AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined with Juan González in Chicago.

As students return to school for the fall, we spend the rest of the hour looking at how university administrators continue to crack down on Gaza solidarity student protests and professors. An op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education called it a, quote, “assault on the truth.”

We begin with a guest who last joined us in May after he was attacked by name during a congressional hearing about pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. As Republican Congressmember Jim Banks grilled Northwestern University President Michael Schill, he singled out Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher, who had been to the Gaza solidarity encampments at Northwestern in Chicago and other schools as a professor and as a journalist.

REP. JIM BANKS: Steven Thrasher, who’s one of the goons in the photo behind me, he’s a professor of journalism at Northwestern. He and several of your faculty members locked arms. They scuffled with police officers, blocked the police officers on your campus from doing their job. Do they continue to teach students at Northwestern University after this embarrassing incident?

MICHAEL SCHILL: So, I will not comment on individual faculty members, nor on matters —

REP. JIM BANKS: President, is it — is it your decision, your decision alone, to allow those professors to continue to teach students on your campus?

MICHAEL SCHILL: We believe in due process at the — at Northwestern University.

REP. JIM BANKS: You believe in due process except for —

MICHAEL SCHILL: We will follow —

REP. JIM BANKS: — the decision that you made about Coach Fitzgerald.

MICHAEL SCHILL: We followed the contract. That was —

REP. JIM BANKS: Had your cake and eat it, too.

MICHAEL SCHILL: — due process. We had an investigation. But I don’t — I’m not going to go on and on about that.

AMY GOODMAN: After this congressional hearing, Northwestern filed charges against professor Steven Thrasher for allegedly obstructing police at the encampment, which Cook County prosecutors dropped. Since then, Professor Thrasher has continued to speak out. But students at Northwestern will not see him in their classrooms as they return to campus, because he has been suspended with pay as Northwestern says he’s under investigation. He’s joining us today in New York to publicly speak about this for the first time.

Steven Thrasher is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. His forthcoming book is called The Overseer Class: Representation as Repression. He is at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, chair of social justice in reporting.

Professor Thrasher, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you explain in your own words what has happened to you since the Gaza protests?

STEVEN THRASHER: Thanks for having me, Amy.

So, at the Gaza encampment, as you saw in the video, I was one of a number of professors and graduate students who surrounded our students to try to make sure that nobody hurt them. The day before, there had been horrific violence at several other universities where we had seen that students had been brutally hurt by university police.

And I was on Democracy Now! and did some therapy and thought things were kind of going OK by the time that I finished the school year and planned to go offline for the summer to work on my next book. I was out of the country for the whole summer. And actually, the day that I had left the United States and landed in Europe, I found out that the Northwestern police wanted to talk to me, and eventually found out that I was one of four people that they’re pressing charges against. Now, it was really disturbing. This was many months after the fact. Like many other situations on other campuses, most of the four of — all four of us had been very outspoken, who are being charged, and most of us were LGBTQ people. And we found out that they are pressing these charges. And the state of Illinois had thrown out all kinds of other cases. They threw out our case, as well.

But the day that I found out that the state of Illinois was throwing out the charges, I also found out that my fall classes had been canceled and that I was not going to be allowed to teach in the fall pending an investigation. So, this was, of course, very upsetting, particularly — and this is something I’m hoping that Professor Franke might speak about, as well — particularly because my classes were very LGBTQ classes. I’m the Daniel Renberg chair of social justice in reporting with a focus on the LGBTQ community. And I also was teaching a class on LGBTQ recording methods and viruses and viral media. So, my classes were canceled. I’m the only person who teaches LGBTQ classes. I had to let eight different people know, who I had contracted to be a grading assistant, to come in as guest speakers, to do tours, who were all LGBTQ journalists and alum. I had to let them know that they wouldn’t be working, as well. And, of course, it was a huge disappointment to our LGBTQ students.

It was really odd to hear President Schill talk about due process, because I have received no due process in being taken out of the classes. I’m still being paid, but I did not get the fair due process. I was told that I would not be allowed until investigations into complaints against me, to intemperate social media usage, and into my beliefs around objectivity in journalism had been investigated.

And this is all very strange, because I’m going through the tenure process. My mid-tenure review had just been done last year. Like all faculty, it was put off for a year because of COVID, on my timeline. But I got a glowing mid-tenure review. And my endowed chair, the Daniel Renberg chair of social justice in reporting, had just been renewed in October. The university has praised and done a lot of PR about the work that I do around objectivity in journalism and social justice journalism. They put me on the cover of the alumni magazine just the year before.

What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine. And so, they don’t like that. And that the Congress is putting pressure on them to put pressure on me, they’re aiding that.

So, it’s a really, really dangerous and sad situation. I’ll be fine personally no matter what happens, but the idea that a social justice journalism professorship cannot talk about one of the most important social justice measures — issues of our time, the genocide in Gaza, that a journalism professor can’t talk about a issue and a situation where 171 of our colleagues have been murdered, journalists in Gaza, that we can’t talk about these things, that we can’t take a stand for free expression and the safety of our students on campus as they’re becoming more militarized, all of this is, of course, extremely upsetting.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve Thrasher, what are the specific charges against you? And also, what has been the reaction of your fellow faculty members?

STEVEN THRASHER: I really haven’t talked — I mean, this is the first time that I’m really talking about it publicly. I made a commitment to myself that I would finish my next book and not get derailed from that. And I finished it on Tuesday, so now I’m talking to you on Thursday.

I don’t want to get too much into the specifics, but one of them is called “complaints against you.” This is a very vague thing that’s come up all over the country, that they’ll say that there are complaints. And the complaints, which I’ve seen, which there’s no merit to, those complaints are very much at odds with what was written up for me in my mid-tenure review, in which my mid-tenure review, Dean Whitaker wrote that I go above and beyond the call for my students. And my endowed chair, which was also renewed, I got very specific praise about being a leader in the field of journalism education. And I’ve received awards for my mentorship of Northwestern students. So, none of that really bears much on the complaints.

Also, I was told about my use of social media, which is something that I have done, with a lot of passion at times, but with part of my journalism practice, to speak about issues that are important to me. And in the Northwestern University magazine article that was about me when my book came out, they actually highlighted, in a very positive way, the way that I use social media. Again, I don’t think they like me using the tools that I’ve used to talk about HIV, LGBTQ issues and race issues to be applying it towards Gaza, because all of the complaints about my social media are about interactions that I’ve had with people about Palestine.

And the third one is an incredibly ridiculous thing to be complaining about. It’s about my commitment to the idea of objectivity in journalism. And this is something I’ve talked about on Democracy Now! before. It was part of what my application and my job talk when I was hired as the Daniel Renberg chair of social justice in reporting, and it’s been a cornerstone of the books I teach, like Lewis Wallace’s The View from Somewhere, guests I’ve brought onto campus.

Part of my practice is that I don’t believe in the idea of faux objectivity in journalism. I do believe in rigor and putting a lot of effort into your work, and that viewers, listeners and readers have a right to know the positionality of the person reporting the news to them, because that gives them a frame of reference for how they can think about it critically. But this idea that somehow I am not objective enough, when my job is focusing on social justice in journalism and LGBTQ issues, and when I had just been very glowingly reappointed for doing my job and that the university has very much embraced my book and many of the articles I’ve written that come from a position of social justice, is really a ridiculous thing. The field of journalism education, like all academic disciplines, has ways that people argue about the central tenets of that discipline. One of them is objectivity. People have different feelings about it. I’ve made mine clear. But this is not something that should be, you know, any way disqualifying for someone who has a professorship that is focused on social justice issues.

AMY GOODMAN: And before we turn to another professor, this one at Columbia University School of Law in New York, Steven Thrasher, your message to the returning academic community, to professors and students alike?

STEVEN THRASHER: My message is we have nothing to be ashamed of. We have nothing to be afraid of. We are doing something that is very important.

And back in October — I’m not yet tenured. I’m filing for tenure, and I plan to file for tenure on schedule this fall, because I think that my record deserves to let me have that hearing. But back in October, after everything started getting really, really bad in Gaza, I made a video asking, you know, “Should untenured professors like myself talk about this?” And I said, “Absolutely,” because it’s a moral issue. If you become tenured trying to stay silent through this stuff, you’ll become the kind of professor you don’t want to be.

And even though I have been — I have been physically beaten up by the police of my university, I’ve been interrogated in front of Congress, I’ve been threatened with jail, and now I am suspended with pay and not allowed to teach, this is the work that we need to do in these very difficult moments. This is a genocide. This is something that is having an enormous impact not just on many of us in the United States, but on 600,000 students who have lost their ability to get to school in Gaza, on 14,000 children who have been killed in Gaza.

And so, what we have to do as educators is teach. And even if I don’t — I hope I go back into the classroom at Northwestern, but even if I don’t, maybe the teaching that I have to do is what I’m doing right now. Maybe all of us as educators right now, the most important teaching we can do is to teach our students that there are things that are morally important that we have to speak about, and that we have to show our students that they are worth taking the consequences. But, ultimately, we are going to be OK, because what we are doing is something that is righteous.

AMY GOODMAN: Steven Thrasher is chair of social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago, author of The Viral Underclass.

Next up, we’ll be joined by Columbia University professor Katherine Franke, now under investigation after an interview she did on Democracy Now! Stay with us.