The News
A University of Arizona faculty member who was penalized last week over classroom comments she and another instructor were recorded as making about the war in Gaza revealed new details about the controversy in a conversation with The Chronicle on Wednesday.
Rebecca Lopez, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Education, said she and her co-instructor, Rebecca Zapien, received letters last week informing them that they were being placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
Lopez said she and Zapien, a staff member, had jointly taught the class on cultural pluralism in early-childhood education for five years.
The university would not confirm that the instructors had been placed on paid administrative leave, but it did verify that an investigation into the matter is underway and that, in the meantime, other instructors are teaching the class.
The Details
The penalties were imposed against Lopez and Zapien after recordings went viral of them referring to Hamas as a “resistance group,” likening it to the Black Panther Party, and linking a rise in antisemitic attacks in the United States to “people not understanding the difference between” antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The clips, from the class’s October 30 meeting, were shared on November 12 by Israel War Room, a supporter of Israel, on the social-media platform X.
The recordings could not be verified as legitimate. In response to questions about the recordings’ legitimacy, Lopez said the instructors’ words had been taken out of context and paused in certain places “that make it seem as if we’re implying things that we’re not implying.” She also said that the videos had incorrectly labeled speakers (such as a professor speaking when it was actually a student) and lacked key parts of the discussion.
“I cannot guarantee that that is exactly what we said in those moments,” she said. “But I can guarantee you that those are our voices. Those are our students’ voices.”
The larger issue, though, Lopez said, is that “we are being punished for trying to have a really important critical conversation in a class where that’s what we do.”
Lopez said her letter spelled out the university policies she is accused of violating, “UHAP 7.01: Professional Conduct” and “UHAP 2.10: Political Activity and Lobbying.” Lopez said her letter did not specify the concerns that had led to her being placed on leave.
We are being punished for trying to have a really important critical conversation in a class where that’s what we do.
“To be very frank, I think that the reason that these policies were listed as violations is because I was talking about what’s going on in Palestine and in Gaza from a lens that differed from the dominant discourse of what we as a country have been talking about,” she said. “So talking about Palestinian perspectives a bit more than Israeli perspective — I think that that’s what caused some hurt or that’s what made some students upset.”
One purported recording of the class begins with an instructor distinguishing the state of Israel from the Jewish faith. A student responds that she has seen videos of Hamas leaders speaking “very antisemitic.” One of the instructors responds, in apparent reference to Hamas, “they’re probably anti-Zionist, which again is about the Israeli state.”
In another alleged recording, one of the instructors likens Hamas to the Black Panther Party, noting that they’re not the same but that an American context helps her “understand things” in other countries.
“Black people in the U.S. are really freaking tired of the way that they’re getting treated, and so they have this group, like a resistance group,” she says. “And so the way that I would describe Hamas is like that. They are a resistance group, and yes, they are choosing to resist through violence, and they don’t represent the Palestinian people.”
The United States and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist group.
The Backdrop
The alleged remarks are yet another example of a contentious debate at American colleges over the war between Israel and Hamas. Since October 7, when Hamas fighters massacred 1,200 people in Israel and took about 240 people hostage, Israeli air strikes have killed more than 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
Colleges are contending with calls to punish faculty and staff members over their conduct and what they say related to the war, to the chagrin of free-speech groups.
This was a lecture that was longer than the little snippets that you heard.
Students and faculty members at the University of Arizona held a sit-in on Monday at the College of Education to call for the immediate reinstatement of Lopez and Zapien.
Robert Q. Berry III, dean of the college, assured protesters at the sit-in that he would have more information on the instructors’ status by the middle of the week, according to reporting by The Arizona Republic. Lopez said it was her understanding that the leave would continue until the investigation was completed.
Berry did not respond to interview requests from The Chronicle.
The Stakes
Leila Hudson, chair of the University of Arizona’s Faculty Senate and an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, told The Chronicle that the instructors and Berry had received hate mail, and that the recordings had been taken out of context. Zapien’s and Lopez’s staff pages have been archived from the university’s website.
“My understanding is that this was a lecture that was longer than the little snippets that you heard,” Hudson said, adding that it “was part of a syllabus and curriculum that devoted time on a regular basis to current events.”
In response to criticism that the war is out of the purview of the class, Hudson said the number of children who have been killed in Gaza and Israel makes it relevant to a class on early-childhood education.
Hudson said there needed to be guardrails around “decontextualizing” words in educational settings and then “disseminating them in weaponized form via social media and external third parties,” resulting in students, faculty, and staff being “doxxed,” or having their identities revealed through social media.
“The students have asked for guidelines around the dissemination of materials for noneducational purposes, without consent, from the College of Education,” Hudson said. “I would go further and say that we need to have guidelines like that at the university level, not just for students doxxing their professors, but we’ve also had complaints about professors doxxing their students in an attempt to prevent them from future employment.”
Law schools have seen professors call out pro-Palestinian student groups for antisemitism. In October a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley published an essay in The Wall Street Journal urging law firms not to hire his “antisemitic law students.”
Hudson said the Faculty Senate would hear more about the instructors’ status at its next regular meeting, on December 4.
“We’ll definitely have something to say about it subsequent to that,” she said.
Lopez, who attended the University of Arizona as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, said she would like to see it create a policy for recording in class. Students should be able to record for accessibility reasons, Lopez said, but especially in teacher-preparation courses, students need to be comfortable being open about their experiences.
“To be able to record to use content against us as we’re trying to learn and while we’re being vulnerable — I think that that is a gross invasion of privacy and it should not be allowed,” Lopez said. “So hopefully this event will lead to some sort of change or some sort of ability for the college to create a policy around recording.”
