UCSF is recommending firing me and censuring me for 10 years for my advocacy of Palestinians and my exposure of their racist practices of repressing those of us who speak out against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
As a professor of medicine and a member of the UCSF community for 23 years, my work in healthcare centers the most oppressed communities in the Bay Area. My scholarship in medicine specifically analyzes how power harms oppressed people and as a consequence, leads to poor health outcomes for those people.
UCSF is sending a very clear message here. This is not just about Trump. It's about the rightwing overhaul of the Academy. In California, it started through toxic online harassment by Democrat CA Senator Scott Wiener. But it is also about Trump and the MAGA intention to destroy academic freedom and the scholarship of people like me who make an evidence-based case for justice and equity in the Academy. UCSF has retained disgraced lawfirm Paul Weiss to go after me. This lawfirm cut a $40 million deal with Trump which has drawn scrutiny of law-abiding Congresspeople. Why UCSF is using a Trump-supporting lawfirm to do its dirty work of repressing people who speak against genocide at UCSF should have people concerned about how health equity plays out in a space like this.
Wake up, America. Your future is being stolen--by Democrats and Republicans alike. Billionaire donors and their lackeys in politics and in our universities--like the Dillers--are dictating who can teach what in our schools.
We require academic freedom and freedom of speech. We require protection for whistleblowers who expose the racist rot at the heart of academic medicine, which prevents us from achieving measurable outcomes in health equity. We require transparency around who is driving this racist repression in our schools and what their allegiances are.
We must fight and struggle for our rights and our place in these spaces of learning. Here is my lawyer’s response to the several blacked out pages.
I will be writing more about this process in the interest of exposing dynamics around health equity and why we do not have it in the US. If we cannot speak out about Black people being gunned down by police in the US, trans people being denied appropriate care, Palestinians being annihilated by bombs funded by our tax dollars, immigrants being disappeared by masked gunmen in unmarked vehicles—we will not be able to “advance health equity.”
Health equity requires we wrangle with the structures of injustice causing poor health for our community members. It requires an unflinching analysis of power and the courage to take on the structures causing harm. Genocide is the ultimate racist harm and it is being perpetrated in our names with the funds generated by our labor. If we cannot speak out against this genocide, we cannot have health equity. Period.
This would be absurd if it wasn’t so dangerous. I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this and appreciate all you do.
The last time I looked at the Canary Mission's list of targeted individuals I was struck how the vast majority of targets were younger female professionals in health care, teaching and social services or female students in those fields - mostly with Arab or South Asian names. The racism and focused misogyny practiced by the Zionist thugs at Canary Mission is obvious. The young targets working in the caring professions are what Zionists want to present as threats... How perverse and revelatory of their own cowardice and insecurities!
They represent a corrupt and hysterical lynch mob - unable to function beyond their own thuggish fantasies fueled by the ungodly wealth of uncultured billionaires. That institutions and administrators fold under their crude pressure speaks volumes about our institutional rot.