I am the only Palestinian professor on my campus. Since the genocide began I have walked through hallways where colleagues greet me with the same casual “Good morning” they offered before the genocide began. They discuss weekend plans and complain about grading while I carry images of my friend’s neighborhood in Gaza reduced to rubble, while I read goodbye messages from loved ones who may not survive the night, while I watch universities like mine, places where students once debated literature and dreamed of medical careers, systematically destroyed.
In nearly two years of genocide, exactly one colleague has asked how I’m doing.
What are my other colleagues refusing to see? The magnitude of these atrocities defies comprehension: over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, 18,000 of them children. To put this in perspective: more children have died in Gaza than in every modern conflict combined. About 10 children per day lose limbs, the entire population is starved, and newborns are denied baby formula. Starving civilians are gunned down as they run toward airdropped aid packages, a level of cruelty that seems scripted for a horror film. 250 journalists have been directly targeted and murdered while wearing press vests, Israel does not allow any international journalists inside to report. Entire bloodlines have been erased. Hospitals have become graveyards, schools have become shelters, and then both have become targets. This is just the physical destruction, to say nothing of the psychological and emotional trauma inflicted on an entire population.
I naively thought that as the violence escalated, as the asymmetry became undeniable, as student protests across America were met with police batons, my colleagues would finally see. That someone, anyone, would recognize what was happening and reach out.
They didn’t. The reason became clear.
This isn’t about ignorance or individual callousness, although those aspects clearly exist. This is about institutional design. Universities have created systems where Palestinian solidarity threatens careers while other forms of solidarity advance them.
The Career Mathematics of Selective Empathy
When a perhaps well-meaning colleague invited me to an interfaith event to discuss “the situation in the Middle East,” I explained that Palestinians were experiencing tremendous pain. Her response: “Israelis are experiencing pain as well.” I was taken aback, what so many saw as obvious genocide, she framed as symmetrical pain, as though there was somehow parity between the victims of genocide and those committing it.
This same colleague organizes support for other marginalized communities. She coordinates emergency faculty meetings when other groups face violence. She understands trauma and knows how to offer solidarity, because the university has taught her that this solidarity is professionally safe, even rewarded. The institution rewards supporting certain marginalized groups as proof of progressive values and good citizenship in diversity and inclusion efforts. Palestinian solidarity offers no such benefits. This colleague is generally a nice person, and I want to believe her response to Palestinian pain stems from institutional conditioning rather than personal callousness. But the university has made such responses professionally safe whether they stem from conditioning, racism, or simple indifference.
This isn’t accidental, it flows from institutional design. The university maintains investments in weapons manufacturers. It partners with Israeli institutions, universities that operate within and legitimize an apartheid system. These aren’t coincidental business decisions; universities know that challenging Israeli policy risks federal funding cuts and donor backlash. Faculty quickly absorb that Palestinian solidarity brings consequences, not rewards.
When Palestinian and Muslim students tried to hold events on campus approved for other groups, the university created new policies to ban such events. When Palestinian flags appear, flag displays are swiftly banned campus-wide. These aren’t isolated incidents, they’re institutional lessons in what solidarity the university will not tolerate.
The university’s institutional design conditions colleagues not to ask how I’m doing. Asking would require seeing, and the system has structured their professional survival around not seeing Palestinian humanity. The university has created conditions where that choice becomes predictable.
This isn’t unconscious bias or cultural incompetence. This is the university successfully conditioning faculty, the institution has taught them exactly which causes advance careers and which end them.
The System Working Perfectly
Universities create conditions where certain forms of solidarity advance careers while Palestinian solidarity destroys them. Faculty aren’t failing when they stay silent about Palestine, they’re succeeding at navigating an institutional system designed to punish Palestinian solidarity.
Students observe this institutional conditioning, and many reject it entirely. While faculty have learned to stay silent to protect their careers, students risk their academic futures to protest for Palestinian rights. They face mass arrests, academic suspension, and police violence while their professors watch from office windows. The contrast is stark: students with everything to lose choose conscience, while faculty with tenure and job security often choose silence. The university’s brutal response to student protests, riot police, expulsions, criminal charges, serves as a warning to faculty about what happens when someone refuses to be conditioned.
The university’s violent crackdown on student protesters reveals exactly how the system maintains faculty silence. This demonstrates the university’s method: brutal consequences for some create compliant silence from others. The university has engineered conditions where Palestinian elimination must remain invisible for careers to advance. This is an inherent part of the institutional design. Faculty who challenge this face professional destruction while those who maintain silence are rewarded with tenure, promotions, and administrative positions.
The system works exactly as intended. My colleagues aren’t broken professionals who need better training in empathy, they’re successfully navigating an institutional structure that has made Palestinian humanity a career liability. The university has trained them well.
As the only Palestinian professor on campus, I represent what the system cannot tolerate: visible Palestinian pain that demands acknowledgment. The university has calculated the cost of my humanity, and found it too expensive.
The author is a Palestinian American professor at a major American university. Their name has been withheld to protect them from institutional retaliation.
Also from Karen: When a Palestinian speaker gave a talk this week in my synagogue in Eugene, Oregon, my fellow Jews overwhelming responded just as this author writes – with continual deflection and false equivalences, “as though there was somehow parity between the victims of genocide and those committing it.” We have to do better.
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This exchange had me cackling..
Thank you for using your platform in a way that centers humanity in these dystopian times. Your courage is moving and inspiring.
Just this week, my institution forced two professors to remove “Free Palestine” stickers from their office doors. This is at a department of social work, which purports to advance social justice and uplift marginalized communities.
The complicity of our academic institutions will be shamefully studied in future generations.
That is utterly disillusioning. I am so sorry.
Thank you for sharing this guest post. I appreciate getting these honest reflections and cries of the heart from those suffering in our academic communities.