Champaign-Urbana Muslim Action Committee welcomes the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) designation of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a ‘hostile campus’ for targeting anti-genocide voices.
CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has added UIUC to its list of “Hostile Campuses” across the nation. CU MAC echoes this designation. Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and all anti-genocide students have been targeted, doxed, and discriminated against on campus including charging students and community members with felonies for opposing genocide. UIUC administration has also isolated their students, staff and faculty, and community by completely ignoring the tens of thousands of Palestinians being murdered by Israel and supported by UIUC’s investment portfolio.
Despite the passing of a student referendum demanding the university divest from genocide with an overwhelming majority (73%), the anti-genocide voices on campus continue to be silenced. This anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism is not new to campus, though it has escalated over the last 18 months.
According to UIUC’s All Campus Climate Assessment conducted in the fall of 2023, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) faculty felt the least valued in their department/unit for teaching with only 58% feeling valued. It also reported that 31% of MENA students experienced discrimination in the last 12 months while 27% of MENA employees felt discriminated against on campus.
These numbers are likely an under-representation as CU MAC receives complaints from community members who do not report their discrimination due to a distrust of the system. CAIR has also reported record high reports of anti-Muslim complaints with a shift in narrative from targeting Muslims for their faith to “a broader pattern in which Muslims, alongside Palestinians, Arabs, Jews, African Americans, and Asian Americans, were targeted for their opposition to genocide and apartheid.”
In light of this designation, CU MAC hopes the university will reassess how it views its anti-genocide students, faculty, and community as well as addressing the growing concerns regarding its complicity in genocide.
You can find the full report by CAIR on islamophobia.org.