4/17/2025 2pm ET, 1PM CT

As part of the National Day of Action for Higher Education, SSJ will be hosting another webinar -- The Universities As Political Battlegrounds: A Call For Courage. This session will explore why universities are such important sites of struggle and what it means to be courageous in this moment.

4/17/2025 7PM ET, 6PM CT

SSJ’s Cathy Cohen will join the Day of Action National Teach-in with other leading voices in the fightback against repression on campuses across the country. Other speakers will include Todd Wolfson, President, Rutgers AAUP and National AAUP; Levin Kim, Higher Education Labor United; Aslı Ü. Bâli, Yale University Law School/Middle East Studies Association; Leila Kawar, University of Michigan AAUP and others!

4/23/25 5pm CT

How does U.S. higher education make sense of Black faculty activism, advocacy and education about Palestine? In what ways is this continuous with and distinctive from the forms of generalized dishonor that Black faculty regularly face in higher education? How do the politics of the Palestine Exception seek to render Black faculty as “faces of (whatever neoliberal schemes) universities” find themselves entrenched in? How are Black faculty members navigating being truth tellers in an era of organized attacks on higher education? In this webinar, Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard compares the use of their image in the public sphere before and after being arrested on campus on May 15, 2024. Dr. Willoughby-Herard offers their observations of nearly two decades of enforcement of the so-called “Palestine Exception” on their own campus, examining how several cases of suspension, firing, physical violence, and vigilante terror against Black faculty vocal about Israeli state’s role in genocide, apartheid, and human rights abuses shed light on critical questions about the role of Black scholar-activists in the University.

5/6/25 at 5pm CT

On college and university campuses across the US, talk of “academic freedom” and “student safety” has become all-consuming. But what is academic freedom? And whose safety are we really concerned with? As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s genocidal attacks, faculty, students, and staff across American colleges and universities are being charged with creating an “unsafe atmosphere” by speaking up for Palestinian liberation. What does it mean to create an “unsafe atmosphere” in the context of talking about genocide? How has safety been weaponized to silent dissent? What are our rights and what are our responsibilities? And what can we do now?