At 4 p.m. on the day before Spring Quarter 2025 would begin, Medill second-year Georgia Kerrigan got an email that made her stomach drop.
“We’re writing to inform you that this class … has been canceled,” it read. “If you were enrolled in the JOUR 301 side of the course, we will work with you to find an alternate placement.”
As she read the email, Kerrigan wasn’t exactly surprised; eight months earlier, she had been enrolled in the same LGBTQ+ health reporting class with assistant professor of Journalism Steven Thrasher only to have it canceled before Fall Quarter could begin.
The same March day, Thrasher himself received an email from Medill Dean Charles Whitaker explaining the cancellation.
“Medill and Northwestern have an established tenure review procedure, including available appellate recourse, and remain committed to the privacy and sanctity of that process,” it read. “However, over the past few weeks, you have routinely and regularly mischaracterized in public forums the decision to deny you tenure, which was made after due process.”
“Your public lobbying, mischaracterizations and efforts to encourage pressure from groups complicate and compromise the process of tenure review, decision making, and appeal. Therefore, we are concerned about your presence with students in our community. Medill is removing you from classes for the spring term. Furthermore, you will not be assigned classes to teach in the 2025-26 academic year.”
According to Jacqueline Stevens, professor of Political Science and president of Northwestern’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), there was no precedent for cancelling Thrasher’s classes.
“There’s no policy that’s indicated [in the letter] that Professor Thrasher violated,” Stevens says, “and there’s no connection between the allegation of him making false statements and him being banned from teaching students.”
The emails were sent 11 days after Thrasher announced his tenure denial in a statement that characterized the termination as a “political hit job” in response to his pro-Palestinian activism. The support for Thrasher from students and faculty came quickly: 117 Medill students and alumni signed a March 30 letter to the editor published in The Daily Northwestern; a now-paused GoFundMe raised over $12,000 to contribute to Thrasher’s legal funds; a petition calling upon Whitaker to reconsider his decision has 1,968 signatures and counting.
While some see Thrasher’s tenure denial as an attack on free speech and a capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands to combat antisemitism, other faculty members warn against jumping to premature conclusions. They emphasize that the tenure process took place behind closed doors and the details of Thrasher’s firing remain unclear. Thrasher’s case and others like it have ignited conversations about free speech and academic freedoms on college campuses nationwide.
A history of activism
Northwestern’s leaders have been responding to Thrasher’s outspoken political activism since he was hired in May 2019 — though their tone has changed drastically since then.
The week before he was put on Northwestern’s payroll, Thrasher delivered a speech at New York University’s commencement ceremony. In it, he emphasized his support for Palestine and advocated for the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions” movement, which calls for an international divestment from Israel. The speech elicited sharp criticism from NYU then-President Andrew Hamilton, who said the version of the text Thrasher submitted beforehand did not include that message.
Northwestern then-President Morton Schapiro acknowledged Thrasher’s controversial remarks in a statement but defended his freedom of speech.
“Many were understandably offended by some of the comments made by Dr. Thrasher during his commencement speech at New York University earlier this week,” Schapiro and then-provost Jonathan Holloway wrote. “We do not share all of his views, nor do we feel commencement was the appropriate venue to express them. However, academic freedom assures his right to hold them.”
Thrasher arrived at Northwestern to fill a new position: Medill’s Daniel H. Renberg Chair, an endowed professorship that emphasizes social justice reporting with a focus on issues relevant to the LGBTQ+ community. Thrasher would teach classes including “Journalism in Practice: Reading and Reporting LGBTQ Health” and “Sex and the American Empire: Journalism and Frames.”
Thrasher became the subject of controversy, however, in the spring of 2024, when he participated in the “Northwestern Liberation Zone” encampment, a multi-day pro-Palestinian occupation of Deering Meadow. After creating a protective line between Northwestern University Police Department (NUPD) and protesting students, Thrasher, two other faculty members and a graduate student were charged with a Class A misdemeanor for their alleged obstruction of a police officer. The charge was dropped in July, but Thrasher’s fall 2024 classes were canceled days later.
The University cited his politically charged social media usage and lack of “objectivity,” launching an investigation in September. Though there was little elaboration, Thrasher’s outspoken political views may have been viewed as a breach of objectivity, a core practice enforced at Medill which advocates for neutrality in journalistic coverage. In January, Northwestern launched an additional investigation into his conduct at the encampment, which allegedly violated the University’s demonstration policies.
Thrasher’s case was catapulted to the national stage last May, when then-Rep. and current U.S. Sen. from Indiana Jim Banks called him out during a House Committee on Education and Workforce hearing where University President Michael Schill had been called to testify about antisemitism on college campuses.
Banks interrogated Schill about whether or not he felt it appropriate for Northwestern faculty to “scuffle with police officers,” calling Thrasher and other protestors “goons.” The congressional hearing put intense scrutiny on Northwestern.
Against this backdrop, Thrasher’s tenure case was brought forth for evaluation in Fall 2024. Its denial has caused some in the Northwestern community to question whether Schapiro’s stated commitment to free speech remains a deeply-held value in the University administration.
The room where it happened
To never worry about being fired is a luxury provided only in the worlds of academia and law, thanks to the longstanding tradition of tenure.
“I think from the general public’s point of view, they’ve always looked at tenure as this weird thing,” says professor of Journalism Craig LaMay. “I don’t care whether your dad is a banker or a pipe fitter, nobody gets job security for life — except federal judges.”
But the practice dates back to 1915, when the AAUP published the Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. One clause plainly outlines the parameters of tenure.
According to the document, “University teachers should be understood to be, with respect to the conclusions reached and expressed by them, no more subject to the control of the trustees, than are judges subject to the control of the president.”
Tenure is meant to maintain independence in teaching, research and extramural activities and provide enough financial security to make the academic profession attractive to talented intellectuals. For a university, then, the stakes of granting tenure are high: they are placing a bet on the professor, tying themselves together indefinitely.
Tenure-track faculty have a six-year period from the time they are hired until their tenure case is brought before the evaluation committee. The evaluation committee, which is made up of tenured professors in the candidate’s department, uses materials including letters from faculty at other institutions, student reviews and a “reflective statement” to vote on the candidate’s tenure and make a recommendation to the dean.
Recommendations are based on three pillars: the candidate’s scholarship, service and teaching. The dean makes a recommendation to the provost, and the case — if successful — moves up the ladder to the Board of Trustees.
Candidates don’t know who will write their external review letters and faculty who sit on the tenure committee are sworn to secrecy over the content of their discussion. In Thrasher’s case, it is unclear where along the line the decision to deny him tenure was made.
On March 18, Whitaker sent a letter to Thrasher elaborating on his reasons to deny the professor tenure. He acknowledged Thrasher’s impactful research but expressed concerns about the other two pillars of tenure, saying “the committee qualified this assessment of [his] service to be appropriate for someone in the rank of assistant professor,” and adding that Thrasher’s pedagogy was found to be “inadequate with serious concerns reported by students.”
Sources have confirmed the faculty committee vote was split in half.
According to professor of English and Comparative Literature Jules Law, successful Weinberg tenure cases at a departmental level usually have a unanimous or almost unanimous vote. Professor of Journalism Douglas Foster, who sat on the Promotion and Tenure committee, says things are different in Medill: a number of faculty have been granted tenure on a split vote.
Despite this, Law emphasizes that it’s important to remember the majority of information available about this particular tenure case has been shared by Thrasher himself.
Foster’s position as a member of the committee precludes him from revealing specifics of the discussion or how other members voted, but his own opinion is clear.
“In my 21 years on the committee, I’ve never seen a stronger case before us,” Foster says. “In the end, it wasn’t a fair hearing.”
Marcus Anthony Hunter, a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees. Hunter authored one of Thrasher’s tenure review letters, and says Thrasher’s tenure case should not have been a hard one to decide.
“I support excellence, let me say that. And when I looked at that file, it was excellent,” Hunter says. “I can’t speak to what other people see when they see that file. But I’ve seen a lot of files: full professor, associate professor, new professor, and I’ve worked with a lot of them, and [Thrasher’s] was among the top 10% I’ve ever reviewed or seen.”
On paper, Foster says, Thrasher should have been more than qualified to receive tenure based on his service and scholarship. The only remaining pillar, then, is teaching.
Student perspectives, mixed reviews
Unlike Kerrigan, Martha Contreras (Medill ’25) was able to take a class with Thrasher: Reading and Reporting LGBTQ Health, a 301-level class in the spring of 2024. She has only positive things to say.
“I have never felt so safe and close in a classroom setting,” Contreras says. “Genuinely supported by my professor, both for professional and personal endeavors — not related to the encampment, just related to diversity and our identity and giving us a space to express ourselves in a way that is a lot more vulnerable than other academic settings really permit.”
Nafi Soumare (Medill ‘24) took two classes with Thrasher in her junior and senior years. She says Thrasher took extra precautions to ensure his political beliefs did not bleed into classroom instruction. Soumare says he avoided talking about his involvement in the encampment and his views on Palestine.
“He went out of his way not to bring it up, because he knew it would get him in trouble,” Soumare says, recalling her LGBTQ+ health reporting course in the spring of 2024.
CTECs — quarterly reviews of classes and faculty written by students — for Thrasher’s fall 2023 class “Sex and the American Empire” tell a different story.
Students in that course said Thrasher changed the course content a month into the quarter, centering in-class lectures on the Israel-Hamas war instead of “the relationship between American journalism and the U.S. military in creating an American empire,” as it was described in a course flyer.
One student wrote in a CTEC, “This is a good class with very interesting course materials and discussion topics. At times, it felt a little one–sided (we did not bring much nuance into complex topics like Israel-Palestine) and at times felt like opinion was being introduced as fact. Overall, the class was one of the more fun ones I’ve taken at Northwestern and the course materials are great, but it didn’t feel like a super safe space to share opinions that conflicted with that of the professor.”
Many CTEC comments mentioned the shift in course focus, the presence of Thrasher’s strong opinions and the fact that graphic media was often presented without warning. Students’ reactions to it, however, ranged from offended to neutral. One student criticized the professor for sharing his own political opinions in an academic setting.
“It seemed as if Prof. Thrasher was more interested in espousing his political opinions than actually teaching this class,” they wrote.
Hunter says he was aware of the reviews of this class when writing his tenure evaluation letter. In his experience, changing a course based on current events is not unusual, especially in a journalism class.
“A syllabus is a form of a contract between the students and the professor,” Hunter says. “Often there is a line in the syllabus that says ‘this syllabus is subject to change.’ So when I hear changes happen, that is indicated in a syllabus. Whether or not everybody likes the change, that’s another conversation.”
The fourth pillar
Hunter chose to send Thrasher his finished tenure review letter before submitting it to the committee. Aware of all the negative feedback Thrasher was receiving for his political outspokenness, Hunter wanted to send him a message of encouragement.
“You should be very proud of yourself no matter what the outcome is,” Hunter says he told Thrasher.
Thrasher responded with some hesitation.
“And so [Thrasher] said, ‘I’ve received this and with the spirit that you’re sharing,’ … ‘though I am not so confident that it will be a positive result,’” Hunter recalls.
If Thrasher had an inkling that things would be more complicated than they looked on paper, he was right. Foster says there was a fourth dynamic at play, one not outlined in the Faculty handbook or the AAUP’s tenure evaluation recommendations: donor pressure.
Whitaker in particular may have been subject to donor and Board of Trustees pressure, says Foster. In this case, he doesn’t think the committee’s recommendation was a deciding factor.
Whitaker declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
“We hired a public intellectual intentionally with a specialty in social justice reporting, and now we have turned him away largely because he is a public intellectual who specializes in social justice reporting,” Foster says. “I have very little doubt that solely on his merits, Thrasher would not have been denied tenure … I think in this case, context drove the decision.”
Foster is referring to Thrasher’s activism and involvement with the encampment. Though they are technically bound to consider only the three pillars, Foster suggests other factors may have also played a role.
Freedom under fire?
Though the full story behind Thrasher’s tenure denial remains unknown, Foster points out that as long as the community perceives it as a retaliation for his pro-Palestinian views, it will have a “chilling effect.”
Ultimately, Foster worries that in the post-COVID academic climate, professors have stopped treating their students as full, intellectually curious beings who want to have their beliefs challenged, instead relying on a “customer-friendly” approach that avoids ruffling feathers.
In Medill, the conversation expands beyond free speech to the question of objectivity. Contreras says in her experience, the Medill first-year core sequence teaches that journalists shouldn’t attend protests or publicize their political opinions. Her class with Thrasher turned those guidelines, perhaps outdated, on their head.
Addressing an audience of roughly 100 at the encampment, Thrasher encouraged the University administration and media to be empathetic toward pro-Palestinian protestors. He redefined Medill’s classic definition of fairness.
“Our work is not about objectivity,” Thrasher said. “Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work and opening your compassionate hearts.”
While Thrasher’s case has garnered high-profile attention, it is not the first instance a politically outspoken University professor has been penalized.
In March, Washington University in St. Louis professor Tae Seok Moon filed a lawsuit against the university claiming he was forced to resign for speaking out against discrimination on campus.
Maura Finkelstein, tenured associate professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College, was terminated after re-posting an anti-Zionist graphic on her personal Instagram account.
Columbia University appeared to have fired assistant visiting professor of modern Arab studies Mohamed Abdou in spring 2024 after Facebook posts surfaced of Abdou expressing support for Hamas and Hezbollah under an alternate spelling of his name — though Abdou claims his contract ended.
Though tenure denials and terminations are the subject of scrutiny, LaMay notes that pressures on curriculum and diversity efforts are academic freedom issues as well.
“The question is,” LaMay says, “Does giving people tenure really give them academic freedom? And I don’t know that there’s evidence for that.”
As the federal government cuts funds to universities like Northwestern and threatens further punitive measures, LaMay says tenure denial is a small part of a much wider conversation about academic freedom in higher education.
“It is kind of precious to be talking about tenure as an academic freedom issue in a climate in which academic freedom, in a much bigger way, is under assault,” LaMay says. “Because when that happens, your tenure doesn’t really mean anything.”
Print design by Leila Dhawan and Ilse Von Heimberg.