When S, a faculty member at Brooklyn College opened an email from HR in June, the last thing she thought was that she was going to be let go from her position as adjunct professor.

“I had been scheduled by my department to teach two classes in the fall, and so I reached out to the person who is in charge of scheduling,” S explained. “He believed that the email from HR was a mistake, because he was also planning for me to teach those two classes.”

S (who is speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of doxxing and harassment) soon learned she and three others had been unceremoniously fired. All were active within the campus’ Palestine movement.

“We knew it had nothing to do with our job performance or our student evaluations, or any concerns about our quality of instruction,” said S. “We’re all in different departments. We’re in different programs. The only thing that we have in common is our activism.”

T, another faculty member who was fired, said “I’m an excellent professor. My student evaluations are stellar… all of the evaluations I’ve gotten from fellow faculty who come to observe me are stellar, and yet that doesn’t matter to the CUNY administration.”

When CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez testified in front of the House Higher Education and Workforce Development committee on July 15th he confirmed this, telling a republican representative “we have terminated four individuals on the faculty or staff for violating our policies on antisemitism,” something that T described as making the termination of herself and her three other colleagues “a trophy to placate the right.”

“I’m Jewish. I’m not engaged in antisemitic acts. I’m engaged in protest against a genocide. I think it’s disgusting that anyone would be fired for being on the side of life,” S said in response to the Chancellor’s words.

On July 31, in the middle of a torrential downpour that caused the city to declare a state of emergency, 150 CUNY faculty, staff, local politicians and supporters protested outside Brooklyn College’s Bedford Gates to speak out against the removal of four Brooklyn College faculty.

Alexandra Juhasz, a distinguished professor of film at Brooklyn College spoke on behalf of her colleagues at the protest. “It’s a matter of the integrity of the workplace…but we also know that they were fired for their organizing and vocal expression for Palestine,” she told The Indy. “So the organizing around their firing has also been focused on our rights as faculty members to have political expression outside the classroom.”

Both T and S emphasized the precarity of adjunct professors’ financial situations in general, and described the stress of having to job search so unexpectedly, calling the situation “nerve wracking,” particularly leading up to the Chancellor’s testimony in Washington.

“CUNY has been my home for many years,” said S. “I earned my undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College. I earned my graduate degree at Brooklyn College. I taught there for a year and a half. “This was really my community and my home. It’s extremely painful.”

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