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It has been more than a year since the tents and banners of 2024’s pro-Palestine student encampments came down. But dozens of faculty members, staff, and students nationwide are still navigating the backlash that followed, fighting continued campus repression.

“This is not a time to be timid; it’s not a time to be overly cautious,” Anna Feder told Truthout. Feder had been working for Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, for 17 years, a dozen of them spent curating a popular public film series, when administrators terminated her employment and barred her from campus in August 2024, according to a civil rights lawsuit she has since filed against the college.

That suit alleges that Emerson College violated Feder’s free speech rights when it fired her after she screened a film critical of Zionism and criticized the college’s response to Palestine-related speech on campus in an op-ed for the campus newspaper.

Almost a year into the grueling legal process, Feder told Truthout she remains committed: “With the state of the country, the state of the world right now, we all need to find ways in which we can leverage what power we have to fight back.”

The recent sharp rise in attacks on faculty, staff, and students is part of what the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association characterized in a November 2025 report as a top-down campaign of “unprecedented steps to suppress campus speech — including scholarship, advocacy, and protest — opposing the state of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

Repression of Palestine Solidarity on Campus Enabled Anti-Migrant Escalation

That report, titled “Discriminating Against Dissent,” details how accusations of antisemitism are being weaponized as a pretext to advance a regressive agenda in higher education. It includes data showing a sharp rise in complaints of antisemitism lodged under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act against colleges and universities since October 2023. More antisemitism investigations were opened in the last two months of that year than in all previous years combined, and a new record number of investigations were filed in 2024, according to the report.

“This is not a time to be timid; it’s not a time to be overly cautious.”

“This is not a time to be timid; it’s not a time to be overly cautious.”

Isaac Kamola, a political scientist who studies campus repression and is director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF), told Truthout that the spike in antisemitism investigations is the result of the same “out-of-control right-wing ecosystem that for two decades now has basically been publishing lies about what takes place in higher education.”

For years, that political infrastructure, captained by right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo and billionaires like Marc Rowan, has been wielded against educators who research and teach about race or gender issues. Now, Kamola told Truthout, it has pivoted to lobbing accusations of antisemitism at professors as a means of intervening in curricula and........

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