Summary
A Palestinian-American professor at San Francisco State University and director of its Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, whom The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US presents as a central case of the academic-freedom tactic: investigated and audited after the AMCHA Initiative accused her of abusing taxpayer funds to meet with “known terrorists” on a research trip to Palestine and Jordan (PDF p.6, p.21-22, p.32).
Details
- SFSU ultimately cleared Abdulhadi, finding the allegations meritless, but the smear campaign went unanswered for months; AMCHA complained to the California State Controller in June 2014, and in August 2014 SFSU audited her travel expenses for the previous five years (PDF p.22, p.32).
- Abdulhadi described the cost: “I spent my 2014 sabbatical responding to [allegations of terrorism] and providing support and reassurance to my students whose learning environment was severely disrupted by the intensity and malevolence of AMCHA’s attempt to destroy our program” — the program being the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, whose students were implicitly branded, by association with her, as potential terrorists. She was unable to work on her planned book and fell behind on the research needed to advance to full professor (PDF p.22).
Related pages
The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US, AMCHA Initiative, Academic freedom