Washington Targets Dissent: Repression from the Academy to the Streets

Speakers

Abed Ayoub

National Executive Director, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

Asli Bali

President, Middle East Studies Association of North America; Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Lara Friedman

President, Foundation for Middle East Peace

Tariq Habash

Co-Founder and Director, A New Policy; former Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development

Moderator

Yousef Munayyer

Head of Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow

Arab Center Washington DC

About the Webinar

The Trump Administration’s policies toward universities and protestors have been characterized as the biggest assault on civil liberties in the United States since the Second Red Scare or the era of McCarthyism. Some of the nation’s most esteemed universities have been targeted by the administration with punitive measures aimed at forcing changes that would gut their academic freedom. Students who protested Israeli policies and American support for the war on Gaza have been summarily detained by masked agents and disappeared.

Arab Center Washington DC is convening a webinar panel of experts to discuss this and will seek to address several questions. What have been the impacts of these policies so far? Where do we expect things to go? What have the legal responses been? How are institutions responding? What is the origin of these policies, and how did we get here? How is immigration law and federal education policy being used?

Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Christopher Penler

Location

Via Zoom

Date

Thursday April 24, 2025

Time

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM ET