When We Fight, We Win: Why I Am Suing Northwestern University—and the US Government
Steven W. Thrasher on the Fight For Academic Freedom
Yesterday, I filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University and—in his official capacity as Chairman of the US House of Representatives House Committee on Education and the
Workforce—Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg. The suit is also against various actors in the federal government who have pressured Northwestern, including Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy.
I am suing them because—as my attorneys and I have shown in our filing and as we will prove in court—they have robbed me of my “successful academic career and livelihood because of a joint project of Northwestern and elements of the federal government to manufacture consent for their participation in the Zionist colonial project in Palestine.”
I am suing them for blatant and repeated breach of my employment contract, for violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for violation of the Illinois Human Rights Act, and for retaliation for exercising my right to freedom of speech—a freedom, as breathlessly extolled in innumerable celebrations of America’s 250th birthday this month, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
I am suing them because they tried multiple times to unfairly terminate my employment (twice unsuccessfully and twice successfully). First, at the behest of pressure from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Northwestern filed a criminal complaint against me for legally and ethically standing peacefully between innocent students and Northwestern workers who were attempting to assault them. (While this is not in our lawsuit, I would add I was compelled by Title XI training not to allow other Northwestern workers to assault and molest students in broad daylight.) These charges were so baseless that the Cook County State’s Attorney declined to prosecute me and expunged my name and the charge from the record.
Second, Northwestern assigned an ad hoc committee to investigate me; but, after six months of investigation, the committee exonerated me, recommended no punishment and affirmed my right to academic freedom. Third, a day after accepting the committee’s recommendation, overseer Dean Charles Whitaker denied my application for promotion and tenure, despite having just issued me a glowing review less than two years prior. Finally, Northwestern complied with Rep. Walberg’s demand that I be banned from teaching again, and Northwestern refused to substantively review my internal appeal of my tenure denial, resulting in the termination of my employment at the end of my contract (the last day of August, just about six weeks from now), even though, in the fall of 2023, my term as the Renberg Chair was extended until 2028.
I am suing Northwestern because they have kept me from teaching in the classroom over the past two years. While many people joke to me about how great it must be to be paid while not teaching, it is not. I loved teaching, and many of my students loved me, and it is a breach of my contract (and of guidelines set forth by the American Association of University Professors and of Northwestern’s own faculty handbook).
When the House Committee smeared me on TV and sent letters chastising Northwestern during the Biden administration, suddenly my Palestine solidarity speech became a fireable offense.
I am suing because the timeline is clear: Northwestern did not try to press charges against me until facing pressure from the United States government. When the House Committee smeared me on TV and sent letters chastising Northwestern during the Biden administration, suddenly my Palestine solidarity speech became a fireable offense. When the Trump administration came down on “DEI” and LGBTQ research and—most concretely—when it froze $790 million in funding to Northwestern, I was served up as a would-be scapegoat. When it hired me, Northwestern crowed about the Renberg Chair being the first journalism professorship in the world to focus on LGBTQ research. But while we will show that Northwestern supported my work on LGBTQ issues throughout most of my “employment and was pleased with the renown and funding it brought to the University, Northwestern began to perceive Dr. Thrasher’s sexual orientation as a liability by virtue of the Trump administration’s campaign to denigrate and vilify LGBTQ communities.”
So, I am suing.
This is not something I am especially happy to be doing. I would have been content continuing as the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism for the rest of my working years. I liked my job, and I was very good at it. This is evidenced by a letter signed by thousands of professors, scholars, journalists, medical practitioners and public health professionals that I have “earned an international reputation that is not only tenure-worthy, but would garner a full professorship at most universities.”
It’s also evidenced by the fact that despite being suspended from teaching over the last two years, Medill students still regularly contact me to meet for advice or to talk through ethical dilemmas—even students who began after I was benched and never took a class with me—because they believe there is no one on faculty at Northwestern they can turn to for such concerns. As one student put it in an open letter in the Daily Northwestern protesting my tenure denial, “Medill doesn’t have another Dr. Thrasher to give students advice when they’re doing [social justice] reporting, and it would be a stain on our institution to let him go. Further, it is an open secret that in Dr. Thrasher’s absence, Medill professors fear for their jobs when discussing Palestine, even in class. Dean Whitaker knows as much, and his decision to nevertheless fire Thrasher reflects a betrayal of the journalistic values he’s supposed to represent.”
But while the last two years have taken a toll on me personally—as my suit proclaims and as we will show in court I have been “effectively blacklisted from academia and [have] been unable to secure a comparable position, causing irreversible economic and reputational harm”—this is about much more than what happens to me.
Most importantly, it’s about the ongoing genocidal colonial project in Palestine. Anyone in the United States has the constitutional right to protest something as politically important as this crime against humanity without risking the loss of their livelihood. When I was hired as the Daniel Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting, I accepted the responsibility of speaking on and teaching by example about social justice. Dean Whittaker suspended me from teaching, in part, because of a speech I gave called “Our Work is Love,” in which I talked about a young Al Jazeera journalist named Hossam Shabat. Hossam was the same age as many of our students at Medill, and I had the blessing of corresponding with him directly; I talked about him at the encampment, and about the then staggering killing of some 143 journalists in Gaza.
The danger I have been in professionally and economically is nothing compared to what my colleagues have endured.
Well, today, Hossam is dead—he was assassinated with an American-financed missile shot at his car—and the number of Palestinian journalists killed has doubled to nearly 300. Hossam’s final words were “By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past eighteen months.” (A Muslim, Hossam’s life perfectly encapsulated Buddhist-Christian teacher Adyashanti’s dictum to “Imagine that you are a love so vast, so unconditional that you decided to pour yourself into this life as an act of love.”) Meanwhile, 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the US-brokered ceasefire—or, as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it recently, the “so-called ceasefire.”
So, the danger I have been in professionally and economically is nothing compared to what my colleagues have endured—especially Hossam, who paid the ultimate price for the nobility of our profession and who never even got to finish journalism school. The least we can do here is fight for the right to talk about it.
Also, the dynamics of race and sexuality underneath who Northwestern and the US House of Representatives committee are punishing are not just about me. If left unchallenged, they will harm communities of people who are marginalized in academia (and in all workplaces) even more. It does not appear to be a coincidence that I am Black, gay and being prosecuted: “When faculty and staff linked arms to protect students during the encampment, and the Committee launched an investigation into the encampment, three of the four employees Northwestern chose to criminally charge were Queer.”
Indeed, in my recent national book tour for The Overseer Class, on almost every college campus I visited, the person being persecuted the most in an attempt to silence criticism of Zionism and the US war machine was a Black or Latinx member of an LGBTQ community. This was true with Professor Tiffany Herard Willoughby Herard, who was singled out at UC Irvine. (You can sign a petition for her here.) I also met Black, Latinx and Muslim staff members who’d been fired at various colleges with none of the press coverage professors receive—including a Latina worker who cried with me on the book signing line in Chicago.
So…
What do we do when we’re under attack?
Stand up, fight back.
Because bullies buckle when we stand up—and when we fight, we win.
When my Northwestern colleague law professor Sheila Bedi sued the same House Committee For Education and the Workforce for illegally trying to get records of legal clinic work, the committee withdrew its subpoena.
After becoming the first tenured professor to lose her job over her speech about Gaza, Cal State University San Jose professor Sang Hea Kil won back her job last month, after a mediator ruled in her favor that she’d been unfairly terminated.
When LeRoy Pernell, a professor at Florida A&M University’s college of law, challenged the constitutionality of Florida’s “Stop Woke Act”—and sued for his right to teach critical race theory—he won.
Professors fired for their constitutional right to criticize Charlie Kirk after his demise are forcing major concessions.
When the American Association of University Professors sued to block the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom in the University of California system, it won.
After it was challenged in court (mostly by K-12 schools) for illegally trying to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs in K-12 schools and universities, the Trump administration abandoned its anti-DEI lawsuit.
Released documents from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s intimidation campaign revealed that during the 2024 encampment, Northwestern Trustee Michael Sacks sent then President Schill a text message with the request that “we just not hire assholes anymore,” referring to a Medill faculty member (me????) who engaged with the Dearing Meadow encampment. Trustee Sacks additionally wrote to President Schill that “we knew he was a bad guy before he came over and we hired him anyway. . . . Let’s just try hard not to do that the next 5-10 years.”
Sacks runs a fund worth nearly $60 billion. He is also a booster of AIPAC, a trustee of the Obama Foundation, and a major donor to the former president’s pharaonic edifice to himself. But just because he has a lot of money does not mean that Northwestern University may unconstitutionally collude with the US government to enact his agenda by abridging my (or anyone’s) speech.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” James Madison wrote in 1789 in the text for the soon-to-be-ratified First Amendment, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
To the Northwestern University Board of Trustees (especially Michael “asshole” Sacks) and Dean Charles Whitaker, I say to you: Just because you may want to illegally conspire with Congressman Walberg to illegally abridge the freedom of speech, and of the press, and of the right of the people (such as journalism students and faculty!) to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances does not make it legal.
Quite the opposite.
So, we’ll see you in court.
Steven W. Thrasher
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, CPT, a journalist, social epidemiologist, and cultural critic, holds the Daniel Renberg chair at the Medill School of Journalism, and is on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. A former writer for the Village Voice, Scientific American and the Guardian, Thrasher is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. [Photo by C.S. Muncy]