At least four faculty members have been fired and at least one student has been suspended at the City University of New York (CUNY) in what has “all appearances of an ideological purge,” according to PSC-CUNY, the faculty, staff, and graduate assistant union. The four faculty are adjuncts at Brooklyn College (as well as at other CUNY colleges, where they also lost their jobs), and all of them have participated in pro-Palestine activism. The student, Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, is the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the City College of New York, the site of the CUNY-wide Gaza Solidarity Encampment in 2024. Malik is banned from all CUNY campuses for one year. When she returns, she will be banned from student clubs.
CUNY activists believe the firings and suspension are linked to an upcoming hearing in which CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez will testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce at a hearing called “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” There, he will appear alongside administrators from Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley. Past hearings on similar topics with administrators from other universities have highlighted that many workers and students have been disciplined for their involvement in pro-Palestine activism. The hearing is scheduled for the morning of Tuesday, July 15.
But this is only the most recent escalation in the repression of the pro-Palestine movement at CUNY. The road to this mass firing has been long. Let’s take a look at some of that history, beginning in 2011, when another adjunct faculty member at Brooklyn College was fired for his pro-Palestine viewpoints and an undercover NYPD officer infiltrated the Brooklyn College Islamic Society.
This is not a comprehensive account of all instances of repression during this time period but an attempt to map some of the major events that led to this latest escalation. It is also a warning: the attack on these five people will not stop here; if they can come for these five people, they can come for anyone. That is why it’s essential to stand up now and stop these attacks.
2011: NYPD Surveillance of Muslim Students and the Case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton
In January 2011, CUNY doctoral student and adjunct lecturer Kristofer Petersen-Overton was fired from Brooklyn College—only two days after he officially signed his contract—after State Assembly member Dov Hikind complained to the president of Brooklyn College about Petersen-Overton’s past publications and some of the contents of his syllabus, which was believed to have been leaked by an anonymous student.
The university claimed the firing was unrelated to the complaint and was undertaken because Petersen-Overton lacked a PhD, but the chair of the Brooklyn College Political Science Department pointed out that in the past many people without PhDs have been hired to teach master’s-level courses at Brooklyn College.
Petersen-Overton was reinstated a few days later, after a “massive letter-writing campaign and the united stance of the department,” according to an article in the union newspaper. Classmates at the CUNY Graduate Center had also organized a rally in his defense, but he was reinstated before the rally could take place.
Later that same year, an undercover NYPD officer using the pseudonym “Melike Ser” or “Mel” began attending meetings of the Brooklyn College Islamic Society, despite not being a student. She expressed a desire to convert to Islam and learn more about the faith, attending many meetings organized by the society and other events with the Muslim students she was getting to know.
In interviews with Gothamist, some of the women who knew her said they found some of her behavior suspicious, such as her asking questions about “jihad” and suicide bombings, her seeming lack of seriousness about her conversion, and her constant availability to attend events, even though she claimed to work full time. But they had no way of confirming their suspicions.
The NYPD claimed the officer’s activities at Brooklyn College ended in 2012, but Brooklyn College alumni who knew her confirmed that she continued attending meetings of campus student groups at least as late as 2014. She was even a bridesmaid at the wedding of a Brooklyn College Islamic Society member.
The true identity of “Mel” was revealed in 2015 when she was involved, using the same false identity, in exposing an alleged plan to build a bomb. A short documentary film, Watched, describes the psychological impact on Brooklyn College’s Muslim student community, including fear of political expression, paranoia about new club members, and shame regarding their own feelings of distrust and how it prevents them from connecting with fellow students. While current Brooklyn College president Michelle Anderson (who was not president when the surveillance took place) said in an email that undercover surveillance runs contrary to the college’s mission, the students never received an official apology from the college, and Anderson did not stay for the question-and-answer session after the film was screened on campus.
2014: Brooklyn College Charges SJP “Security Fees”
In February 2014, Brooklyn College announced a new policy of charging student clubs fees for security at after-hours events, assessed according to each case. The next month, the college told SJP that it would need to pay $400 for security at a book talk event. According to Palestine Legal, SJP seemed to be the only student club charged a security fee all year, until the college rescinded the policy in early October.
2016: Attempt to Suspend All SJPs, BDS Blacklist
Two years later, in February 2016, the Zionist Organization of America wrote a letter to the CUNY chancellor and the Board of Trustees alleging widespread antisemitism at CUNY, primarily from the SJP clubs and faculty. The letter demanded that all SJPs be suspended.
The chancellor ordered an investigation of the claims, which found that while some antisemitic remarks were made at SJP-organized events, there was no evidence that these comments were made by SJP members or, in the case of public events like the 2015 Million Student March, by any CUNY students at all. The report recommended against suspending the SJP chapters but noted that it would not violate students’ First Amendment rights for college administrators to condemn speech they found offensive. NYC-SJP, a coalition of student clubs that was the predecessor to Within Our Lifetime, condemned antisemitism, distinguished it from anti-Zionism, and pointed out CUNY’s failure to condemn recent instances of Islamophobia on campus (including at the march) and an instance of antisemitism directed at a Jewish member of Hunter SJP during the march, when pro-Israel counterprotesters demeaned the student’s Jewish identity.
That same year, the New York State legislature considered (and ultimately rejected) several pieces of anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) legislation. Then-governor Andrew Cuomo, who is currently running for mayor of New York City, created a BDS blacklist by executive order, directing the state not to provide any funding to organizations found to be boycotting Israel. The blacklist exists to this day and includes 11 organizations, last updated on June 3, 2025.
2020–22: Attacks on CUNY Law Students and the Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Assistant Union
Nerdeen Kiswani, cofounder of NYC-SJP while a student at Hunter College, later enrolled at CUNY School of Law, where she continued organizing for Palestine. In September 2020, she became the target of an organized harassment campaign coordinated through an anti-BDS app, the founders of which worked closely with the Israeli government to achieve pro-Israel propaganda objectives using the app. In 2022, when Kiswani was elected as the class graduation speaker, CUNY School of Law responded to external opposition to Kiswani’s speech by removing it from the website and condemning it. The same occurred in 2023 for elected graduation speaker Fatima Mousa Mohammed, also a pro-Palestine activist and member of Within Our Lifetime. They have both continued to face coordinated harassment and threats from Zionist organizations, individuals, and elected officials.
In 2021, a fresh wave of Israeli attacks in Gaza began, killing some 260 Palestinians, about half of whom were civilians and about 60 of whom were children, according to Human Rights Watch. In response, members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC–CUNY), the faculty, staff, and graduate assistant union at CUNY, proposed a resolution condemning “the massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli state” and pledging that the union would support the BDS movement. This resolution did not pass the union’s delegate assembly, but an alternate version did, retaining the condemnation while refraining from supporting BDS and instead calling for chapters to facilitate discussions about BDS at the chapter level. Supporters of the resolution were later added to the anti-Palestine surveillance website Canary Mission, which has since been used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to identify international students and revoke their visas.
After the PSC–CUNY resolution was passed, five faculty members resigned from the union and collaborated with anti-union organizations to file a lawsuit challenging the union’s right to exclusively represent a bargaining unit in the state of New York. Essentially, these faculty asserted that not only did they not want to be PSC members, but they also didn’t want the PSC contract to apply to them, despite the protections it offers for pay, benefits, job security, and working conditions. If the lawsuit had been successful, it would have seriously undermined public sector unions’ ability to advocate for the workers they represent; fortunately, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
2023 to Present: Doxing, Violence, Arrests, and Firings
The start of the genocide in Gaza marked the revitalization of the pro-Palestine movement in the United States and around the world. At CUNY, students and faculty organized and attended many events, including teach-ins, marches, and rallies.
At one such rally, on October 13, 2023, City Council member Inna Vernikov attended a Zionist counterprotest while carrying a visible gun. It is against state law to carry weapons at protests, and it is particularly threatening for CUNY students to have an elected official, who presumably represents a portion of the student body, show up to oppose their protest while armed. Her charges were dropped on the grounds that her firearm, which she presented to the court after she was allowed to take it home rather than having it seized as evidence by the police, was found to be nonfunctional. Since then, Vernikov has played a central role in encouraging attacks on CUNY community members involved in the Palestine movement, including calling for the firing of one of the Fired Four and cosigning a letter with other City Council members demanding punishment for faculty who participated in the May 8, 2025, protest at Brooklyn College.
On November 14, a billboard truck sponsored by the right-wing organization Accuracy in Media began circling the campus, displaying the names and pictures of several students and faculty, labeling them “Hunter College’s leading antisemites.” The organization also creates websites for targeted individuals to further publicize their names and information.
In early 2024, the Palestine Solidarity Alliance (PSA) at Hunter College filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education regarding the college’s failure to acknowledge Palestinian deaths and injuries in addition to its statements about Israeli loss of life on October 7, its failure to protect PSA members from harassment and defamation, and its failure to take action against the billboard truck. Hunter College also canceled a student-organized screening of the documentary Israelism and canceled planned and previously approved searches for faculty specializing in Palestinian studies.
Also in 2024, two CUNY adjunct faculty were fired from John Jay College and Hunter College, respectively, after the colleges received complaints about their pro-Palestine social media posts. There followed a campaign to fire another adjunct faculty member from Queens College for teaching about the genocide in Gaza in her class. This faculty member ultimately kept her job, even though her name and email address were publicized by Congressman Ritchie Torres, which subjected her to additional publicity and harassment.
Most famously, over 170 people were arrested, and several were injured by police, at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at City College on April 30, 2024. Immediately after the encampment was dismantled by the NYPD, the college hired a team of private security officers to secure the campus. Multiple guards were stationed at every entrance to check IDs. In the 14 months since that day, City College has remained fenced off from the surrounding neighborhood, serving as an ominous reminder of the repression and the college’s ability to remilitarize the campus whenever it deems necessary. Eight of the people arrested that night, known as the CUNY 8, are still facing trial on felony burglary charges.
Not long after the start of the genocide, Governor Kathy Hochul commissioned an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at CUNY. The results, known as the Lippman Report, were published in October 2024. Lippman found that antisemitism (which in the context of his report includes criticism of Israel) is prevalent at CUNY and made 13 recommendations for addressing it. These recommendations include that the university place greater emphasis on “the relationship between Israel and the Jewish People when adjudicating whether conduct constitutes antisemitism,” become more willing to call the police on campus protests, and impose harsher disciplinary measures against members of the CUNY community.
Student leaders in the Doctoral and Graduate Students Council (DGSC) at the CUNY Graduate Center were also subjected to investigations over their support for BDS regarding the allocation of student club funding, which the council oversees. The administration also seized control of the DGSC email list and imposed additional restrictions on student event planning and funding. A number of CUNY international students had their student visas revoked as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. While there has been no reported connection between the revocations at CUNY and any pro-Palestine activism by the students, an ongoing lawsuit on behalf of other international students detained by ICE has revealed that a significant portion of students investigated by DHS for possible visa revocation were targeted over their activism.
On April 24, 2025, students at City College briefly occupied the quad, the former site of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment one year earlier, before being ushered first into a designated “free speech zone” in front of a building and then off campus entirely. Soon after they crossed through the gates, at least one campus security officer began pepper spraying students.
On May 8, 2025, police entered the Brooklyn College campus during a pro-Palestine protest organized by students and joined by faculty to arrest, brutalize, and tase students. Each of the Brooklyn College Fired Four was fired after this protest, creating the appearance that the student-faculty solidarity on May 8 may have contributed to Brooklyn College becoming a target for faculty firings. After the protest, nine City Council members cosigned a letter demanding investigations into the faculty and staff who were alleged to have been involved.
The Urgency of Protecting the Fired Four and Student Activists
As this brief history shows, attacks on pro-Palestine students and faculty at CUNY, particularly at Brooklyn College, are not new, but they have escalated considerably over time. While Kristofer Petersen-Overton was reinstated quickly after his firing in 2011, the Fired Four in 2025 are still fighting for their jobs in a very different political context, one marked by considerable pressure from the highest levels of government for universities to crack down hard. The worldwide student movement in support of Palestine and the shifts in public opinion toward sympathy with the Palestinians, especially the base of the Democrats, present an ideological challenge for the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in federal, state, and city government. Support for Israel was once a given, but the impassioned movement against the genocide heightens the stakes, such as creating the impetus for these Congressional hearings.
Attacks on federal research funding, student loan availability, student visas and undocumented immigrants, the Palestine movement, unions, cuts to federal funding for the states (which in turn fund public universities), freedom of speech, and more issues are all closely interconnected, especially at universities. It is absolutely critical that CUNY workers, students, the entire higher education sector, and the organized Left stand together and fight these firings tooth and nail. If we allow our colleagues to be fired en masse, seemingly for their political views, and allow our students to be suspended for the same reason, we leave the door open for even more attacks in the future. The Palestine movement is now facing the worst of the attacks at CUNY, but the threat posed by these firings extends beyond that particular topic.
The Trump administration is also targeting climate science, LGBTQ+ studies, women’s studies, Black studies, and every other area of study involving race and racism, as well as leftist organizations, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Unión del Barrio. The trickle-down effects of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill on state funding could also imperil public universities. Our ability and willingness to mobilize in defense of the Fired Four will also have an impact on these future battles.
The Rapp-Coudert Committee hearings of the early 1940s, when a state legislative committee interrogated over 500 faculty members about their political activities, are a particularly dark time in CUNY’s history. Dozens of education workers, about half of whom worked at City College, lost their jobs over their alleged Communist Party ties or their refusal to cooperate with the committee. CUNY workers are not (yet) facing that type of repression, but we must keep this history in mind as we defend the Fired Four. The strength of our fight now, to reinstate the Four as well as the suspended student, will help protect all of us from further escalations.
This fight belongs to every student and worker at CUNY, not just the Fired Four, the suspended student, and their allies in the movement for Palestine. The first step is to spread the word, to make everyone in our community aware of what is going on and to discuss in our worker and student organizations potential next steps. Our union has a critical role to play in organizing press conferences like the one today, but also organizing at the level of the rank and file. Every union chapter should be having summer emergency meetings and organizing committees for the reinstatement of the fired 4, building up the power to reinstate all students and workers attacked for speaking up against a genocide. As CUNY alumna Assata Shakur famously said,
It is our duty to fight for our freedom
It is our duty to win
We must love and support one another
We have nothing to lose but our chains.