Before I even read the article claiming a professor was “fired for her politics,” I knew for sure this professor wasn’t fired for her politics. But I was curious about the real story, so I read on. Turns out that the story really is about a chilling form of academic intimidation—it’s just that it’s the professor who was the guilty party.
The piece is in the New York Times Magazine, so it dedicates more than 7,000 words to its subject. In this case, that subject is some imagined dystopian world in which Jewish students and government officials are engaged in a campaign of ruining professors who might hold opposing views on political issues.
But those thousands of words don’t end up painting a dystopian world at all. The facts of this specific case are such that any right-thinking person will find the professor to be the least-sympathetic character in this story.
The professor is Maura Finkelstein, and the school is Muhlenberg College, which is about 20 percent Jewish according to the piece. Just after the beginning of the 2024 spring semester, Finkelstein was told by the provost that the school was facing a federal civil-rights investigation. Both the provost and Finkelstein immediately assumed it was because of something Finkelstein had done. Students, you see, had been complaining that her rhetoric in class and online had revealed an inappropriate pro-Hamas militancy.
For example, according to the screenshots provided to the school by the students, Finkelstein had posted a photo of herself five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and spree of sexual torture. In the photo, Finkelstein is wearing a keffiyeh and a shirt that says “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only.” It’s captioned: “Free Gaza, free Palestine, stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli and American war machines.”
In other words, she posted a picture of herself celebrating the worst daylong mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Since Israel had not yet gone into Gaza—by Oct. 12 they were still collecting bodies—her caption was at least revealing: The “genocide” accusation has no correlation whatsoever with what was actually happening on the ground. But a false accusation of genocide is the less-egregious part of a post in which the other part celebrates an attempt to wipe out the Jewish people.
As for the “anti-Zionist vibes only” part of her message: At American universities, “Zionist” means “Jew” and no one really pretends otherwise. Even in the best possible explanation, this professor was announcing that she “only” hated about 90 percent of Jews.
After Finkelstein got the call from the provost, she decided to go all-in. She added to her Instagram stories a post written by a Palestinian-American who had this to say: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
These are the words of a person who is deeply dispirited by the fact of Jews continuing to live. It is a barbaric thing for a professor at a famously Jew-friendly university to endorse. It is a barbaric thing for a professor anywhere at any time and at any university to endorse. It is a post that at least implicitly threatens her students, which I assume is a big no-no even at elite universities.
Writes the Times: “Finkelstein was told not to return to campus and locked out of her email. Her classes would be reassigned to an adjunct professor while the college hired an outside firm to investigate.”
I would think so!
After an investigation, she was fired—and as we now know, it was not for her politics. You may believe a teacher shouldn’t be fired for alerting her students that if they are Jewish they should expect to be publicly shamed in her presence, but you cannot say she was fired for her opinions or beliefs, rancid as they are.
The fact that Finkelstein made that insane post right after being told by her provost that the school was under federal investigation (likely) for her anti-Semitism demonstrates another relevant fact: she was trying to get fired, and she was doing so by publicly telling her boss to take a long walk off a short pier.
So Finkelstein got what she wanted. What, then, does the writer spend the remaining thousands of words of the article on? Well, the rest of the piece is about the cases of other professors who have over the years been fired for actual speech. In other words, the entire article is framed around Finkelstein, but Finkelstein is the one example that does not fit the thesis. This is the making of a martyr, and the people who claim Finkelstein was wronged are doing great damage to the cause of academic freedom by equating it with lunatic behavior that has nothing to do with it.
