Some faculty members at the Indiana University at Bloomington say administrators ignored the university’s own shared governance policies when they temporarily barred a tenured professor from teaching after he helped book a room on campus for a November event hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a student organization.
“We consider the suspension an injustice to Professor Sinno but also to the entire IU community, for it places into question the university’s commitment to academic freedom, civil liberties, faculty governance, and the free exchange of ideas about controversial matters that is at the core of any first-class public university,” says a faculty-led online petition with 350 signatures as of Wednesday in support of Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor of political science and Middle Eastern studies and now former faculty adviser for the PSC at IU, who has been prohibited from teaching until next fall…
‘A Political Move’
Sinno believes his suspension from teaching “was clearly a political move,” noting that the administration launched three separate actions against him in November, including one that came after he made remarks critical of Whitten’s exclusive support of Israelis—and not Palestinians—during a campus event.
“The administration couldn’t find a single policy violation to leverage against me, so they made up a hodgepodge of frivolous accusations without merit as a pretext to impose severe sanctions on me,” he said. “There is no doubt that what the IU Whitten administration is doing is part of the national trend, but I believe that I am the first faculty member to be suspended because of the Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian hysteria creating pressures on academia.”
Last month, IU also canceled an art exhibition by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian American IU alumna, that was scheduled to open in February at the Eskenazi Museum of Art on campus. A petition calling for the reinstatement of the event notes that the university has not responded to requests to explain its decision or reinstate the show.
“Whether they intend to or not, IU administrators are signaling to members of several minority groups, as well as politically progressive students, that they don’t belong at IU,” Sinno said.
Steve Sanders, associate dean for academic affairs at IU’s law school and a constitutional law expert, signed the petition in support of Sinno. “For most of my time here I have observed an institution where the norms of shared governance were honored,” said Sanders, who has been affiliated with IU for roughly 40 years. “This incident suggests that’s no longer the case.”
Sanders co-chaired the Faculty Affairs Committee of the Bloomington Faculty Council during the 2021–22 academic year, when the campus-level policy in question was revised and approved by the council. He believes IU administrators did not correctly follow that procedure in their investigation of Sinno.
“While this may seem like one incident with one professor, a wall has been breached here,” Sanders said. “This is emblematic of the ongoing and increasing contempt of administrators for shared governance.”
Anne Marie Tamburro, program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in an email that the organization is “concerned whether viewpoint discrimination motivated this decision” and that from what FIRE knows about the case, Sinno’s severe punishment seems unwarranted.
“We would be surprised if the university were routinely enforcing these requirements and doing so in this way,” Tamburro said. “Falling back on such technicalities is a common pretextual tactic used to shut down controversial speech.”
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