More than 115 educators condemned the cancellation of academic journals across the entire academic journal, which is specifically targeting Palestine Harvard University Publishers are “censorship system”.
exist Open letter Academics published Thursday condemning the sudden scrapping of Harvard Education Review Special Issue – First reveal By Guardian in July – as an academic examination of “trying to make Israel and its allies genocide, hunger and dehumanize the Palestinian people.”
The author points out that the censorship on the issue is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination.” Gaza”.
Special Issue of Prestigious Education Magazine is planned within six months Israel’s war in Gaza As mentioned earlier, issues related to the education of Palestinians, education of Palestinians, and related debates in American schools and universities are to be addressed, as previously reported by The Guardian.
“The field of education plays an important role in supporting students, educators and policy makers Gaza,” the journal’s editor wrote in a call to abstract, amid the destruction of educational infrastructure in Gaza, including the closure of hundreds of schools and the destruction of all universities in the region.
More than a year later, the special issue is ready-all articles have been edited, contracts with most authors have been completed, and the issue has been advertised on the academic conference and on the back cover of the previous post. But later in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group at Harvard School of Education published the journal, requiring Harvard General Counsel to submit all articles to a “risk assessment” review – unprecedented demand.
When the author protested, the publisher responded suddenly to cancel the issue. In an email obtained by The Guardian, Jessica Fiorillo, the organization’s executive director, quoted what she called the inadequate review process, as well as the need for “a large number of copy editing” and the “lack of internal consistency” about special issues. The decision, she said, was not “due to a particular viewpoint censorship nor was it related to academic freedom affairs.”
The author and editor flatly rejected this feature, telling the Guardian that the removal of the dangerous precedent was an example of what many scholars call the “Palestine exception” of academic freedom.
“The responsibility of HEPG’s decision to abandon its institutional mission, and its world-leading position requires is the scholars in action,” dozens of scholars have also signed recent letters, using terms coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “restrictive and systematic devastating” education system.
“It is unreasonable for HEPG to choose to publicly cancel it as academic quality while omitting the key facts of public reporting on censorship.”
Arathi Sriprakash, a sociology and education professor at Oxford University and a signatory professor of sociology and education, told The Guardian that the cancellation of the special issue mobilized so many educational scholars “it is because we recognize the serious consequences of this threat to academic freedom and academic integrity.”
“The ongoing genocide violence in Gaza involves the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many educational institutions around the world, there are active attempts to close what happens in learning. As educators, as educators, we must be firm and unwavering towards knowledge and learning without fear or threat, and we must be firm and unwavering.”
‘assault About Academic Freedom
The ordeal of the special Palestine problem is Trump administration Suppress the autonomy of American higher education institutions Anti-Semitism on campus.
Harvard is the only university to sue the government in response to the cuts Billions of dollars It has released the university in amid federal funding and other penalties. But internally, Harvard has put forward many government demands, including downgrading scholars, canceling initiatives to provide space for Palestinian narratives, and adopting a controversial definition of anti-Semitism, which critics say is contrary to academic inquiries.
The journal’s editors said in a conversation with Harvard Education Review editors, the journal’s publishers acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of articles because they fear that its publication would prompt anti-Semitism claims.
Harvard is reportedly about to reach a settlement with the Trump administration Along the line Among those who arrive at other top universities.
Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American education anthropologist at Barnard College, one of 21 contributors to the canceled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as another sign of institutional surrender.
“If universities (or in this case the university media) are unwilling to stand up for the core of their mission, I don’t know what they are doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”
Instead of immediately responding to a request for comment to the latest letter, a spokesperson for Harvard School of Education wrote in an earlier statement to The Guardian that the publisher “still committed to our strong editorial process.”
Last month, the freedom of speech group Pen America also condemned the cancellation of the special issue, a “blatant attack on academic freedom.”
Kristen Shahverdian, director of the group’s Campus Freedom Speech Initiative Program, Kristen Shahverdian statement.
“Silence these academic voices, robbing scholars, students and the public of opportunities to interact with their insights. It also sends a shocking message in the context of the Trump administration’s relentless pressure on Harvard and political intervention in higher education, including efforts toward the Palestinian scholarship.”
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