seeking at the core of higher education’s mission.
