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The guest speaker event with Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, was scheduled to take place March 27 before the talk was canceled.
A non-profit civil liberties group sent a harsh letter to administrators at Northeastern University after the university allegedly required a student group to provide a list of attendees for a guest speaker event.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sent the letter to administrators April 25 alleging that the university infringed upon students’ expressive rights and urged the university to “recommit to upholding these rights.”
“Under the restriction, students could not attend the controversial event without facing official surveillance — creating an impermissible chilling effect,” FIRE Program Officer Aaron Corpora wrote in the letter. “If Northeastern is to live up to its free speech promises, it must commit to no longer require attendance lists for expressive events.”
On March 7, the Northeastern University School of Law’s Jewish Law Students Advocating for Justice (JLAJ) announced a March 27 guest speaker event with Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University. The event was scheduled to take place the week before Northeastern’s Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week.
Segal was going to talk about “the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the weaponization of the Holocaust, and the future of Genocide studies,” the JLAJ wrote on Instagram. The JLAJ asked attendees to register ahead of time using a QR code on the post or a link in the group’s Instagram bio, according to the post.
On March 26, the day before the event was supposed to be held, JLAJ announced that the event was canceled because the university had demanded a list of students attending.
“Northeastern would only let us have our event with Raz Segal if we gave them a list of students attending, which would be handed to campus police,” the JLAJ wrote on Instagram. “Because we refused to put our classmates in harm’s way, the event has been cancelled.”
Segal stated that he “would not speak at Northeastern University under these conditions” and asked the group not to hand over a list of names, according to FIRE.
On April 9, the JLAJ posted a statement about the event’s cancellation on Instagram. The group asserted that they were targeted by the university for their anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian stance.
“This event was run by a Jewish student organization, involved Jewish faculty, and featured a prominent Jewish speaker,” the group wrote. “Yet, since we planned to speak out against the weaponization of the Holocaust — the genocide of our ancestors — as a justification for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, it was too ‘controversial’ to allow without collecting the names of all attendees. In doing so, Northeastern labels our own identities, as anti-Zionist Jews, controversial.”
The group stated that the university’s “late and inadequate response” to the detainments of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and the “forcible cleaning” of an on-campus encampment last April demonstrate that the university “does not have respect” for the Palestinian people or students who support Palestinian liberation.
“A student group in Northeastern’s law school organized an event and invited a speaker without going through the proper university protocols,” Renata Nyul, Northeastern’s vice president for communications, wrote in a statement to Boston.com. “Student Life staff worked with the group to make the event possible by putting the appropriate registration and safety procedures in place. A couple of days before the event was to take place, the student group canceled the event. It is longstanding practice for Northeastern’s Student Life staff to require pre-event registration.”
Northeastern did not require students to register for the university’s Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week events, according to The Huntington News, the university’s independent student newspaper.
Associate Dean for Belonging and Student Affairs Kiana Pierre-Louis and Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs Hemanth Gundavaram, who are both addressed in FIRE’s letter, signed off on the event and “were in communication with Student Life, NUPD, and other parts of the central administration,” the News reported.
The letter also addressed Nyul and James R. Hackney, dean of the Northeastern University School of Law. It acknowledged that Northeastern is a private institution but stated that it had “independently committed to upholding students’ expressive freedoms,” citing the university’s student handbook.
“That commitment to free expression — and a reasonable student’s interpretation of that commitment — is informed by decades of jurisprudence defining the scope of the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and association,” Corpora wrote. “Any reasonable student reading these policies would understandably believe Northeastern will protect their free speech rights consistent with First Amendment principles.”
FIRE accused administrators of viewpoint discrimination due to the university’s “failure to cite specific concerns motivating their request” and asked for a “substantive response” to the letter by May 2.
“Northeastern commendably commits in writing to respect its students’ expressive rights,” Corpora wrote in the letter. “But, in this case, the university failed to meet this commitment.”
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