In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
For Finkelstein’s repost of Kanazi’s words, the college determined that their employee of nine years had violated its equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies.
having seen shit go down, a lot of people wildly misunderstood what tenure is it what it does to protect the individual, full professor at a university. in truth, it is a feather in the cap for careerists and allows them to Lord over younger faculty. it is granted by the institution to people who bring in a lot of money to the institution, in other words, people who are good at navigating the political economy of funding institutions.
if you go against the president of a university publicly, it will be stripped from you and you will be shit canned. if you make yourself an enemy of administration or, in the instance if publicly supported institutions, get in the radar of a politician holding ourselves strings in a negative way, or if you jeopardize the reputation of the institution, it will be stripped from you. if you don’t basically keep doing what you’ve been doing and bringing $ in, you can lose it too.
it basically only protects you if you’re the sort of senior faculty who doesn’t really need or deserve any protection.