update deskSchools & Higher Education

English instructor at Cornell cancels class as part of anti-Israel strike

Ph.D. candidate Alyiah Gonzales told students that instead of attending her lecture, they should write an essay on “the relationship between writing, power and systems of oppression.”

Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., from atop McGraw Tower, looking southeast. Credit: sach1tb/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., from atop McGraw Tower, looking southeast. Credit: sach1tb/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

An aspiring academic teaching a “race, writing and power” course at Cornell University has brought her opposition to the Jewish state into the classroom, suspending the first day on Jan. 22 as part of a “Global Strike for Palestine.”

Alyiah Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the school in Ithaca, N.Y., where she teaches a writing course with an activist focus. The Free Beacon obtained an email she sent canceling the class and assigning a two- to three-page essay on “the relationship between writing, power and systems of oppression.”

She wrote, “In Gaza, students like us, who hold a passion for learning and engaging in community knowledge production, have had their institutional resources ripped away from them one bomb at a time.”

Gonzales has previously expressed her anti-Israel animus, sharing on Instagram after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 that “freedom has only ever been achieved through resistance. Stand with the Palestinian resistance.”

In another post, she declared: “Me, personally, I think the f***ass settler State of Israel and all those complicit in genocide and occupation can rot in the deepest darkest pits of hell.”

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