As the first free public college in the United States, City College has a long and storied tradition of activism by students fighting to make the institution inclusive and reflective of the values and identities of this city’s diverse working class. In the 1930s, Jewish City College students organized against domestic poverty and overseas facism. In 1969, Black and Puerto Rican activists famously occupied the campus in a struggle that resulted in open admissions, changing the face of higher education across the country.
SUFFERING IN GAZA
Today, the galvanizing issue for students is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As president of the City College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik was the most prominent voice of this sentiment on our campus – until she was suspended in July from the college and all other CUNY campuses for the upcoming school year. Her suspension has become a rallying cry for everyone on campus who is concerned about the rising repression of academic freedom and free speech at CCNY, which has been a touchstone for these issues since police were called onto campus to violently break up a Gaza solidarity encampment in the spring of 2024.
“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Hadeeqa is her warmth,” said Liana DeMasi, an adjunct lecturer of English and a former teacher of Malik. “That warmth is something she carries with her in everything she does: her poetry, how she conducted herself in peer review, when she would email me lines from a book she was reading that she thought I’d enjoy, and how she advocated tirelessly for a free Palestine. My classroom was better having had her in it, and I know the same can be said of City College as a whole.”
The City College administration hasn’t released a public statement about her suspension, but Malik said she was told it was in response to her role in leading a February protest when Governor Kathy Hochul was scheduled to visit campus – just days after the governor had outrageously demanded that Hunter College remove a job listing for a professor of Palestinian studies.
“This was a very clear attack on not only Palestinians dying in Gaza every single day, but our ability to learn, and our ability to seek education to try to create a more just world,” Malik told Clarion. “[Hochul’s action] was a very clear attack on academic freedom, especially for CUNY faculty that may not have all the accolades, but they choose to be at this university – most often, from every faculty that I’ve heard, because of the community that we have here.”
ACCUSED
At her disciplinary hearing, Malik said she was accused of violating two of CUNY’s Henderson Rules, as well as two of the more recent protest rules that the City College administration enacted in the months after it called the NYPD onto campus to break up the nonviolent Gaza solidarity encampment in May 2024. Setting aside the veracity of these claims, Malik is not being accused of doing anything outside the bounds of leading a peaceful protest, which makes her yearlong suspension all the more draconian.
“Suspending Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik is a very clear attack on the academic freedom of all members of the CUNY community,” said Anthony Alessandrini, professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and the chair of the union’s Academic Freedom Committee. “When students are punished for exercising their right to political expression, it makes CUNY a less free place for all of us – faculty, staff and students.”
Malik said she believes that her suspension is part of the latest generational chapter in the long story of new groups of City College students fighting for institutional respect and recognition.
“[City College President Vince Boudreau] has really tokenized us a lot of the time, claiming that we’re the most diverse university, and that it’s our working-class community that makes us so great, but he doesn’t actually end up representing that through who he’s protecting – and the students that he refuses to protect,” she said. “We have been refusing to accept the pretty little box of a hijabi that they can put on their ads on the subways to say, ‘Come look at CUNY, we’re so diverse.’ Instead [we’re] reclaiming exactly what it means to wear a hijab, which is to be fighting for justice and for Muslims all over the world.”
The City College chapter of the PSC voted in September to condemn the growing attacks on academic freedom and the right to protest. The resolution specifically cited Malik’s suspension.
As that resolution indicates, students, faculty and staff are all facing the same threat of rising repression. The victimization of Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik and the Brooklyn College “Fired Four” comes in the wake of the violent police crackdown of a Brooklyn College protest, Governor Hochul’s censorship of faculty job listings and the attack on CCNY’s Gaza solidarity encampment.
As PSC members continue to organize against the attacks on academic freedom and the basic functions of higher education in a democratic society, it’s important that we defend the rights of students like Malik as well as faculty and staff. As CUNY students continue a proud tradition of being at the forefront of fights for social equality and international justice, they find themselves under attack from a new McCarthyism that wants to roll back the rights that their predecessors have won.
“City College enjoys looking back on its past protests with a certain pride, the kind of pride that institutions often employ when the dust has long settled,” DeMasi said. “I would hate to see Hadeeqa’s leadership, tenacity and steadfastness be honored years after her impact was made, when we have the ability and opportunity to defend her now.”
Danny Katch is an adjunct lecturer in English at City College.
Published: December 11, 2025
