“Do Not Participate”: The Absurd Excuse Notre Dame Gave Me When They Canceled My Talk
What a tragedy when we cannot rely on universities to house our most critical conversations.
Eman Abdelhadi
Mary E. Gallagher, dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, wrote University of Chicago Professor and In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi on Saturday morning to tell her that her upcoming keynote speech was canceled.
“We were unaware of your planned lecture, and since this conference overlaps with two other annual events on campus, we cannot provide security at short notice,” Gallagher wrote in an email. “For this reason, we respectfully request that you do not participate in the conference.”
Abdelhadi is a widely celebrated academic, organizer, author and journalist. She frequently speaks on campuses across the country and from 2023-24 was a faculty fellow at Notre Dame.
Most recently, Abdelhadi was honored with the Ripple Effect Community Media Award from Public Narrative, which “recognizes quality journalism that has enlightened and inspired people in Chicago and/or across the country — journalists whose investigative work changed policies or whose engaging, well-researched stories shifted the public narrative around an issue.”
On Monday, Abdelhadi sent the response below to Gallagher (this version has been very lightly edited). It includes the following sentence: “In a moment where ICE is abducting lawful residents of the United States simply for exercising their First Amendment rights, to further point the eyes of the state towards these events makes you culpable in this authoritarian turn.”
—Ari Bloomekatz, Executive Editor In These Times
Dean Gallagher,
This is simply a case of censorship, to the injury of which you added the insult of a flimsy excuse.
I was invited to give this speech in January. Is three months not enough advance notice?
Let me assume for a moment that you did just find out about the event. I had the pleasure of spending 2023-24 on Notre Dame’s campus as a fellow with the Institute for Advanced Study, so I find it difficult to believe that an institution that has its own police force, that manages sporting events with hundreds of thousands of attendees every year, that has a $18 billion endowment, cannot provide one or two security personnel to attend an academic speech with a week’s notice.
If the issue really is logistics, why wouldn’t your letter make any gestures towards rescheduling or inviting me back at a later date when security can be arranged?
The students who painstakingly worked to create this event and who politely organized with me were shocked by your decision to rescind my invitation. Clearly this guidance has not been openly communicated to the Notre Dame community, nor were the organizers of the conference properly notified of special security arrangements being necessary.
A policy that requires security at all Israel-Palestine events — even if it really existed and was properly implemented — is discriminatory and racist. It places an already highly surveilled and marginalized community under further scrutiny. As we can see here, it further shuts down spaces for dissent, debate and education. In a moment where ICE is abducting lawful residents of the United States simply for exercising their First Amendment rights, to further point the eyes of the state towards these events makes you culpable in this authoritarian turn.
I woke up this morning, like most mornings for the past 548 days of genocide, to the latest round of corpses. And instead of getting to mourn or grieve, I am instead responding to your email. I will never get past the absurdity of the expectation that Palestinians should silently watch our murder.
I am the daughter of a man who was stateless for most of his life. I am the granddaughter of a man and a woman forced out of their ancestral land and never allowed back. My relatives in the West Bank are facing the possibility of being yet another generation expelled from our homeland. I spend most of my waking hours working for institutions hellbent on erasing these histories.
For the better part of 18 months, I and other Palestinians have watched Israel slaughter our people at a rate that exceeds that of any other conflict this century — 250 children killed per day. The death toll today stands at 61,000, just from the bombs. Some 200,000 more have been killed through starvation and the systematic destruction of medical facilities, sewage plants and much more.
We have seen children’s shredded bodies dangle from walls. We have seen bulldozers shovel dozens into mass graves. We have watched a man burn to death while strapped to his hospital bed. We have watched parents hold up the beheaded corpses of their children for the world to see.
Instead of our colleagues screaming with us, many — like you — have sought to silence us instead. We have spent the past year and a half fighting for a space to speak in the very institutions whose job is to gestate and birth knowledge, whose mission is to foster debate, whose raison d’etre is truth.
What a tragedy when we cannot rely on universities to house our most critical conversations.
You may be telling yourself, Dean Gallagher, that you are just doing your job or enforcing instructions from those whose power exceeds your own. But there is no excuse for moral cowardice. There’s a reason authoritarians attack universities first, and unfortunately as you have proven, there is no one at the gate to protect us. Even from the halls of a relatively privileged and insulated institution, you have donned the black shirt.
I will be publishing your letter to me, along with my response. As time passes, and history documents the truths of this moment, there will be a record, for posterity, for all generations to see. As the bombs continue to fall on Palestinians in tents and as our rights to freedom of speech and protest face a wave of assault — this is the position you chose for yourself. I hope you have the integrity to at least feel ashamed.
Sincerely,
Professor Abdelhadi
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.
