University of Florida administrators withdrew institutional funding and support for an event on the war in Gaza less than 24 hours before it was scheduled to begin, forcing faculty organizers to make last-minute alternate arrangements.
The symposium, “Critical Conversations in the Humanities: The War in Israel/Palestine,” had been sponsored by the university’s English department, its Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and several other campus entities, and was planned to feature several academics, including the noted philosopher Judith Butler, who has been a critic of Israel’s conduct in the war, as well as two prominent Palestinians.
The event’s planners were able to find space at a local church to host the symposium, without any university affiliation, on Friday and Saturday. But a lawyer representing one of the organizers argued the revocation of university support was an act of viewpoint-based discrimination, a charge to which a university spokesman didn’t directly respond.
Faculty members at Florida had been planning to host the symposium for months and believed they had received all the necessary permissions to do so, including reserving a room on campus. But on Thursday morning, Malini Johar Schueller, a professor of English, received a call from a university administrator who’d seen a flyer for the event distributed last week to departments on campus. According to a letter that Gary Edinger, a Gainesville-based lawyer representing Schueller, sent the university, the administrator said, “It appeared the presentation would be controversial because the speakers and subject matter were not ‘balanced.’”
Soon after, Schueller and Laura Gonzales, an associate professor of English who helped plan the symposium, received an email from their department chair, Sidney Dobrin. Dobrin, too, had received a call that morning, from Ryan R. Fuller, the university’s interim vice president and general counsel, and Mary A. Watt, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In an email shared with The Chronicle, Dobrin wrote that while the general counsel “identifies that the symposium is being advertised as a University of Florida event,” according to the general counsel, “it is not a university event and is not compliant with the University’s use of space policy.” The organizers needed to “cancel the event as currently arranged,” Dobrin wrote, and no university resources, including space and funding, could be used.
“I recognize that this is deeply problematic given that the event starts tomorrow,” Dobrin told the faculty members, adding that he told the administrators that “I support the academic freedom that encourages such events to be held on campus, but that, they said, is not the issue.
“I know you will have questions and concerns,” Dobrin concluded, “but unfortunately, I do not have answers.” (Dobrin did not respond to a request for comment.)
Steve Orlando, a university spokesman, said in a statement that the organizers had “wrongly marketed” the symposium as a university-sponsored event. It was not, he said, and did not comply with the institution’s use-of-space policy. Orlando declined to answer a question about how, specifically, the policy was violated.
Schueller was not available for comment on Friday, but told WUFT that she saw the university’s decision as part of a larger trend. “It’s happening all over the country, and I’m really sorry that UF, which is an institution that has allowed academic conferences to continue and to allow us to have critical conversations, has totally suppressed this,” Schueller said. “Anything that has anything to do even in the slightest with Palestine is not allowed.”
The symposium is now being held at the Westminster Presbyterian Church, about 10 minutes from campus. All the scheduled speakers will still appear. Among them are Saree Makdisi, a professor and chair of the English department at the University of California at Los Angeles, who studies “the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut, and Jerusalem,” according to his university bio, and Umayyah Cable, an assistant professor in the departments of American culture and film, television, and media and a core faculty member in the Arab and Muslim American studies program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Cable is also the author of a forthcoming book titled Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and the Politics of Solidarity (fall 2025, University of Minnesota Press). (Both Makdisi and Cable are of Palestinian descent.)
Also appearing at the symposium is Butler, who has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s war against Hamas, whose attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the professor once described as “armed resistance.” Joining Butler are Abi Fletcher, who works with the Gainesville branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, which describes itself as “the world’s largest Jewish organization standing in solidarity with Palestine,” as well as two Palestinians, Plestia Alaqad and Ranna Abduljawad. Alaqad is a journalist whose daily accounts of the Israel-Hamas war drew international attention on Instagram, and Abduljawad, who has lived and volunteered in Palestinian refugee camps, is the former executive director of the Arab American Community Center in Jacksonville, Fla. (Butler, Cable, and Alaqad were scheduled to appear at the symposium via Zoom.)
‘Pretextual’ Reasoning?
The seven-member advisory board of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere approved the seminar in February, and provided $4,900 to support the event, according to a letter that Edinger, the lawyer representing Schueller, shared with The Chronicle. According to the letter from the center’s director, Jaime Ahlberg, the board appreciated that the organizers sought “to assemble a balanced panel of participants to explore this culturally charged topic.” The advisory board’s members, six of whom are on the faculty, encouraged the organizers to maintain a “balanced approach as you finalize your roster of participants.”
Edinger told The Chronicle that the space-use-policy violation claim “has just got to be pretextual,” given that Schueller and her colleagues had completed the necessary paperwork and the concern Schueller fielded about the “balance” of the speakers. “The decision was made that that content was appropriate for university sponsorship and funding. All indications are that they changed their mind because they did not like the viewpoint of the individual speakers that were invited,” Edinger said. “A viewpoint is objectionable, and so censorship prevails.” (A March 2024 Chronicle analysis found that lack of “balance” was among the most-common reasons institutions cited for canceling events related to the war in Gaza.)
Edinger noted that case law in Florida is far from settled on the broader question of academic freedom. Lawmakers in 2022 signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which prohibited teaching or instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students or employees to believe any of eight concepts, among them a belief that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” But that fall, a federal judge blocked the act, calling it “positively dystopian.” Florida’s university system in August also ordered its universities to screen courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.”
It’s particularly troubling to see the university go after faculty and faculty’s clear academic freedom to host speakers on campus.
Jessie Appleby, a program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said her organization had offered Edinger help.
“If it were just an issue about use of space, I would expect the relevant offices to reach out to the professors who organized the symposium, explain what the problem was, and try to work out some sort of solution,” Appleby said. “Generally, if it’s an issue with space or something in that ballfield, you don’t receive an email that says, ‘The general counsel’s office has ordered the immediate cancellation of the entire symposium.’”
Both Appleby and Edinger pointed to the university’s three-year suspension of a graduate student who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on campus this spring as important context for the symposium snafu. “This is a pattern we’ve seen from the University of Florida,” Appleby said. “It’s particularly troubling to see the university go after faculty and faculty’s clear academic freedom to host speakers on campus, including speakers that have a particular point of view or even a view that may offend others. That is all within the normal business of academic discourse, and the university has no business trying to shut down that speech.”
Five organizations — the UF Divest Coalition and the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, Young Democratic Socialists of America, and Jewish Voice for Peace — posted a joint statement on Instagram calling the incident “yet another attack towards Palestinian perspectives that violates our academic freedom and our First Amendment Right to free speech, and goes against UF’s core value of freedom and civility.”
Edinger said on Friday that the university had not yet responded to his letter and that his firm was considering a lawsuit. Meanwhile, revised flyers for the symposium circulated online, with an updated location, registration link, and tagline: “We will not be silenced.”
