September 19, 2024
The Palestine Exception’s Creeping Threat to Academic Freedom - Commentary
Nathan Brown, a professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal, writes:
One of the most significant contradictions of the “Palestine exception” — whereby pro-Palestinian advocacy does not enjoy the same protections as other kinds of political speech on campus — is that administrative actions specifically taken to prohibit, delegitimize, and isolate statements of opposition to Israel’s murderous war in Gaza, and its apartheid regime in the West Bank, inevitably bleed out into restrictions upon political speech more generally. Although especially acute in the United States, the Palestine exception and its contradictory consequences are not limited to it.