In the aftermath of Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and the country’s subsequent siege on Gaza, the University of Texas at Arlington’s political-science department did what political-science departments often do: It held a Q&A with a scholarly expert.
The idea, said Morgan Marietta, the department chair at the time, was for students to pose their questions to Brent E. Sasley, who studies Middle East politics, and learn from him about the conflict. But the event, held on October 18, was not a calm, scholastic exchange. It was tense. There was some interrupting, shouting, and, according to Marietta, some cursing. At least one student was peacefully escorted out of the room by a police officer.
Days later, Marietta’s dean expressed “concerns” about his performance as department chair and said she might consider removing him from the position if he didn’t accede to a few “preliminary requests,” according to a memo, which Marietta shared with The Chronicle. Those requests included that department events not be scheduled without prior approval, and that he submit a written plan for managing any event seven work days in advance, including “a copy of comments you plan to give by way of introduction.”
This was unthinkable to Marietta, who then resigned as chair. “These policies,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “are transparent attempts to halt public talks by political science faculty, curtail the academic freedom of scholars, and quash discussion if it might lead to criticism.” (The Shorthorn, the student newspaper, first reported Marietta’s resignation. He’s still on the faculty.)
On campuses across the country, the war in the Middle East has inflamed existing political schisms and intensified debate over who has the right to say what and offend whom. Campus protests have escalated into screaming matches, and college presidents have faced pressure to counter their own students’ statements — when viewed by some as unconscionable — with condemnation.
At UT-Arlington, the site of disagreement was not a protest or a publicly issued statement, but an academic unit’s standard offering to its community. The reaction raises questions about how colleges should carry out their core mission: to educate, discuss, and allow people to civilly disagree about polarizing topics.
A ‘Duty’ to Broach Difficult Topics
Marietta, who studies constitutional politics and political psychology, is new to UT-Arlington. He’d left the University of Massachusetts at Lowell to become the Texas department’s new chair, officially starting in August.
He told The Chronicle that during the interview process, which took place under a former dean, he expressed his belief that political-science departments, particularly at public institutions, have a duty to broach difficult topics outside of the classroom, at events for students.
Barely two months into the job, a sobering opportunity arose. On October 7, Hamas fighters killed some 1,400 Israelis and took hostages. Israel then rained down bombs on the Gaza Strip and cut off access to food and electrical power. The death toll is now reportedly many thousands more.
To Marietta, it was obvious the department should host an expert-led discussion about the conflict. Sasley, an associate professor, agreed to do a Q&A. Marietta would moderate.
The department circulated a flier advertising the event: “The Hamas-Israel War: Student/Faculty Q&A with Professor Brent Sasley.” That the event was framed as Israel versus Hamas bothered Michael Anderson, a sophomore and an officer with the university’s Progressive Student Union. “From our perspective,” Anderson told The Chronicle, “... this is a colonial regime which is supporting apartheid versus the Palestinian people who are fighting collectively for their freedom.”
At least two students also emailed concerns to people in the department about Sasley’s work being biased in favor of Israel.
In an email to The Chronicle, Sasley disagreed with the characterization, writing that he has studied international conflict and Middle East politics for 16 years and has always worked hard “to present a nuanced and scholarly analysis of the issues under discussion.”
The students argued the event should include someone who was pro-Palestine.
Marietta refused, telling one student in an email that Sasley is widely respected, and that the Q&A “is not at all meant to be an ideological debate, or a partisan back and forth.” Rather, it should be a civil conversation — not intended “for the advocates who have already made up their minds, but for people who are asking questions and seek to listen to sensible voices on the topic.”
He cautioned the student, who had said that many Palestinian and pro-Palestine students would show up to ensure their voices were heard, that “shouting rarely persuades anyone, except that the person shouting should be disregarded as soon as their voice fades.”
Marietta had alerted his faculty colleagues that students had raised concerns, writing in an email it’s “sad that the current culture encourages the idea that there are no actual facts or legitimate observations, but just opinions and assertions, so any position is as good as any other. I believe we should not go along with that.”
Marietta had also asked the campus police department to have what he called a small presence at the event. He said he spoke with the police chief and two officers a couple days before the Q&A to discuss protocol.
On October 18, inside a large room at University Hall, Marietta gave a brief introduction to a crowd of mostly pro-Palestine students, according to video of the event, which was provided to The Chronicle by an attendee. He explained why he thinks political-science departments should host these discussions. Many universities are not holding such events right now, he said, because they’re afraid of being criticized — by the left, the right, or both.
While he was sure whatever was said that day would also be criticized, Marietta said, “Let me be very clear: I do not care. I will never care. We will always just do what universities ought to do.”
Marietta then advised students to “try to look at all of this without blinking.” There’s a great deal of “misinformation” and “misdirection” out there, he said. He recommended listening to how President Joe Biden described the October 7 attack. Hamas, Marietta continued, is a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. Fighters targeted a concert and went “from house to house and slaughtered families, children.” Biden described the killings as “evil” and “abhorrent,” Marietta said.
What happened that day raises deeply important questions for everyone, particularly students, Marietta continued. Among them: What does all of this mean? How does a reasonable person respond? It raises “important moral questions about the civilians in Gaza,” Marietta said, especially Palestinian Gazans who do not support Hamas, but are victims themselves of Hamas. These questions have to be addressed “openly and honestly. What does the situation require? What does the situation allow?” He then turned over the floor to Sasley.
An attendee would later question why Marietta, in his introduction, did not mention the longer history of Palestinian suffering by the hand of Israel or the Palestinians who’d perished in a hospital explosion the day prior. “I don’t support any citizens being killed,” the attendee said. “But why does it only matter when they’re Israelis? Why can’t our standards be for all humans — because if it’s not, that’s racist.”
For the better part of an hour after Marietta’s introduction, students pressed Sasley, through their questions and comments, to take moral or political stances on what they view as genocide by an apartheid state, and Sasley attempted to offer definitions of terms under international law and other context from a scholarly distance, which generally dissatisfied and angered his audience. At one point, someone asked: “If Israel was founded on terrorism, how can you denounce any type of resistance to Israel?”
Sasley replied, in part, “I don’t know what you’re expecting me to say.”
Though Sasley fielded most of the questions, an audience member asked Marietta why, in his “very expert opinion,” he considered Hamas a terrorist organization.
Terrorism, Marietta said, in part, is violence that intentionally targets civilians in order to showcase those deaths for political purposes. “All decent and reasonable people condemn it, whether they’re Palestinian or whether they’re Israeli or whether they’re American,” he said. “This is not complex.”
One attendee applauded and a couple others told that person to “get out!” The question-asker complained that Marietta “didn’t answer my question at all.”
A few minutes later, someone yelled, “What’s the difference between a Nazi and a Zionist?”
“Would you shut the f— up!” an attendee shouted back before being ushered out of the room by a police officer.
After the Q&A, students and others rallied on campus in support of Palestine.
Reflecting on the event, Marietta said it was a mistake to have only one expert speaker because it placed a lot of pressure on that person. In the future, it’d be much better to have a panel, he said, and to have multiple microphones for the audience, in case someone initially refused to give a microphone back, which happened.
But Marietta stands by his introduction and said he tried his best to keep things civil during the Q&A. He still thinks public universities must host these sorts of events, even if there’s intense student outcry. He expected that reaction, at least to some degree.
What he did not expect was the dean’s response.
A ‘Mismanaged’ Event?
Two days after the Q&A, Elizabeth Terese Newman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, told Marietta in an email that “given how your departmental event played out,” she had “concerns” about a talk he was scheduled to give the following week about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings. She asked him to cancel it “until we have had time for a discussion about this, and other concerns I have more broadly.”
At a meeting to discuss those concerns, according to Marietta, Newman told him that because he had “mismanaged” the event, she was going to put in place protocols to make sure future department events were properly vetted. Later that day, she described those protocols in a memo to Marietta, which included several “preliminary requests” to improve his department management, including:
“No events should be scheduled without prior approval. For each such event, please provide the following at least 7 working days in advance: a written management plan, including a risk assessment, risk mitigation plan, and a copy of any comments you plan to give by way of introduction to the event,” the memo states.
Reached by email, Newman directed The Chronicle to the university’s communications professionals. A spokesman said in a statement that the liberal-arts college provided “guidance” to Marietta “to ensure a positive educational experience for our students to engage in spirited debate on all topics, even ones that some find upsetting or controversial.” No content or topic restrictions were put in place, he said. The university “supports events that facilitate free-flowing exchanges of ideas and also wants to ensure it properly plans for them.”
In his meeting with Newman, Marietta said, he repeatedly asked the dean for examples of his mismanagement, and she did not provide any. He also strongly objected to the idea that the college would need to give prior approval for events held by a department — a measure he’d never heard of before.
“It is blatantly obvious,” he told The Chronicle, “that this will chill speech, and that this will deteriorate academic liberty, and it will keep students from being able to hear discussions of controversial topics. One can say all day long that, ‘Oh, we’ll only do it if we think there’s going to be protests,’ or, ‘We’re only going to do it if there’s some physical threat to faculty.’ We all know that if administrators have that power, they will use it to keep faculty from speaking on subjects that are controversial.
“This is the death of what universities are meant to do,” he said. “And I was very clear when I said that I won’t do this.”
In his resignation letter, addressed to the university president, the provost, Newman, and his colleagues, he wrote that he would not “supervise the decline of the profession.”
The Chronicle attempted to speak to other UT-Arlington political-science faculty members but either did not hear back or was directed to the university’s communications staff. Sasley is now the unit’s interim chair and did not respond to The Chronicle’s email asking if the dean’s events protocols still apply. (Neither did a university spokesman.)
In his email to The Chronicle defending his work, Sasley said he applied the same nuanced and scholarly approach that he has as a researcher and a teacher to the Q&A. “I also recognize that on a topic that many people feel so strongly about,” he wrote, “that approach will not be satisfactory to everyone.”
On the department’s website, the only upcoming events listed are for an annual poster session and for an informational meeting for students hoping to fast-track a master’s degree.
