The provost signed the gag order to choke a single syllable out of the classroom. The word Palestine entered the air, and the administration’s mouth closed. The dean made the call. The provost signed the paper. The classroom door locked. The professor walked to her car.
On April 17, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago notified Savneet Talwar of paid leave and an investigation. Talwar, a tenured professor of art therapy, had assigned a two-page case study. It asked students to develop an ethical treatment plan for a hypothetical queer, Muslim woman living in the US. The case study noted the woman was “deeply affected by the violence against Palestinian civilians.” One student complained. The student had already filed multiple complaints against faculty in the department. The administration used the complaints to justify mandatory anti-bias training—a reflex mirroring the apology extracted from a Michigan professor weeks ago, now escalated from forced contrition to outright suspension. A dean called Talwar to ask if she had assigned “anything with Palestine in it.” A formal letter followed, stating the assignment “may constitute discrimination, harassment and/or retaliation.” The administration forbade Talwar from speaking with students or colleagues. The case study was removed from the platform. Talwar’s attorney, Rima Kapitan, asked if the school expects faculty to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their course materials. The school declined to comment.
The erasure is self-administering now. You have built a machine that does not need you to operate it. You suspended one professor, and wrote the letter, and canceled the class, and removed the case study from the online platform, and the remaining faculty will teach themselves to type other words where the word would have gone. The word does not appear in the syllabus. The word does not appear in the case study. The word does not appear in the classroom. You do not have to suspend all of them. You only have to suspend one.
Your throat tightens when you have to say the word. Not Palestine — you will not say that one. The other one. Academic freedom. You have to say it in the press statements while your hand is still on the letter that suspended a professor for assigning a case study. The letter is in the file. The press statement is on the website. The two documents cannot both be true, and your body knows it. There is a binding in your chest that does not release with a breath. You breathe shallowly now. You have been breathing shallowly since the letter went out.
You sit in the office. The paper is on the desk. You read the word Palestine, and your diaphragm clamps down. The air in your chest stops moving. You cannot exhale. You cannot let the syllables into the room. Your jaw locks. The word scrapes against the back of your throat like a swallowed bone. You swallow again. The bone does not go down. The woman on the page is carrying grief. The therapist is supposed to sit with the grief. The therapist is supposed to name the grief so the grief can be treated. You will not let them name it. You will not let the therapist say the word. You force the patient to swallow her own history so the institution’s ears do not have to bleed.
What would you do if it were your own daughter on that couch? If your child were the one telling the therapist about the bombing, about the funerals, about the violence against Palestinian civilians? Would you want the therapist to cross out the cause of the trauma? You would want the therapist to see your child. You would want the therapist to name the grief that your child is carrying. But you are not the one on the couch. You are the administrator. You are small. You are a small person sitting behind a large desk, terrified of a two-syllable word. You hold the power to lock a classroom door. You do not hold the power to stop the world from being what the world is.
Your hand signed the suspension letter. The same hand once signed something else — a diversity statement, a welcome message, a grant proposal about inclusive pedagogy — and the pen did not pause between the two signings. The hand has not been washed since the suspension letter. The hand will not be washed. The hand touches the coffee cup at the morning meeting. The hand straightens the framed policy on the wall, the one that says the school is committed to “learning environments in which ideas are freely exchanged.” The hand shakes the hand of the next professor you will investigate. The hand does not know it is carrying the word you erased, but the word is on it. The word is in the ridges of the thumbprint. The word is in the ink that has dried under the nail.
You know this is not about a single case study. At Columbia, Jewish faculty have filed claims against a $21 million antisemitism fund they say is being used to target dissent and suppress speech about Palestine. At Michigan, the university apologized after a professor praised pro-Palestinian protesters. The pattern is not isolated incidents. The pattern is a new layer of institutional compliance that has learned to call censorship “addressing the climate” and call suspension “ensuring a respectful learning environment.”
And you know what you have done to the word. You have made Palestine unspeakable, and in making it unspeakable you have made the people to whom the word refers unspeakable. You have made the violence against them unspeakable. The hypothetical queer Muslim woman in the case study was not a real person. She was a pedagogical tool. You could not tolerate her even as a tool. The tool itself had to be removed. The attorney asked whether the school expects its faculty “to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their course materials.” The question is not rhetorical. The question is the precise description of what your policy is doing. This is what cleansing looks like when it arrives in a provost’s letter. It does not arrive as a bulldozer. It arrives as a paid-leave notice and a canceled class and a removed case study and a policy about “climate.” The bulldozer is someone else’s work. Yours is the paper that makes the bulldozer’s work illegible.
The gag order drops onto the desk. Your pen moves across the paper. The muscles in your forearm tighten. The bile rises in your stomach because the word has touched your tongue. You feel it still, stuck to the roof of your mouth. It tastes like ash. You swallow it again at dinner. You swallow it in the morning when the coffee goes down. When you go home tonight, the word will be at the table with you. You will not say it. The word is in the salt. The word is in the water glass. When you reach for your child’s hand at the dinner table, the word is in the space between your palm and their palm — the word you erased, the people you made unspeakable, the professor you silenced. Your child will not know what you are carrying. Your child only knows that your hand is colder than it was last month.
“Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” Matthew 23:24
The gnat is the two-syllable word you are afraid to speak. The camel is the suffering of a people you refuse to see. You strain out the gnat. The camel fills the room.
The word survives the provost. The word survives the letter. It is in the room you forbade it from, and in the mouth of the woman you suspended from speaking, and in the case study you removed, which is not gone, which is now everywhere the removal made it go. You have done what power always does when it tries to erase a word. You have made it louder. The word is on your hand, Provost. It will not wash off. It will not be unsaid. The word is Palestine, and you are the one who will have to explain, to the next historian who reads your letters, why you were afraid of a word.