Letter Concerning Removal of Professor Rula Quawas from Her Post as Dean at the University of Jordan

[Logo for Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association. Image from MESA website] [Logo for Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association. Image from MESA website]

Letter Concerning Removal of Professor Rula Quawas from Her Post as Dean at the University of Jordan

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association concerning the removal of Professor Rula Quawas from her position as Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Jordan after a her students produced and published a video on sexual harrassment. To view the video, click here.]

26 October 2012

Dr. Ikhleif Tarawneh
President
University of Jordan
Amman 11942, Jordan


Dear President Tarawneh,

I write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our concern over the dismissal of Professor Rula Quawas from her position as Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Jordan University. The circumstances surrounding the termination of Prof. Quawas’ service as dean strongly suggest that this step represents a serious violation of academic freedom. 

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. It is the preeminent organization in the field. The Association publishes The International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3,000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere. 

According to her appointment letter issued by then-president Adil al-Tuwaysi, Professor Quawas was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Jordan University for a two-year term which began 11 September 2011, pursuant to a decision of the Board of Trustees of 7 September 2011. 

In the Fall 2011 semester, Dean Quawas assisted and advised a group of students in her Feminist Theory class in making a short video about sexual harassment experienced by female students on the University of Jordan campus.   This video was posted on YouTube six months later, in June 2012, and quickly generated a great deal of discussion and controversy, including in the local print and on-line media.   In response, the Vice President of the University of Jordan called Dean Quawas, reportedly furious, demanding an explanation regarding the students’ project. His concern was that the film harmed the university’s reputation. No concern was expressed about the degradation of the learning environment at the university caused by widespread sexual harassment. Dean Quawas’ response was to defend the students’ film as a legitimate product of academic expression and research. 

She followed up by sending a letter to you, President Tarawneh, explaining that the production of the film was a class project, but received no response. On 30 August 2012, you met with the Board of Trustees to discuss your proposed changes of Deans, about which the Board reportedly had reservations. On 2 September 2012, Dean Quawas learned from the press that she had been removed from her post—after completing only one year of her two year-term as per her appointment letter. The following day you met briefly with all the deans and informed them that it was your right as a new President, appointed the previous February, to make changes. At no point prior to what can only be described as an extremely unprofessional and demeaning dismissal had you our any other upper-level administrator called Prof. Quawas to discuss her administrative performance as dean or to suggest that there were any problems.

In the absence of any documentation of poor performance of her administrative duties, and given the timing of Prof. Quawas’ unseemly dismissal, we can only conclude that she was terminated as dean as a result of her work with the women in her class on the video on sexual harassment.  

The University of Jordan has recently touted its intention to enter the ranks of the top 500 universities in the world. We respectfully submit that in order to do so, arbitrary dismissals such as that of Dean Quawas, as well as the systematic and unpunished sexual harassment of female students on the university campus, must come to an end.   We, therefore, call upon you to ensure that not only the norms of academic freedom, but also the basic human dignity of all students and faculty on the University of Jordan campus, will henceforth be respected and protected.

We look forward to your response. 


Sincerely,

 

Fred M. Donner
MESA President
Professor of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago


cc:

Her Royal Highness Princess Basma Bint Talal, Head of the Jordanian National Commission for Women

His Excellency Professor Khalid Touqan, Chairperson of the Board of Trustees at the University of Jordan

Her Excellency Asma Khader, Secretary-General of the Jordanian National Commission for Women

His Excellency Professor Wajih Owais, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research

 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412