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Dr. Nitasha Kaul was born in India, but is no longer allowed to go there. She was detained at the Bengaluru airport and kept under surveillance for 24 hours last month, despite having all the necessary paperwork to enter her country of origin. Indian authorities put her on a plane back to the UK, where she is a citizen and a professor at the University of Westminster. She was supposed to participate in a seminar on the Kashmiri constitution, and has been outspoken in her criticism of India’s “occupation” of the region. The Indian government has been silent on the matter, but the ruling right-wing BJP party has called her a “propagandist.”
In Afghanistan, Javed Noorzad Kakar, the Vice President of Student Affairs for Roshan Online University, was arrested by the Taliban, tortured, and released upon the promise that he would resign his position. A Roshan University announcement calls Kakar “one of the defenders of the education rights of deprived women of Afghanistan.”
An Iranian court sentenced Dr. Tina Deljoo, a university lecturer with a PhD in political science, to a year in prison for “propaganda against the system.” She was arrested after she made Instagram posts that were critical of Iran’s theocratic regime. Her “proceeding” lasted no more than five minutes.
Philosopher, sociologist, and former professor Freddy Quezada was taken into custody by Nicaraguan authorities, and has since disappeared. He was fired from the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua for supporting protesting students in 2018. Quezada, a “lifelong insubordinate intellectual,” was known for his sharp criticism of the Sandinista government, which he referred to in one of his last posts as a “fox-headed dictatorship.”
This sort of thing doesn’t happen to university professors in the United States.
Yet.
Earlier this month, Indiana’s Governor signed Senate Bill 202 into law. The bill allows for denial of promotion and termination of professors who do not “foster a culture” of “intellectual diversity.” “Intellectual diversity,” the bill explains, “means multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.” Who decides whether the standards for “intellectual diversity” have been met? Why, the…
