(NEW YORK) – PEN America today criticized Wake Forest University’s cancellation of a second campus speaker connected with the Israel-Gaza conflict, just four months after the university canceled a talk by another speaker – on the other side of the conflict.
The Office of Jewish Life had invited Sam Fried, an American-born IDF soldier, to speak on Feb. 11, in an event titled “An Evening of Conversation: The Story of One American IDF Soldier.” The talk was sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office and, according to the chaplain, was intended “to facilitate meaningful dialogue on the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, after some opposition, including an oped by three professors and social media posts denouncing the speaker, the Chaplain’s Office withdrew its funding. The oped objected both to the speaker and to the planned date of the event, which fell on the first anniversary of the Israeli airstrikes in Rafah.
Wake Forest is no stranger to speaker cancelations – last fall, the university canceled a lecture by Rabab Abdulhadi, a Palestinian-American activist and scholar who had been scheduled to speak on the anniversary of the October 7 attacks. When that lecture was canceled, President Susan R. Wente and Provost Michele Gillespie wrote in an email to the campus community that they had made “the conscious decision not to host events on this day that are inherently contentious and stand to stoke division.”
In response to the most recent cancellation, Kristen Shahverdian, Campus Free Speech program director at PEN America, said: “As we said before, we say again now: stifling speech can never be the answer to painful or contentious issues. Canceling a confirmed and scheduled lecture based on the reactions of campus stakeholders is arbitrary and misguided—and the precedent we warned about has come to fruition with this second cancellation. Universities must be willing to platform challenging, controversial, and even painful content, on every side of a controversy, and even in the face of opposition from within their communities. This lecture, and the one previously canceled, could have been moments for Wake Forest to model the kind of listening and dialogue that are so necessary on campuses. In the end, the entire community has lost out on the chance to hear these vastly different perspectives and grapple with the challenging issues they present.”
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.