This week, my colleagues at the Medill School of Journalism are returning to Northwestern University’s campuses in Chicago, Evanston, Qatar, and Washington to begin teaching and learning with our brilliant students for the fall term.
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While I am still being paid and continuing with my research projects, I will sadly not be returning to the classroom with them.
Is it because I haven’t prepared adequately? Nope. My scheduled fall classes, “Viruses and Viral Media” and “Reading and Reporting LGBTQ Health,” are very complicated and I had been planning them both for months. For the former, I had hired a grading assistant (a queer former student), and had planned lessons about the emerging and ongoing H1N1, mpox, Covid and HIV/AIDS pandemics. We were going to read Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention (winner of the 2023 Stonewall Book Award) and Victoria Law’s brilliant and just published Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration and we going to learn directly from the authors. For the latter class, I had planned eight field and lab research trips across Chicago. I was going to hire about eight guest speakers and tour guides this fall—most of whom were Northwestern alumni and people of color, and all who were LGBTQ journalists and scholars.
Is it because I failed to support my students? Hardly. I have won Northwestern’s Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award, and have helped place many of my students’ work in Chicago, national, and international publications. Indeed, when I passed my mid-tenure review with a glowing recommendation from my school’s tenure and promotion committee, Dean Charles Whittaker wrote that I “often go above and beyond the call of duty to help [students] realize their academic and professional goals.”
Is it because I have failed to meet my charge to create “journalism of impact”? Unlikely. In 2019, my story “H.I.V. is Coming to Rural America” was the most read story in the entire New York Times the day it was published and led to the Ford Foundation granting me a $75,000 Creativity and Free Expression award (for, among other things, the use social media as a teaching tool).
From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, my writing in Scientific American and in scholarly publications has been cited in governmental responses around the world and widely discussed in print, radio, academic venues and on TV. My debut book, The Viral Underclass, was widely praised. And just over the last few months, my writing has created impact in venues ranging from the New York Times paperback row to the United States House of Representatives to Hollywood (when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet took my book for a stroll and created a paparazzi frenzy everywhere from The Cut to the The Daily Mail). In fact, when my appointment as Daniel Renberg chair of social justice in reporting was voted on by Northwestern’s Board of Trustees on September 22, 2023 and renewed until 2028, Provost Kathleen Haggerty wrote that she was “delighted about this recognition of your standing in the profession. Congratulations!”
Many academics of color have to figure out how to be the first person like them in their job. But as the inaugural Renberg Chair—the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ people and research—I have also had to navigate a kind of job which literally no one has ever had before. And for years, my university has been openly proud of me—so much so that in the fall of 2022, it published a story mentioned on the cover of the official Northwestern magazine titled “Bearing Witness: Steven Thrasher has spent his career reporting on social justice. Why can’t he stop fighting?” (As the subtitle suggests, it is a very complimentary article and features positive images of protesters and a favorable framing of my methodology and pedagogy.)
But, while university administration had been supportive of me when I applied social justice journalism to race, LGBTQ identity, and infectious disease, it did not like when I began applying this same analytic to the genocide in Gaza and the obliteration of our journalism colleagues in Palestine, particularly after the House of Representative’s Committee on Education & the Workforce demanded that Northwestern take action against faculty who supported students in their protest.
In April, students on our campus set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. I spent five days talking with them, saying Passover prayers with them, learning from them and—most importantly when I saw Northwestern police getting ready to physically assault them—placing my body between them and the assailants. For this, I was beaten up by Northwestern cops, leaving me in physical pain for several weeks. Then, Northwestern’s President Schill was called to testify before the Committee on Education & the Workforce, where Representative Jim Banks referred to me as “one of the goons.”
The genocide in Gaza in general (and the war on its journalists specifically), along with the right of students to express themselves freely on university campuses, are some of the most pressing social justice matters of our time.
More than two months later (while I was out of the United States for the summer writing my new book, The Overseer Class), the Northwestern police filed criminal charges against me and three other people. (Of the four of us, all were outspoken and most were LGBTQ people.) The State of Illinois declined to prosecute, and when the criminal charges were dropped by the state, I found out that my fall classes were canceled and I was under investigation at Medill.
What’s happening is obvious: the House committee witch hunt is putting pressure on Northwestern to punish people, and they’ve decided I am one of the people to punish. I am an easy target because—like so many people who are being punished for supporting Palestine on campuses around the nation—I am Black, queer, and very loud.
But it’s also awkward for Northwestern because, well, my position is an endowed chair to focus on social justice in reporting—and the genocide in Gaza in general (and the war on its journalists specifically), along with the right of students to express themselves freely on university campuses, are some of the most pressing social justice matters of our time.
Shortly after October 7, when what was to come was obvious, I asked myself a question which Queen Esther is asked in the Old Testament of the Bible: “And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” At the time, I was teaching a class called “Sex and the American Empire: Journalism and Frames of War,” which has had Israel/Palestine in the syllabus for five years. We were scheduled to begin a three-week study of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent the week after October 7—and, being a journalism professor, I turned to the unfolding genocide in Gaza as the main news subject through which I discussed Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model of journalism. Complaints were made about my expression of that perspective in my class, and months later, after the congressional committee demanded a list of faculty under investigation, it occurred to the university that it could use that against me.
The charges I am now facing I think of as falling into three categories: “complaints” about me inside and outside the community, my “intemperate” use of social media, and the fact that I made a statement questioning the concept of “objectivity” in journalism.
I will deal with two of these three matters briefly now, and return to the third at the end of this essay. Regardless of what any professor thinks of me or Palestine, every professor should be outraged that random complaints from inside or even outside your community can circumvent established evaluation protocols and get you pulled out of the classroom without due process. In terms of my use of social media, citing it as a reason to pull me out of the classroom is a blatant attack on free speech—and an especially egregious one given how Northwestern magazine positively featured my social media use in 2022.
More important than the charges themselves is the need to call them out for the red herrings they are (not to mention they’re at odds with my official evaluations at Northwestern from September of last year).
A big weapon they’re depending upon is shame. They want to make dissidents feel ashamed. At universities around the country, administrators want us to feel guilt for having a conscience when they have none.
The charges against me (and, indeed, the repression on college campuses across America) are happening because of capitalism. Universities are dependent upon private donors and federal funding, both of which have a vested interest in waging a genocide on behalf of weapons manufactures. And so, acting like a colonial power, donors and feds are operationalizing university administrators to behave like field generals tasked with squashing dissent among the local populations—starting, naturally, with the loudest students, staff and faculty.
A big weapon they’re depending upon is shame. They want to make dissidents feel ashamed. At universities around the country, administrators want us to feel guilt for having a conscience when they have none. But, as my friend Kia says, a person like that cannot make a person like you feel shame. And while I still hold the Renberg Chair, I want to quote two gay icons in this matter: Zora Neale Hurston (“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it”) and Blanche Devereaux, when she bought condoms with Rose and Dorothy: “We’re not embarrassed, we’re not uncomfortable, we are not humiliated. We’re gonna walk outta here today with our heads held high, secure in the knowledge that what we have done is morally and socially responsible.”)
And so, even though I am not teaching in the classroom this fall, I will continue to teach in other ways, and I will say:
I am not embarrassed, I am not uncomfortable, I am not humiliated. I am gonna walk outta here with my head held high, secure in the knowledge that what I have done is morally and socially responsible.
I will not be ashamed for protecting students.
I will not be ashamed for teaching my students about sex, empire, pinkwashing, and being against faux-objectivity and for a critical, rigorous interrogation of positionality.
I will not be ashamed for having, as one friend kindly put it, “a big, warm heart” and for encouraging students to bring their hearts and minds to their work.
I will not be ashamed for centering the work of Palestinian journalists over the last year (who, by the way, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize), nor will I be ashamed of trying to do what little I can to keep them from being killed.
No university administrator can make me feel shame because I answer to a higher authority. (No one can make you feel shame, either.)
They can’t even keep me from teaching.
While I deserve to return to the classroom, and I hope that I do, perhaps the main lesson I needed to teach at Northwestern was the one I taught when I stepped in front of our students in April. Maybe the most important lesson I needed to teach myself, our students, and anyone else watching is that—as University of Chicago PhD student Christopher Lacovetti put it—“There are things that matter more than my academic future. Certainly every one of those children that is being murdered, starved, maimed, whose parents are having to choose (which child to starve first)” are more important than my career. So is trying to protect the safety of students and the lives of our colleagues.
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As college campuses are turned into proxy battlefields for American imperialism, the first casualties are usually not university administrators or white, tenured professors but students, staff and untenured LGBTQ professors of color (especially, despite our numbers, Black professors of queer studies).
Lacking even the nominal protections to speech which professors may claim, the risk and harm staff are enduring is underreported and severe. When Northwestern president Michael Schill appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, he said staff at our university had already been fired.
One of my brave colleagues, librarian Josh Honn, is also under disciplinary investigation. When the police moved in on our students last April, Josh linked arms with other faculty, staff, grad students and me to protect them. Months later, on June 7, the House committee Chairwoman Virgina Foxx demanded a “list of all faculty and staff disciplinary/conduct cases relating to alleged antisemitic incidents at Northwestern since October 7, 2023, showing the date, incident, case status, entity responsible for reviewing the case, status of the alleged perpetrator (normal status, suspended, terminated, etc.), and case outcome.”
On August 8, Josh was notified that he would be required to participate in an “investigative discussion regarding the events that occurred on Deering Meadow the morning of April 25th,” which elaborate that the “Library’s leadership team has been presented with information that raises concerns about potential violation of Northwestern’s Demonstration Policy.”
For using his own body to absorb the blows university employees tried to inflict on undergrads, he is being punished.
Both Josh’s case, and mine, came months after the events on Deering Meadow (but not so long after Foxx’s letter.) Again, all of this is a red herring: other than people like Josh and me (who peacefully took the cops’ blows), no one was hurt. No one was even arrested. As a librarian who specializes in the research needs of Northwestern’s English, Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, Theatre and Prison Education programs, Josh is known for caring for students and helping them in any way he can (and is beloved by my students at Medill).
And for using his own body to absorb the blows university employees tried to inflict on undergrads, he is being punished. I am aware of other staff, on my campus and around the country, who are being terrorized with threats of punishment.
And when it comes to faculty, who have more speech protections (at least in theory), it is curious to look around and see how many look like me. Despite there being a dearth of Black professors who teach queer studies on university campuses, there sure were a lot of us getting beaten up at student encampments by cops on the news. Whether it was Black Disability Politics authors Sami Schalk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, African American and queer studies professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard at the University of California Irvine, or me, it is amazing how few Black queer professors there are in academia and yet, paradoxically, how many of us are showing up to protect our students and then being singled out for the most violent, racist punishment of anyone.
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Returning to the third red herring, as to whether or not I have been suspended: Medill Dean Charles Whittaker has written to me that my “statements about the standards of journalism—are antithetical to our profession and values as a University, including but not limited to your declaration in Deering Meadow that you do not teach your students to be ‘objective.’” He wrote that a speech I gave called “Our Work is Love” “reads like a rejection of the standards of fairness and balance” and said that I held “an untenable position for a member of this faculty.”
But what, exactly, did I say that was so egregious about objectivity that one dean should be able to circumvent our tenure and promotion committee (not to mention his own words from a few months before) to such an extent that I have an “untenable position” on Medill’s faculty? This is what I said:
I teach in the Medill School of journalism and I work in the Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing—and one of the people I look up to most in the world is trans journalist Lewis Wallce, who sacrificed a great deal out of love for his fellow humans. In his book The View From Somewhere, he lays out how there are two major schools of journalism—extractive journalism, where journalists take something from people (in a model similar to colonialism), and relational journalism, where journalists are in relationship with the communities and people they are writing about.
I teach my students relational journalism. But one of the many lessons Palestinian journalists have taught me—at great sacrifice—is that journalism can be an act of love. They have elevated beyond belief what relational journalism can, and should, be.
As you may know, 143 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far in the genocide. The last two, Ibrahim Al-Gharbawi and Ayman Gherbawi, were killed just yesterday. The journalists who are surviving and still reporting are not just doing so in the face of imminent death at any time while vowing to keep reporting until their last breath; they are doing so while practicing journalism as a form of love. They are treating journalism as a public good and as a shared responsibility—one which is not about who “scoops” whom, but one in which they all work together to bring the world the news as a story of their people collectively.
In December, on a day when Khan Younis was under attack and “only”—I am using scare quotes—about 80 journalists had been killed, journalist Ahmed El-Madhoun posted a video, depicting a group of men and women sharing laughs and a simple meal, writing “Today, we got our lunch late, but together. A group of brave journalists decided to stay in Khan Yunis and cover what’s happening here despite the intense shelling. All of us, hand in hand.”
All of us, hand in hand.
Madhoun and his colleagues, such as Hossan Shabat (who is 21 and should be a junior in college like many of you) are changing the game of journalism. Neither of them are “objective.” But this is one of the many gifts Palestinian journalists, at great personal sacrifice, are giving to the world: they are giving us a chance to view the role of the journalist in fundamentally different ways, including to see how interdependence might be a better way to approach our craft than the myth of independence. If the purpose of journalists is to get “news people can use” to the public to make a better world, that is a shared responsibility, and a goal we can work towards together without competing against each other. Madhoun, Shabbat and their colleagues report, with great heart and intellect and integrity, on the genocide around them. But they also feed the people around them. They feed one another. They tend to the tears of the crying children. They jump in as medics for the wounded. They sweep the floors of hospitals and dig through the rubble. They seem to understand that if you want to be a journalist, you need access to clean water, food, shelter—and a freedom from violence.
They are not objective. But why is the U.S. press corps objective as they prepare, this very evening, to yuk it up with Genocide Joe Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—after he killed 143 of our colleagues? Why is not caring about the mass murder of tens of thousands and the famine of millions “objective?” At last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, Genocide Joe gave an impassioned speech about a single Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, who was detained in Russia and who is, unfortunately, still detained there —and Britany Griner, who had just been released from Russia. If Biden could devote much of his 2023 speech to Gershkovich and Griner, but fails to talk about the 143 journalists his bombs have killed tonight, and the press corps just eats their rubber chicken and says nothing about murdering our colleagues—why is that “objective”?
To the Medill students and journalists within ear shot, I say to you: our work is not about objectivity. Our work is not about “scooping” one another. Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work, and opening your compassionate hearts, and linking your arms together understanding all of our fates are interconnected.
Our work is love.
One of the most fulfilling journalism jobs I ever had was working at NPR’s StoryCorps project, whose motto was “Listening is an act of love.”
So now, as a journalism professor, the “untenable position” I hold which makes it impossible for me to remain “a member of this faculty” as a professor of social justice in reporting is that I am questioning the faux-notion of objectivity of the White House Correspondents Dinner (an event even the New York Times does not allow its journalists to attend because it is too subjective)? Untenable because I am thinking about journalism as a “public good and as a shared responsibility” and—yes, as I did when I worked at NPR—as an act of love?
My position is “antithetical to our profession” when I am thinking about cooperation between (instead of competition among) journalists? And while I am trying to teach about and learn from Palestinian journalists who have given their lives to our profession—and who just won our profession’s highest American honor, the Pulitzer Prize?
This is awkward, but not for me. In the way the double negative of being anti-antifascist (or anti-antifascist) means someone is pro-fascist, Dean Whittaker’s charge here means he is not just against the aspects of journalism which the Pulitzer Prize committee values, but against love as a part of our practice.
I know Dean Whittaker has read the work of one of America’s great philosophers of love, Martin Luther King: he hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning King: A Life biographer (and Medill alum) Jonathan Eig just a few months ago. So as I apply for tenure this fall, as planned, while being kept out of the classroom, and as I am praying for the safety of student protesters on my campus and across the country, I am keeping in mind these powerful words MLK said in his final public speech, the night before he was killed in Memphis:
Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around! We are going on.
King was arrested 29 times in his life.
To my students at Medill, I want to say: I may not be teaching in the classroom this fall because I stood with many of you, in King’s tradition, for peace—but I will continue to teach. To meditate on King from that same speech, “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
