I love teaching at CUNY. There is nothing in these dark days in this country that gives me more hope than having class and witnessing the sense of possibility, the intellectual resolve and the generosity that my students embody. In this segregated country we live in, my classes are a rainbow – African Americans and West Indians, students from Pakistan and Yemen and Israel, Orthodox Jewish students, Palestinian Muslims and Catholic Nuyoricans – gay, straight and trans, we talk and listen across lines that seem unbridgeable in other parts of American society. In this current political moment of division and cruelty, our Brooklyn College students are kind and careful with each other, tender with each others’ dreams and committed to learning what they haven’t learned.
Jeanne Theoharis at a rally near Brooklyn College. (Credit: Paul Frangipane)
CUNY BETRAYAL
This summer the chancellor went before Congress. And instead of celebrating that beautiful community – and standing up for the faculty and students of CUNY – he gave in to the bullies of Congress, who think DEI is a nasty word. Who weaponize antisemitism to try to take a hammer to public education. Who think freedom of speech only applies to what they want to hear.
I am a scholar of the Civil Rights Movement, and Americans today love to celebrate that history. But too often civil rights history exists in the passive voice: Bus riders are ejected, students are expelled, civil rights activists lose their jobs. The people who did the expelling and the firing, well, we don’t remember their names and we wouldn’t have been them. We wouldn’t have called King an instigator; we wouldn’t have named names for the HUAC. We wouldn’t have arrested Brooklyn college students for demanding African American and Puerto Rican history. But many people did just those things then.
And are doing so again.
Firing four women faculty for their pro-Palestine politics is the red line of McCarthyism. Deciding that Brooklyn College’s lawyer, not the department appointments committee, makes hiring decisions is the red line. Cowering before the bullies of Congress and the City Council is the red line. Claiming these cases are “confidential employee matters” while having defiantly name-checked one of the Fired Four as an “instigator” before the Faculty Council in May is the red line. Testifying before Congress and proudly asserting one of these adjuncts “no longer” works at CUNY is the red line of McCarthyism. Treating anti-genocide protests as antisemitism is the red line of McCarthyism.
DOING WHAT MATTERS
And we’re here to say to the chancellor of CUNY and to the president and provost of Brooklyn College: It doesn’t matter what is in your heart. It matters what you do. Firing adjuncts for their politics puts you on the side of McCarthyism. Claiming you are firing people for conduct but refusing even to name that conduct is McCarthyism.
We are here to say that enough is enough. We are here today to call on Chancellor Matos Rodríguez and President Anderson to stand up to the bullies and reinstate the Fired Four. We are here to say that there might be costs to standing up, as there have been before in history, but it’s time to decide our students and faculty – the fate of public education and academic freedom – are worth it.
Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. This is an edited version of her speech at the July 31 rally for the Fired Four.
Published: September 12, 2025
