Public Statements

Statement on ICE's Detention of Palestine Solidarity Activist Mahmoud Khalil

Drafted March 15, 2025. Approved April 7, 2025.

The Department of English condemns unequivocally the detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of recently graduated Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and the revocation by the State Department of his green card status on spurious grounds. In spring 2024, Khalil served as a leader and negotiator for the Columbia encampment in protest against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. In this exercise of his first amendment rights to freedom of expression, Khalil committed no crime and has been charged with none. Revocation of his status as a permanent resident thus constitutes exceptional targeting of a US person solely on the basis of his constitutionally protected speech. This targeting, which took place at his home on university property, follows a concerted and vicious campaign of defamation and doxxing by associates of Columbia University that explicitly labeled him a security threat and called for his deportation. Despite Khalil’s communication with Columbia authorities about this campaign, aimed at one of their own students, the university administration has done nothing to protect him and nothing to resist or repudiate his treatment at the hands of an increasingly authoritarian and politically motivated deployment of law enforcement by the current president.

This instance of naked repressive force intimately concerns all faculty and all our students and staff. Indeed, in the weeks since Khalil’s abduction, many others have been detained, abducted, and/or deported across the country for their support of Palestine and Palestinians and critiques of, and resistance to, Israeli Zionism: Romeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri, Leqaa Kordia, Momodou Taal, and Rasha Alawieh. We not only condemn the actions taken by ICE and the State Department; we also condemn the complicity of university administrations in this pattern of repression and targeting, going back to former President Shafik’s disgraceful capitulation to ignorance, bullying and political witch-hunting during US Senate hearings in April 2024, in which she gratuitously attacked a number of her own colleagues and violated their academic freedom, and to the termination of distinguished law professor Katherine Franke in January 2025. Columbia, however, is not alone in its complicity with repression. We equally condemn efforts on the part of the UC systemwide leadership and the Board of Regents, which preceded the Trump administration in its punitive efforts not only to subject students and faculty to police violence, arrest, and prosecution, but to move to suspend the norms and procedures of faculty governance, to institutionalize spurious definitions of antisemitism, and to curtail the traditions of freedom of expression and protest on our campuses.

The intellectual integrity and scholarly standards of any university can only thrive in an environment where academic freedom in research and in expression is respected and where freedom to inquire, to protest and to challenge the institution itself are vigorously maintained and protected against politically, religiously, or racially motivated censorship. We are deeply concerned that our university, and other universities nationwide, from Yale and Harvard to NYU and USC, are showing an all-too-ready willingness to comply with the forces of repression that have already shown scant regard for legal processes and institutional independence in every sphere of government and an open intent to suppress the freedom of the press, of assembly, and of expression. We urge our colleagues and our students to commit to refusing and resisting this complicity and to stand up for an open, critical, and democratic education for all.

DEIA Statement

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are reflexively represented in faculty research and pedagogical practice. They guide our collective sense of how best to serve diverse student potential and need, including the re-mapping of department requirements and course offerings. While typical departmental DEI statements narrowly focus on bodies and identities that tend to tokenize faculty and students of color, this department distinctively defines DEI as the impact that under-represented scholars and students and their histories and communities have on our conceptualization and practice of scholarly research, pedagogical innovation, and intellectual community.

In other words, our commitment to DEI fundamentally critiques tokenism, which itself often promulgates homophobia, ableism, sexism, and racism. Instead, we take on the much more complex challenge of embodying and encompassing the diversity of methodologies, curriculum, materials, histories, disciplines, and inter-disciplines, to create a vibrant department community.

The department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion includes epistemic diversity, equity, and inclusion, e.g., conceptual and not just numerical and taxonomic goals. The department provides a model for concretely centering and valuing devalued epistemologies.

In Memory: Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023), Professor of English at the Islamic University in Gaza

12/12/2023

The Department of English notes with sorrow the killing of our colleague Dr. Refaat Alareer, Professor of English at the Islamic University in Gaza, by an Israeli airstrike on December 7, 2023 that also killed his brother, sister, and four young nieces when their home was destroyed. Dr. Alareer was a teacher, a poet, and a mentor to numerous Gazan students who became writers, journalists, and poets with his encouragement and support. He was the editor of the 2014 anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, published by Just World Books, and a co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, a project launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack, to mentor and support young writers in the besieged territory to tell their stories to the world. During Israel’s current war on Gaza, he had already had to witness the deaths of three of his mentees and fellow writers: Huda al-Sousi, Raed Qaddoura and Mohammed Hamo. Anyone who heard his interviews on media outlets like Democracy Now or read his work in Electronic Intifada or The New York Times will have recognized his gentleness, his care, and his humor. He was a beloved teacher of Shakespeare and of World Literature, with a PhD on John Donne, whose impact on Palestinian nonviolent resistance was incalculable. Dr. Alareer was also convinced of the essential role that the teaching of English played in giving Gazans, locked for 16 years in the open-air prison imposed by Israel’s blockade, a means to communicate their perspective and their reality to the world at large. His loss to our profession and to the capacity to bear witness through journalism and literature is immeasurable.

Refaat Alareer is not the only academic or writer to have been killed in Israel’s two-month onslaught since October 7, whose seemingly indiscriminate onslaught has taken the lives of journalists, writers, medical personnel and scholars, including the President of Islamic University, Sufyan Tayeh, a leading researcher in physics and applied mathematics, killed along with his family in an Israeli airstrike on December 2. While it may seem misplaced to single out one individual among the already well over 18,000 Palestinians who have died in this latest Israeli war on Gaza, the untimely killing of so brilliant and exemplary a colleague cannot leave us untouched. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing seems bent on destroying not only Hamas, but Palestinian infrastructure, civil society, and its cultural institutions, and we can only add our voices to the widespread call across the United States and globally for an immediate, permanent, and unconditional ceasefire, the release of hostages and other political prisoners by both Israel and Hamas, and the pursuit of a meaningful political process that will ensure lasting peace and the realization of Palestine’s legitimate aspiration for self-determination and liberation.

This statement represents the personal views of the majority of members of the Department of English and not those of the University of California.

Anti-Harassment Statement

9/30/20

Dear English students,

As the Department Chair, I write in support of the UC Cops Off Campus Coalition’s day of statewide action on 10/1. In the wake of organizing for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), many of our Black, Brown, and Indigenous students have also faced the global health pandemic, ecological crisis, and the continued threat of racialized police violence. We must acknowledge that policing disproportionately violates Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, and poor peoples and immigrants and ultimately renders all members of the campus and its surrounding communities less safe. I am committed to a public university that advances racial justice by ending such forms of harm, and I support students working towards this vision.

The Department of English will not retaliate against undergraduate or graduate students who join the abolition events happening statewide on 10/1 or beyond for exercising their first amendment rights. Further, the department oppose(s) any threat of retaliation that may come from the administration, and stand beside our students in the struggle for racial justice and a more livable university environment for all.

I am disappointed that the university has not yet taken substantive action to provide alternatives to policing in the face of incontrovertible evidence regarding the racialized harm it perpetuates. I call on the UC Riverside administration to substantively respond to the calls for divestment from police and policing on our campus.

In solidarity,

David Lloyd
Chair of English

Statement of Solidarity by the English Department

June 2020

The English department joins in the grief and outrage expressed in this past week’s protests and mourns the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Nina Pop in Missouri, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Sean Reed in Indiana, Tony McDade in Florida from police brutality and antiblackness. That outrage is compounded by the crisis of systemic racism in health care, housing, and employment that has led to great disparities in the impact of COVID-19 that heavily impact Black communities.

UC Riverside and the University of California system, build its brand by acknowledging that our university occupies Indigenous land, advertising the diversity of our undergraduates, numbers of first-generation students, the percentage of students who qualify for public grants, and retention rates for Black students. We call on our leadership not to retreat from a direct engagement with the day-to-day realities of Black students, staff, and faculty. This hypocrisy hurts our community and undermines the university’s national reputation as an institution committed to justice.

We stand with the coalition of student organizations that issued a call-to-action to the campus community, and a series of demands to campus leadership. We add our voice to those of our students, in solidarity, to challenge our leadership to offer a meaningful response.

Letters to Students

These letters were written by English department faculty to their students at the end of spring quarter 2020. They are in random order and only one minor edit has been made. – Susan Zieger