Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, professors, TAs have had to navigate tension
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Lately, Aevyn Barnett has donned a black ribbon on his shirt. Barnett, a second-year master’s student and teaching assistant at Syracuse University, sees it as a less ultra-visible way, compared to a yarmulke, of making his Jewish identity visible.
The ribbon’s main function in Jewish culture, however, is to symbolize loss.
“When you’re in mourning, it’s usually just (for) the immediate family, you wear a black ribbon for … seven days,” Barnett said. “I’ve been just wearing it full time because every time it would have been the end of the seven days, someone else dies.”
Two of his cousins are in the hospital still being treated for burns from the initial early-October Hamas attack in Israel. A family friend’s two grandchildren were killed. Another more distant cousin, he said, died at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border.
Before he left his apartment Tuesday morning, Barnett’s mother texted in his family’s group chat that a family friend’s body had been found. Still, he had to go teach.
“You have to figure out how to separate those two parts of your life and leave that part at home,” Barnett said. “It’s difficult.”
Tuesday marked one month since the Israel-Hamas war started. Since the initial attack, students, faculty and staff at SU have held three vigils across religious groups calling for peace. At the same time, tension has mounted on campus with multiple petitions calling for either the removal of a professor or the cancellation of an event.
Professors and student teaching assistants have had to traverse the conflict in their own classrooms. While some have elected to not interact with the topic, other professors and TAs have chosen to actively engage with it. Whatever their position, most told The Daily Orange the war has at least been in the back of their minds.
On Oct. 7, Hamas launched an attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people. In the attack, Hamas kidnapped 242 people and, as of Nov. 2, only four have been released. Soon after the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was officially at war in a televised address.
Israel has bombarded Gaza since then, further isolating the territory which had been under a blockade for 16 years. Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed over 10,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. As of Nov. 2, the attacks have internally displaced an estimated 1.4 million people, according to the United Nations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the situation in Gaza “more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity.”
In the United States, the start of the war has been met with a drastic rise in both Islamophobic and antisemitic hate crimes, including cases at colleges and universities. An hour away from SU at Cornell University, Cornell student Patrick Dai allegedly posted threats online that he would kill Jewish students on campus. Dai will be in Syracuse on Wednesday for a probable cause hearing.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education urged colleges and universities to take immediate action amid an “alarming rise” of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
SU Provost Gretchen Ritter said at the Oct. 25 University Senate meeting that while faculty do have the right to share their opinions on the Israel-Hamas war, addressing the conflict when it is not the topic of a class or through university channels like Listservs creates “an unfair power dynamic that can make some students feel unwelcome, unsafe or unsupported.”
The American Association of University Professors at SU’s executive committee released a statement objecting to Ritter’s senate comments, questioning the university’s commitment to freedom of expression on campus and the right to academic freedom for faculty.
“We recognize our students’ rights to engage in debates on controversial issues and to disagree with faculty without fear of censure or retribution,” the AAUP executive committee letter reads. “We also affirm our longstanding commitment as faculty members to work with care and respect with our students while also exercising our right to academic freedom. The two actions are not mutually exclusive.”
The AAUP executive committee took issue with the concept of sticking to the “topic of the class,” writing that the boundaries are not clear in many courses and that “world events demand collective discussion.” The committee also took issue with the Provost’s selective application of an “unfair power dynamic” to only certain topics and political viewpoints.”
Matthew Huber, president of SU’s AAUP and a professor in the Geography and the Environment Department, also told The D.O. that it is common for faculty to circulate statements through electronic resources and university Listservs. Huber has worked at SU for almost 14 years and said he found Ritter’s statement “surprising.”
“This sort of blanket concern about students feeling unsafe really seems like restrictions and threats to our academic freedom as faculty to teach and cover in the classroom what we think is most important,” Huber said.
A university spokesperson wrote that SU has not condemned the views or perspectives of any faculty member or department. Faculty were asked not to use “official University communication channels” to express personal views, but are free to do so on their personal websites and social media, the spokesperson wrote.
Ritter’s statement regarding Listservs to the University Senate came a week after the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies released a “statement of solidarity” regarding the war.
The department affirmed in the statement its commitment to Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, Jewish and allied students and organizations whose views and positions have been “silenced and erased” from classroom conversations and academic spaces.
The WGS department specifically demanded that the campus collectively confront anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric. They denounced the “escalating Israeli military attacks on Palestinians in Gaza” and wrote that current narratives “conceal the realities of Israeli settler colonialism.” In the statement, they also denounced antisemitism “unequivocally.”
The WGS statement received backlash. Most notably, a change.org petition — which has received over 7,000 signatures as of 9 p.m. Wednesday — called for the removal of WGS Department Chair Himika Bhattacharya from her position.
The petition claimed the statement sent out under Bhattacharya’s leadership failed to denounce the “heinous acts committed against Jewish people by Hamas.” The creator of the petition wrote that the statement “demonstrated an alarming level of antisemitism.”
Bhattacharya wrote in a statement to The D.O. that she was unfairly singled out by the petition, adding that the statement was collectively released by all the faculty members in the department.
“(The petition) generated racist and anti-immigrant language, false accusations, defamatory remarks, hate mail, and violent threats against me,” Bhattacharya wrote.
A university spokesperson said that while SU does not comment on anonymous online petitions, it “has not and will not” demand the removal of any faculty member for sharing their perspective.
In response to the petition and the university’s lack of response at the time, a coalition of unnamed graduate students, teaching assistants and alumni wrote an open letter petition addressed to Chancellor Kent Syverud, Ritter and Senior Vice President Allen Groves. The letter calls on SU to uphold its commitment to academic integrity and free speech in university-wide communications and to support faculty and TAs being intimidated by other students and people off campus.
“The escalating frequency and severity with which faculty and graduate students are encountering pushback and outright intimidation for merely executing their professional responsibilities and rights to academic freedom is deeply concerning,” the letter reads.
The petition received 483 signatures as of Wednesday night.
At the University Senate meeting, Syverud emphasized the need to make the campus an inclusive space, even as students may have diverging opinions about the war. Remarks from SU leadership during the senate meeting came days after Ritter and Groves wrote in a campus-wide email on Oct. 20 that SU was “looking into” a small number of “classroom interactions” where students felt unfairly targeted.
In the Oct. 20 email, Ritter and Groves confirmed SU removed chalk on the Shaw Quadrangle as it was a violation of university policy. Natalie Gallagher, a TA and fifth year Ph.D. student in social sciences, told The D.O. she chalked tallies of the death toll in Gaza. A cleaning crew alongside Department of Public Safety officers soon cleaned the graffiti after, she said.
For TAs looking to address the war, the Syracuse Graduate Employees Union’s bargaining committee said the month has been difficult. On Oct. 31, the committee proposed to the university that an “academic freedom” article should be included in their inaugural collective bargaining agreement that is currently being negotiated, according to a statement to The D.O.
Over the last week, the SGEU’s bargaining committee wrote that teaching assistants in the union have started reporting harassment to its leadership. Gallagher also said “a lot of other TAs” have also been facing retaliation in the classroom. The union verbally shared its concerns to the university’s administration Tuesday, adding they felt that they were not being properly “supported or protected by the University or their departments.”
SU’s bargaining committee, SGEU’s bargaining committee wrote, was appreciative of the union bringing up their concerns and agreed that further discussion was needed. SGEU also wrote that they reiterated to the university that “any attempt to censor or discipline a graduate employee for engaging this topic in their TA or scholarly capacities may be a violation of labor law.”
In response to the section of the SGEU statement regarding labor law, a university spokesperson said SU remains committed to the free exchange of ideas and academic freedom. There has been no effort to censor or discipline graduate students or teaching assistants, the spokesperson wrote.
Much like SGEU, Barnett does not feel as if the university has properly supported him over the last month. Barnett said there’s been a lack of communication from the university with TAs.
“It’s not that (SU doesn’t) want to, or that they don’t support faculty and TAs, it’s that they don’t know how to or what they’re supposed to do,” Barnett said. “Like, what’s the appropriate amount? What’s overstepping boundaries?”
As a teaching assistant in a presentational speaking class this fall, he already had a list of off-limit topics, believing they were either overused in similar classes or not worth the potential class debate they could stir.
“If a student gives some speech on this, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Barnett said.
Barnett said he’s received few emails regarding the war, one of them coming from the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence. The email outlines that TAs and “Instructional Colleagues” may “wish to consider in advance how you will structure the conversation and how you will respond to any unexpected outcomes.”
The CTLE said instructors may need to evaluate how much time they should allow for discussion, how they respond to “inaccurate statements” and how they will reengage with a student who walks out of a discussion or stops participating “after a heated exchange.”
The email provided a series of links at the end of the email: a series of websites on “responding to challenging moments and disruptive behavior in the classroom,” a video on how to promote peace in discussions of violence, two videos on “stress aware and trauma informed practices” and a guide on media literacy.
Some TAs have found the information the university has sent to be helpful. Sara Houff, a first-year Ph.D. student in Economics, is currently a TA for a microeconomics class. The topic of Israel-Hamas war hasn’t come up yet in the optional recitation, but she’s used the university’s resources to plan how she’d handle the topic.
“It’s important to not be caught unaware. You have to have it in the back of your mind because, as a TA, you’re here to support the students,” Houff said. “You want to make sure that (for) the things going on in their lives, you’re ready to talk.”
As the Israel-Hamas war continues, some members of the university community are embracing an open dialogue in classes as part of their course curriculum. Carrie Riby, a visiting assistant advertising professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said she addressed the war in her class on advertising. She was impressed with how “respectful” the conversation was.
For faculty members like Ingrid Erickson, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies, the Israel-Hamas war doesn’t necessarily fit into their course curriculum, meaning the war is unlikely to arise in conversation. Three professors from the College of Engineering and Computer Science expressed a sentiment similar to Erickson.
Alan Allport — Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History — said the conflict has entered the classroom conversation, but that students have stayed on topic.
“I’ve raised it in order to get students to think about how the war in Gaza will ultimately be terminated,” Allport said. “On the whole, my students are pretty good about staying on task, so we don’t seem to run a great deal of risk of going off-topic and getting into areas that we’re not really supposed to be dealing with.”
Barnett added that SGEU hadn’t yet sent out information to members who were TAs. SGEU’s bargaining committee wrote to The D.O. that they are aiming to have a statement and resources out to TAs, resident advisors and graduate assistants next week.
“These resources are still being developed based on the advice of the Union’s internal officers and staff, as well as collaborative conversations with representatives from the SU administration,” the committee wrote. “We anticipate that these resources will include quick guides or explainers on … employment rights.”
SU’s spokesperson confirmed the university will host a panel discussion next week for graduate student instructors on how to manage “challenging classroom situations.”
“As graduate employees and early-career scholars, we are often asked to opine on global events in a scholarly manner — either in the classroom or other public forums,” the SGEU bargaining committee wrote to The D.O. “Any degree of censorship or harassment against young scholars is wholly unacceptable, whether that’s coming from supervisors, students, or parents of students.”
