What The Hell America!

The central irony of Robinson’s case is that the ostensible reason he could be disciplined is to ensure schools don’t silence people whose political beliefs go against the grain.

One of SEA 202’s key provisions is a five-year tenure review process that could see a tenured faculty member get demoted, face a pay cut, or even lose their job if they are found to have foisted their unrelated political views on students or failed to promote “intellectual diversity.” To that end, it also mandated that schools create a process to let students and employees submit complaints about faculty — a process that IU chose to effectively turn into a system for anonymous accusations.

For Robinson, that accusation came on October 10, 2024, filed as a bias incident report (BIR) to what used to be called the university’s Office of Institutional Equity (now the Office of Civil Rights Compliance), after a year in which Robinson was a prominent faculty critic of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. While the university itself defines bias incidents as instances of “bias or prejudice meant to intimidate, demean, mock, degrade, marginalize, or threaten individuals or groups,” the BIR against him didn’t detail anything fitting that description.

“This professor has repeatedly spoken out against Indiana University on several occasions. It is clear to me that he doesn’t not [sic] value this university,” the complaint read, detailing in-class remarks Robinson had made about being arrested at various pro-Palestinian rallies. “He has used class time to say that the university is restricting peoples [sic] free speech.” “He talks negatively about the state of Israel and describes the war in untrue and unfair ways,” it concluded.

Normally a BIR wouldn’t lead to an investigation or disciplinary action; IU’s own website says so explicitly. The university has a bespoke platform for lodging complaints under SEA 202 named EthicsPoint, but that wasn’t where Robinson’s accuser made their charges. So how did the incident escalate to where it is now?

The answer is that university administrators appear to have actively decided to make it an SEA 202 case. According to documents viewed by Jacobin, on the afternoon of November 19, the anonymous complaint was kicked up by the university’s chief compliance officer, Mike Jenson. Over the next two months, the case was accessed by five other university administrators, two of whom weren’t listed as the original case assignees: the school’s chief audit officer and Anthony Prather, its general counsel and chief legal officer.

Robinson is now the second faculty member to be investigated under SEA 202, both investigations having been ostensibly triggered by a professor’s alleged in-class criticism of Israel. Last year, IU Bloomington professor of folklore and ethnomusicology David McDonald received four anonymous complaints under the law after playing a minute-long clip of campus activists protesting the war in Gaza as an example of using one’s voice for political protest.

IU Bloomington did not respond to a request for comment.

The investigation of Robinson comes amid extraordinary government pressure on colleges to crack down on antiwar speech. This past March, the Trump administration singled out IU and fifty-nine other schools for investigation under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, on the basis that they were failing to stop antisemitic harassment and discrimination.

Robinson, meanwhile, has not endeared himself to an administration under this kind of pressure.

“He’s probably the most outspoken person on campus associated with Jewish Voice for Peace,” says Jeff Isaac, James H. Rudy professor of political science at IU Bloomington, referring to the Jewish pro-Palestinian group that has led activism against the Gaza war, of which Robinson is a member.

That pressure came long before Trump’s inauguration. In November 2023 — a month after Hamas’s atrocious slaughter of Israelis set off what has been described even by Israeli scholars as a genocide in Gaza and nationwide campus protests against it — hard-right then representative Jim Banks (now one of the state’s two US senators) publicly accused the school of a “failure to combat campus antisemitism” and threatened to have its federal funding revoked. Federal money is a major funding source for the university, with the $432 million of federal grants it received in 2023 equal to 10 percent of its operating budget that year.

In IU president Pamela Whitten’s response to Banks, obtained by student newspaper the Indiana Daily Student, she outlined the steps the university had taken to combat alleged campus antisemitism and ensure Jewish students’ safety. Besides beefing up security, the letter stated, the school was in daily contact with on-campus Jewish groups to craft these policies going forward. The two groups she named have both been subjects of controversy.

One was the Secure Community Network, a law enforcement liaison whose CEO had urged the incoming Trump administration to target noncitizens with deportation, prompting hundreds of rabbis and cantors to sign an open letter calling on him to retract the statement. The other was the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), an explicitly pro-Israel organization that has worked with the Israeli government to target pro-Palestinian activists in the United States.

“We also encourage our students to report any incident of bias to our Bias Incident Response team,” Whitten wrote in the letter to Banks.

In the seventeen months since, Robinson has repeatedly come under attack for his activism against the war, often from local pro-Israel groups. On September 30, 2024, his was one of seventeen protester mug shots on a flyer put up by Campus Reform, the pro-Israel media arm of the Leadership Institute, a conservative organization devoted to combating alleged left-wing bias on college campuses. Three months later, a research analyst with CAMERA on Campus, the college branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a group devoted to pressuring media organizations over critical coverage of Israel, repeatedly denounced Robinson’s response to an op-ed by one of their student fellows, characterizing it as an “attack on a Jewish student” — leaving out the fact that Robinson himself is Jewish — and called for disciplinary action against him.

Robinson’s university email was soon inundated with messages calling him an antisemite. A colleague forwarded him screenshots of posts from a Facebook group named “Jewish Parents of IU,” one of which urged members of the group to email IU president Whitten and the university provost with complaints about Robinson over his response to the op-ed. Another told the closed group that the student was “getting great support from IU Hillel (she is a past president!!), ICC, and CAMERA.”

“We’re put in a situation where a student can basically allege anything they like, and you’re caught up in this Kafkaesque process,” Robinson says.

At the same time, Robinson is embroiled in an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit against the university, stemming from his and fifty-five other protesters’ April 2024 arrest for an encampment on Dunn Meadow, a park on school grounds that has historically been the site of protests. The IU administration drew outrage for going further than other schools in putting down the encampment, bringing in state troopers with riot gear who posted snipers on university buildings.

Those charges were later dropped by the local prosecutor who cited the “constitutionally dubious process” IU leadership used to enable the arrests, which saw them change the school’s policy on unauthorized tents ten minutes before midnight a day prior to when they knew students were planning to rally at the park. But Robinson and two others arrested were still banned from the campus for one year under the new policy (albeit with Robinson’s ban temporarily paused), leading to the ACLU lawsuit.

“Whitten really sought to get in line with” the federal push for a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism, says Isaac, “and went beyond the call of duty to enforce it.”

Robinson is not the only one to fall afoul of this crackdown. In December 2023, IU suspended a tenured professor and faculty advisor to the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) for improperly booking a room for a public event by the group, before abruptly canceling an exhibition of a Palestinian American artist’s work that had been three years in the making. Both incidents were later cited by faculty when they overwhelmingly backed a vote of no confidence in Whitten and two other administrators — including vice provost for faculty and academic affairs Carrie Docherty, one of those who accessed Robinson’s SEA 202 case.

A faculty representative will ultimately have to decide whether Robinson should be disciplined, giving him a stronger chance of avoiding censure. But even if he isn’t sanctioned, critics of the law say the damage has been done.

“By publicly announcing this, and this being widely consumed, that sends the signal to other faculty members at IU that they too could be put under investigation if they don’t tread carefully,” says Graham Piro, faculty legal defense fund fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Having the sword of Damocles hanging over your head while you teach is not easy.”

“The process is the punishment,” says Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. “Having to go through all this, the procedural and reputational harms, going through the stress, it’s very significant. Ben has been very courageous, but for all the Bens, there are all the not-Bens.”

It has had a profound impact on David McDonald, the other professor investigated under SEA 202 and who is due for a promotion review in August. Though all four complaints against him were dismissed, the experience left him at a loss for how to teach other classes that touch on Palestinian history, as outlined in the ACLU lawsuit he is party to — and whether he would have to present students the discredited, unscholarly arguments that Palestinians don’t exist or weren’t forcibly expelled in 1948. McDonald told the Chronicle of Higher Education that for one class that covers Palestinian protest songs, he had to, among other things, ban class discussions and record all of his lectures to collect evidence in case of future complaints.

Lakier calls SEA 202 “a vanguard,” part of a wider movement to chip away at legal protections for academic freedom in universities. While Florida’s headline-grabbing, heavy-handed clampdown was blocked by the courts, states like Indiana are having quieter success with a more subtle approach.

In Texas, Senate Bill 37 is currently sailing through the state legislature, which if passed would markedly expand state politicians’ power over universities’ curricula and, similar to SEA 202, create a complaint system that could result in cuts to a school’s funding. Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, signed into law in March and set to take effect in June, likewise created a complaint system that lets anyone report on administrators, professors, and staff who are supposedly impinging on intellectual diversity, along with allowing tenured professors to be fired, banning faculty strikes, and a host of other provisions.

“The fear is always the more formalized opportunities you have for somebody to pass judgment on a faculty member, the more opportunities there are for pretextual decision-making,” says Steve Sanders, a law professor at IU.

This is part of a rising trend of efforts to weaken and even outright eliminate tenure. The 2012–2022 period saw thirteen tenure-ban bills introduced in various states, and the following two years saw bills in ten states targeting tenure in some way. This year, another seven states have gotten in on the act. That doesn’t include Indiana, which is upping the ante after SEA 202 with a provision, now law, that was slipped into the must-pass budget bill at the last minute that, among other things, lets tenured faculty lose their jobs if they fail a productivity review.

“After SEA 202, most people didn’t imagine the legislature was going to stop at that,” says Sanders. “Most people thought there would be a more direct incursion, so this is proof of that.”

University professors were one of the chief targets singled out in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a blueprint for a government-fueled crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism released shortly before the 2024 election result that explicitly modeled itself on the mid-century initiatives that later evolved into the McCarthyist Red Scare. That document has already anticipated a number of the Trump administration’s most aggressive pieces of overreach, justified today on the basis of protecting Jews — even though, as Robinson’s case shows, many of those being targeted in this campaign are Jewish themselves.

That these two rising trends — punishment of pro-Palestinian speech at universities and efforts to weaken tenure — are advancing in tandem begs the question: Are we seeing the groundwork being laid for a revival of 1950s-style McCarthyism, one combining state power with private accusations that lead to professional consequences and a climate of fear?

“It’s not paranoid. This is obviously happening,” says Isaac. “It’s all the Left being targeted.”