In a move that activists are saying is an attempt to quell the passionate student and worker movement for Palestinian liberation within the City University of New York (CUNY), student organizer Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik has been suspended for a year. While she is suspended from CCNY, she is not permitted to enroll in any other CUNY college.
Malik is a courageous organizer and leader of CCNY’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. She has become a public face of the student movement for Palestine in New York City and across the nation since the movement accelerated worldwide to end Israel’s escalated genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
While Malik has been organizing for her university to divest students’ tuition dollars from companies that fuel Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Israel has destroyed every single university in Gaza. In the Fall, had Malik not received an academic sanction, she would have been entering her fourth and final year at CCNY.
Along with CCNY’s academic sanction case against Malik, CUNY has also fired four faculty members, including Corinna Mullin. Mullin held teaching positions at CUNY as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Mullin told Mondoweiss,
Because of our weak contractual protections, adjuncts are some of the most vulnerable among CUNY workers, as demonstrated by the fact at least four adjunct faculty members have recently had their employment terminated by CUNY in apparent retaliation for protected speech against genocide and in violation of the principles of academic freedom.
To address repression at CUNY, CUNY4Palestine held a press conference on Tuesday, July 8, in front of CUNY’s Central Administration building. In front of the midtown office, speakers and supporters holding banners that read “CUNY4PALESTINE,” “NO SCHOOLS LEFT IN GAZA,” and “SUPPORT THE 5 DEMANDS” chanted for their universities to divest from the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine.
In an email blast sent before the press conference, CUNY4Palestine shared that the event would focus on “The especially punitive charges against Hadeeqa [that] suggest she is being made an example to intimidate the growing movement in solidarity with Palestine liberation. If CUNY succeeds, it will set an awful precedent for public universities across the country to escalate this new stage of state repression.”
In the middle of June, Malik was notified of her suspension in a letter signed by CCNY’s Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Ramón De Los Santos. During Malik’s speech at the press conference, which was chanted via “the people’s mic,” a familiar call-and-response tactic used by protest organizers, Malik shared CUNY’s justification for suspending her.
“I was suspended… for allegedly violating the CUNY Henderson Rules number one and seven and CCNY demonstration policies one and two.” The Henderson Rules were created by CUNY as a reactionary model to suppress student organizing after Black and Puerto Rican CCNY students liberated the college’s south campus in 1969. Their occupation lasted seventeen days and successfully shut down the college’s daily functions.
Malik told Mondoweiss that the exact terms of her academic sanction are “A one-year suspension from every single one of the 25 CUNY campuses, a bar from each campus until the suspension is over, as well as probation from campus activities and extracurriculars once the suspension is lifted.”
Malik has been a member of the CCNY SJP board since January 2023. If she returns to CCNY in the Fall 2026 academic semester, she will not be permitted to return to her college community. Given that the terms of her sanction will continue to ban her from both the SJP board and membership in the Muslim Student Association and Women in Islam club.
A further condition of Malik’s academic sanction is that her presence on all 25 CUNY campuses would leave her subject to prosecution for trespassing until her suspension terminates in one year. This condition will force Malik to obtain written permission from the CUNY campuses office of Student Affairs no less than 72 hours before she wishes to enter a piece of property that mixes a public and private legal designation.
CUNY’s repression against Malik and Mullin represents a new wave of academic freedom and free speech violations, characteristic of the second Trump Administration. By terminating Mullin’s adjunct professorship, CUNY administrators have managed to violate their own policies on freedom of expression. Professional Staff Congress/City University of New York (PSC CUNY) President James Davis addressed concerns about the recent violations of academic freedom and retaliation against CUNY faculty members for constitutionally protected speech in a letter addressed to Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez. “The university’s Manual of General Policy Article 1.02 states, ‘The City University of New York should remain a forum for the advocacy of all ideas protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution and the principles of academic freedom.’” Malik’s suspension and Mullin’s termination are a blatant contradiction to Article 1.02 in the university’s Manual of General Policy.
Mullin is an organizer within CUNY4Palestine, the collective Palestinian liberation organizing body within CUNY. CUNY4Palestine comprises membership from all CUNY SJP chapter boards and faculty members across the urban university system. Mullin’s background includes a lectureship in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her activism and academic concentration lend to the incorporation of Palestinian history and politics in her university classrooms.
Mullin told Mondoweiss, “Over the past several years, there has been a pattern of external Zionist, far-right organizations like Camera, Betar, and Canary Mission targeting me and other CUNY workers and students for organizing in solidarity with Palestine.” Instead of protecting Mullin, CUNY has been beside right-wing organizations targeting her and other faculty members.
CUNY has used adjunct professors’ weak contractual protection to justify their termination. “Rather than defend us from harassment and doxxing, the university has consistently contributed to our targeting.” Each faculty member fired by CUNY has been proudly outspoken within their positions in the university against the genocide in Gaza. Therefore, Mullin continues,
PSC president James Davis has described these ‘apparent violations of academic freedom and retaliation against CUNY faculty members for constitutionally protected speech, exposing that this situation has all the appearances of an ideological purge’ reminiscent of the McCarthyite era.
CUNY administrators’ tactic to silence the student and worker movement for Palestine seems to be to pick off organizers one by one. Malik told Mondoweiss,
My case is not happening in isolation. It’s important for us to all recognize that this is all a part of CUNY’s broader strategy to silence the movement for Palestine, whether it be suspending students, brutalizing CUNY workers and students who are protesting on our campuses, or firing our workers who have expressed support for Palestine.
Mullin shared the same sentiment,
In addition to Hadeeqa, several other CUNY undergraduate students have also been hit with disciplinary charges for protected speech in connection with protests for Palestine liberation.
CUNY’s new stage of repression against the student and worker movement for disclosure and divestment from companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine came not even a month before Chancellor Matos Rodríguez was set to testify to the House Committee on Education and Workforce’s Hearing on “Antisemitism in Higher Education” on July 9, which has since been postponed. Chancellor Matos Rodríguez was preparing to scapegoat Malik, Mullin, and the other adjunct professors whose teaching positions were terminated when presenting to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education & Workforce.
Billie Estrine is a politics and culture journalist passionate about the intersection of the arts and politics. She has a diverse background, with news articles focused on the student movement for Palestinian liberation in the United States and a self-published book on how the Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, underground punk scenes grapple with political and social issues through their music and community. Currently, they are an Editorial Intern with The Skinny, an independent culture magazine based in Edinburgh, Scotland.