CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Dear President Castro:

On behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom, we are writing to express our strong objection to your administration’s abrupt closure of the Edward W. Said Professorship Search after all aspects of the search were completed by the search committee.It is disturbing that the information was first brought to our attention through the resignation of a faculty member and former dean in objection to this closure.  We understand that a campaign of harassment and intimidation of search committee members was conducted by some ideologically-driven ​Zionist advocacy groups and individuals after the list of the four finalists, who were of Palestinian and Middle Eastern origin, was announced.

Such campaigns are egregious violations of academic freedom and undermine the integrity of academic processes and procedures.  Even more egregious, by closing the search over the objections of the search committee, your administration implemented the discriminatory intent of the attacks launched by special interest groups.  These attacks are in violation of Title VI. They have focused on the Middle Eastern and Palestinian ethnicity and national origin of the finalists.

It is important to add that this search would have culminated in California State University, Fresno, having the second Edward W. Said chair in the country, after Columbia University, a major honor for your institution.  Professor Edward W. Said, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, was a major literary and post-colonial theorist of our times. He was a Palestinian American scholar of prodigious reputation, one of the most renowned academics and public intellectuals in the world.  Having an Edward Said chair at CSU Fresno would serve to enhance the reputation of the university and of the California State University system.

Allowing special interest groups to change the course of the search process is an affront to academic freedom and the integrity of academic searches and programs, which are under the purview of the faculty.

We call on you to stand by your faculty in the search committee and protect the academic freedom and the rights of the finalists. We call on you to maintain the reputation of your fine university by reestablishing and completing the search with the original search committee.

Sincerely yours,

California Scholars for Academic Freedom

From the site of California Scholars for Academic Freedom.