At the beginning of the spring semester, I was invited to Lehigh University to attend a public lecture given by Dr. Maura Finkelstein titled “Academic Freedom in Times of Crisis.” As a professor working in the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) and a Muhlenberg College graduate, I felt the urgency of listening to my beloved former professor, who has experienced the full force of political censorship and retaliation, becoming “the first tenured professor to be fired for pro-Palestine speech,” as The Intercept put it in its September 2024 exposé.

But my hope for this event was quickly extinguished, as four campus police officers prevented me from entering the building. They claimed that the event was closed to the public as a last-minute “safety” procedure. As I sat outside with other community members, including current and retired LVAIC professors, I felt the consequences of Muhlenberg’s unprecedented decision.

Last week, the AAUP released a comprehensive report on Muhlenberg’s treatment of Dr. Finkelstein, a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. The report illuminates a dangerous year-long assault on academic freedom by a member institution of LVAIC and marks the investigation’s purported end with President Harring’s unceremonious announcement of Dr. Finkelstein’s “voluntary resignation.” As I finished reading the report, I felt inconsolably betrayed by my alma mater.

This feeling’s intensity is framed by my transformative time at Muhlenberg, which continues to shape who I am as an educator, filmmaker and organizer. Alongside my classmates, I worked through thorny topics and unruly histories, contradictory ideas and troubling images — the kind of challenging, essential work to which Dr. Finkelstein is committed.

Muhlenberg was also where I first felt the fragility of academic freedom. In a film studies class my senior year, I watched “5 Broken Cameras,” a documentary that stunned me with the visceral on-screen violence of settler colonialism in Palestine.

But as much as the film impacted me then, what unfolded in the classroom afterwards haunts me more: a classmate confronted the professor for showing us the film and asserted that the violence the filmmakers recorded was not real. This discomforting confrontation didn’t lead to reprisal. Instead, we dug deeper into Palestinian cinema.

Eight years later, Lehigh’s decision to bar the public from Dr. Finkelstein’s first public lecture in the area sets a disturbing precedent for academic freedom and repressive censorship within the LVAIC consortium. Outside the event, my gratitude deepened for educators brave enough to challenge the “Palestine Exception,” as did the shame I felt towards my alma mater for leading the escalating repression in higher education.

As more educators are fired or forced to “voluntarily resign,” as academic programs are censored or shuttered, as student protestors are beaten by police and as activists are abducted in broad daylight, I come face-to-face with the complicity of Muhlenberg’s administration. It is clear to me that the legacy of Muhlenberg will forever be tied to Dr. Finkelstein’s termination and its aftermath.

So, what do you do when your alma mater betrays values it instilled in you? Tell the truth. Organize with co-workers. Resist anticipatory censorship. Divest from institutions that capitulate. And on the horizon of graduation, commit entirely to building the rigorous and liberatory academic space that fulfills the promise of higher education serving the common good.

Drew Swedberg is a visiting instructor of Film & Media Studies at Lafayette College and an alum of Muhlenberg College.