September 8, 2025

Join the Call to Cancel PEN America at University of Minnesota

[Background image above depicts an Israeli strike on the Islamic University of Gaza on December 2, 2023, killing physics professor physics professor Sufyan Tayeh. Photo retrieved from the Andolu Agency.]

**UPDATE The link to take immediate action has been corrected at the bottom of this caption **

On September 18, 2025, the University of Minnesota’s Office of the Vice Provost and the Senate Faculty Consultative Committee will host PEN America to lead a symposium called A Campus for All: Campus Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Current Challenges to Higher Education. The decision to hold such a forum led by PEN America, which has a long track record of suppressing Palestinian voices and critiques of the state of Israel, is hypocritical. It disregards the coalitional pressure campaign led by Writers Against the War on Gaza to hold PEN American accountable for its actions, which include failing to meaningfully address Israel’s genocide on Gaza, normalizing Israel’s colonization of Palestine, suppressing Palestinian voices, promoting Islamophobia, and clamping down on the free speech of its own staff members. Thanks to the campaign, the organization has suffered damage recently, with its major Jean Stein award having to be canceled two years in a row because the nominated authors have withdrawn their books from consideration. The university’s invitation of PEN America while it bypasses the many qualified experts on free speech, academic freedom signals that the university is not actually interested in protecting free speech on campus.

Join the campaign to cancel this event, led by Educators for Justice in Palestine, of which Mizna is a member. The full email text is below. Please revise as you see fit.

** Follow this link to send an email to the Vice Provost, Senate Faculty Consultative Committee, the university’s president, and PEN America. If your browser does not support the Mailto app, send the message to the following addresses: abrah042@umn.edu, trj@umn.edu, phleo@umn.edu, mbodie@umn.edu, borrello@umn.edu, brown013@umn.edu, jenng@morris.umn.edu, hadi0001@umn.edu, rkrebs@umn.edu, kmetzger@r.umn.edu, pahwa007@umn.edu, redish@umn.edu, subree@umn.edu, vpfaa@umn.edu, provost@umn.edu, upres@umn.edu, info@pen.org, umnejp@gmail.com

The full email text is below. Please revise as you see fit.

Dear Office of the Vice Provost and Senate Faculty Consultative Committee (FCC):

Given PEN America’s well-known track record of reluctance to call out the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to fully support Palestinian writers and artists, I am surprised to see the FCC and Vice Provost’s office sponsor PEN to host an event on academic freedom and free expression. 

PEN currently has little to no credibility with many writers, precisely for its woefully insufficient response to the ongoing genocide and scholasticide Israel is committing in Gaza. Following PEN’s violent ejection of Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar from an event in 2024, thousands expressed criticism of PEN and demanded it take steps to stand for Palestinians. Numerous writers, including many affiliated with the University of Minnesota, have participated in what is a widespread and longstanding boycott, still ongoing, of PEN events, awards, and other opportunities. Nor is PEN considered an expert or standards body when it comes to the concept of academic freedom.

PEN America had no qualms condemning Russia’s assault on Ukraine, referring to the ongoing conflict there as “an assault on free expression and human rights, an effort to destroy Ukrainian culture, and poses an imminent threat to the country’s writers, artists, and journalists.” Its reluctance to forthrightly call out these same injustices executed on a genocidal scale in Gaza suggests the organization is tainted with structural racism and Islamophobia.

And yet, UMN welcomes PEN America with open arms, suggesting yet again that the administration echoes PEN’s callous indifference to the University community’s Palestinian, SWANA, and Muslim members and their allies.

It’s especially shocking that this event is organized as a University response to the improper unhiring of Raz Segal, a well-known expert in genocide studies. Violating the normal hiring process and faculty vetting in departments and colleges, the President’s Office barred Segal’s hire as Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies over political objections to Segal’s recognition that Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is genocidal. His stance is not a minority or even, at this point, a controversial scholarly position—for example, it is shared by the International Association of Genocide Studies. 

It is concering that members of FCC and the Provost’s office, themselves academics, dismiss concerns raised by multiple scholars and scholarly associations about the politically-motivated unhiring of a genocide studies expert, and attempt to rectify a clear violation of academic freedom and shared governance by organizing an “academic freedom forum” led by an organization criticized by its own membership for silence on genocide.

I ask that you cancel this event and instead allow real conversations about academic freedom and the freedom to speak about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.