The decision by the provost and president to cancel the lecture by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is an astonishing violation of academic freedom at Wake Forest. The lecture was initiated and organized by members of the Humanities Institute faculty seminar on Genocide and Memory Studies, including faculty with expertise on the topic from four different departments. Faculty seminars convene to conduct interdisciplinary research on a selected topic, and seminars in their second year — as this one is — typically direct inquiry toward urgent academic, social and moral problems.  

Inviting a leading, if controversial, scholar to engage in the Genocide and Memory Studies seminar is appropriate to the seminar’s aim of creating new knowledge. The seminar is co-led by our university’s leading historian of the Holocaust Dr. Barry Trachtenberg and by a renowned scholar of public history Dr. Lisa Blee. The seminar and the speaker event was vetted and approved by faculty committees and department heads. In other words, the seminar and the speaker event exemplify faculty governance and peer-reviewed academic excellence.

The accusations about Abdulhadi are easily dispatched. Following the links in the letter published in OGB, for instance, simply takes readers to other websites that make the same accusations, with little attempt to substantiate or contextualize them. Meanwhile, our provost and president accept the accusations and lean into the tautology of cancel culture. 

We call her a terrorist sympathizer therefore we are terrorized; we claim we may be physically harmed therefore we are not safe.  

That logic is replicated in the provost’s and president’s claim that the event will be “inherently contentious” and that it will “stoke division.”  In truth, the fundamental division that is stoked — and the one every academic at Wake Forest should be concerned about — is between freedom of academic inquiry and expression on the one hand and administrative capitulation to smear campaigns on the other hand. 

It’s a dangerous precedent. Indeed, in over 20 years of teaching at Wake Forest I’ve never seen anything like it, and I call on our administration to publicly explain the process by which they chose to block the scholarly work of our faculty.

Sincerely,
Dr. Dean Franco