by Sapphira Lurie, FCLC ’17
Last month, the Spring 2016 lecture series Political Engagement and Racial Injustice Today, sponsored by the Graduate Student Association, was set to begin with a lecture by Professor Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University.) My professor, Dr. Fawzia Mustafa, encouraged my classmates and I to attend. But the lecture, titled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” was cancelled on February 24th, the day before it was to take place.
I wondered why this particular lecture was cancelled, in light of the many cancellations of events centered on Palestine at universities across the nation. I contacted Peter Murray, the president of the Graduate Student Association, and he sent me his statement about the cancellation, which was distributed to graduate students the week before last. In the statement, he explains that two days before the lecture, Fordham requested two things of Dr. Puar that the invitation to lecture had not originally contained: first, that there be a respondent to the talk. Dr. Puar refused this request, as there was already going to be a question and answer session- according to Professor Mustafa, it is typical at lectures like this to have a question and answer section, but not a respondent. Second, Fordham demanded that Dr. Puar agree to allow the university to record the lecture and distribute the recording to media outlets upon request. When Dr. Puar agreed to have the lecture recorded, but stipulated that the recording be made available only to Fordham faculty and students and not in a format readily copied, the university insisted again that she allow wider distribution. She would not agree, noting, as Murray writes: “this condition ‘has not been applied to other speakers in the series or lectures on other topics,'” and that the request to record was unusual for lectures of this type. The University then cancelled the lecture.
I reached out to Glenn Hendler from the English department, who said of Dr. Puar’s refusal: “Like most academics–myself included–Puar was reluctant to agree to a recording of her lecture. One reason for this reluctance had to be that she would be presenting work in progress.”
Dr. Hendler also indicated that Puar might have been unwilling to have the lecture recorded because of her experience giving a similar lecture at Vassar College. Dr. Puar was recorded, despite a specific request that no recordings be made, by a group at Vassar called “Fairness to Israel” that objects to criticisms of Israel on campus. These recordings were distributed widely and were the source of many disparaging articles about Dr. Puar and her scholarship. In fact, following the Vassar appearance, Dr. Puar and her colleagues at Rutgers University have been subject to multiple threats from people who doubtless read those articles and accessed portions of the recording made of the Vassar lecture.
Yet Fordham, in a press release made directly available to the New York Daily News but unavailable elsewhere online, did not recognize that a recording made of the lecture could in fact put Dr. Puar at risk. The official position, states: “Dr. Puar’s recent experience at Vassar showed, if anything, that the absence of an official recording or transcript gave various parties ample opportunity to mischaracterize her talk there if they wished to do so.” Stranger still, the press release claims that Dr. Puar “declined to deliver the lecture.” But according to Dr. Hendler, the university cancelled the event by insisting that they could not host Dr. Puar if she would not agree to allow the recording to be released to media outlets. This insistence came even after Dr. Puar generously agreed to a recording but maintained that the recording remain in circulation only among the Fordham community. Murray, in his statement, expresses frustration with the University’s blaming of Dr. Puar: “I have no reason to believe that Professor Puar declined her original invitation and no reasonable understanding of how anyone could accept an invitation constantly in flux up until the day before the scheduled event.”
Absent from all the information provided here is any information provided directly to me by the university’s administration. Nothing remains on Fordham’s website about either the lecture or Dr. Puar. My attempts to find which administrators were involved in this decision have not yet proven fruitful. For now, this is the bulk of my findings. I remain troubled by what seems to be a case of censorship and a violation of academic freedom at our university.
You can read Dr. Puar’s statement on her experience lecturing at Vassar College here.
The Fordham Alternative 