On Feb. 5, the NYU New York Student Government shared a letter in support of academic freedom on their Instagram page. The letter, first written on Nov. 23, 2020 and brought to vote in the Dec. 3, 2020 Student Government meeting, voices their concern over Zoom’s alleged censorship of two NYU affiliated events on its platform.

The letter details a series of events that took place in Fall 2020 and includes multiple universities and offices as signatories and affected parties. It urges Zoom leadership to review their actions and promise to refrain from further censorship of academic endeavors.

On Sep. 23 last year, an online event hosted by San Francisco State University was shut down by Zoom, Facebook and Youtube. The event, titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A conversation with Leila Khaled,” was intended to be an open classroom with a roundtable discussion and a Q&A.

The open classroom drummed up considerable opposition in the weeks leading up to it, including several articles in the Jerusalem Post. Celebrity columnist Andrea Peyser wrote an article for the New York Post titled “On today’s campus, it’s all too kosher to honor a terrorist,” strongly condemning SFSU’s decision to host a “hate fest” featuring Leila Khaled, whom the author described as an “unrepentant terrorist”. The Jerusalem Post claimed that the event would “contravene anti-terror laws.”

The event was to be moderated by professors Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program and Dr. Tomomi Kinukaw of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at SFSU. The discussion was also intended to be hosted with the university’s Zoom license and streamed live on both Facebook and Youtube.

SFSU President Dr. Lynn Mahoney put out a statement on behalf of the university, citing their long conversation with Zoom to prevent censorship of the event. Mahoney restated SFSU’s commitment to “support[ing] the right of faculty to conduct their teaching and scholarship free from censorship” and to “condemning anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, racism, and other hateful ideologies that marginalize people.”

In response to the censorship of the SFSU event, the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or NYU-AAUP, hosted its own event, “Against the Censorship and Criminalization of Academic Political Speech,” on Oct. 23, 2020. It was sponsored by a variety of NYU and non-NYU organizations and featured a message by Leila Khaled. This event was also shut down by Zoom.

NYU-AAUP released a statement denouncing the move by Zoom and announced that a recording of the webinar would be posted later. It also urged NYU administrators to issue a stronger statement on the situation and to revisit their contract with the platform.

NYU President Andrew Hamilton, who has previously called Pro-Palestine groups on campus “divisive”, released a statement acknowledging the concern from AAUP members and NYU faculty. Hamilton went on to say that the university expressed their consternation to Zoom regarding its intervention in the event without notice or explanation.

He also highlighted Zoom’s reason for shutting down the events and the fact that it was brought to their attention by the efforts of third parties.

“While their interpretation might be open to argument, it is not a surprise that businesses will steer away from actions that they believe may leave them open to criminally liability. I would also note that terrorist violence conflicts with academic freedom; it is at odds with values that universities hold dear: reason, dispassion, freedom of speech and inquiry, respect for individuals and individual liberties,” wrote Hamilton.

NYU-AAUP responded to this statement with their own, expressing their need for the NYU administration to understand “how NYU’s dependence on a third-party private vendor like Zoom poses a threat to the lifeblood of academic freedom.”

The NYU-AAUP Executive Committee is urging Hamilton to release a stronger statement and lend his support to their quest for academic freedom. They also highlighted the pitfalls of the dependency on corporate platforms such as Zoom or Google.

“To extend counterterrorism laws to pure speech and academic discourse would undermine all of our First Amendment rights to speech and association. Yet that is how Zoom, under pressure from the lobby groups, interpreted these laws. NYU’s faculty and its lawyers know better, and your letter should have said as much in response,” wrote the committee.

The letter released by the NYU Student Government addressed the Zoom Board of Directors on behalf of the student body, faculty and student groups and voiced concerns over the censoring of academic speech. It highlighted the fact that “Zoom is a product, not an academic or educational institution.”

“In times such as these, where all speech is conducted over such platforms, it becomes a violation of our freedom of speech to restrict what is allowed to be said — and more importantly who can be heard,” wrote John Jamil Kallas, Senator at Large for Middle Eastern and North African Students, who drafted the letter.

John Kallas spoke to The Gazelle about the letter and explained that, while the release of the letter was voted on in December, it was only released last week due to winter break.

“I feel like there is this double standard when it comes to … how many Zoom events have been posted with people all around the world who maybe have killed people or have committed acts of terrorism … but they are allowed on Zoom and it's not a problem,” explained Kallas.