CSUSB Faculty for Justice in Palestine
Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) at California State University (CSU), San Bernardino recognizes that the US government, media, and other institutions of knowledge production, have long provided financial, military, moral, and political rationale for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
As an institution of knowledge production, the CSU system plays an integral role in these structures of violence. For example, the Systemwide Time, Place and Manner Policy, (TPM)— put in place in 2024 following the campus encampments protesting the genocide in Gaza— facilitates the silencing, surveillance, and, in some cases, criminalization of students, faculty, and staff exercising their freedom of expression. According to the ACLU, the TPM policy “very likely violates the First Amendment and Liberty of Speech Clause of the California Constitution.”
CSUSB, in particular, added to the silencing of crucial Palestinian scholarly voices when they cancelled the Edward Said Endowed Lecture on Gaza’s genocide, which was to be delivered by Dr. Hatem Bazian of UC Berkeley. This decision was made despite the lecture’s established funding, its importance as a platform for critical scholarship, and the university’s contractual commitments to its donor.
The cancellation cannot be justified by claims of financial, safety, or compliance concerns, especially given the administration’s willingness to host speakers who not only openly endorse Israel’s ongoing violence and dispossession of Palestinians, but also raise funds for such genocidal actions.
In March 2024, a year before canceling the Edward Said Endowed Lecture, the university held the 7th Annual Rabbi Hillel Cohn Endowed Lecture with speaker Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove, who has a history of using Zionist rhetoric and raising money for the Israeli military.
By silencing the Edward Said lecture while elevating voices aligned with occupation, the university not only undermined academic freedom but also exposed a deep double standard in whose narratives are deemed acceptable on campus. It is for these reasons that FJP calls on CSUSB to end its silencing of students, faculty, and staff. We demand that the administration reinstate the Edward Said Endowed Lecture this coming year.
More broadly, FJP demands budget transparency and divestment from companies that fund or benefit from wars and occupation. Students across the nation have voted to have their universities divest any holdings linked with Israel. As of August 2025, Evergreen State College, Sacramento State, and the University of San Francisco have agreed to divest, while other universities (such as Brown and Northwestern University) have pledged to disclose their investment exposure to Israel. We hope CSUSB will follow suit.