Nine months after her initial firing in May 2025, the fourth member of the “CUNY Fired Four” is heading into her seventh hearing with CUNY. Targeted for her activism for Palestine, she is the last remaining adjunct who has not yet been reinstated.

On March 25, the day before her hearing, CUNY-PSC — of which she is a member —- organized a rally and letter delivery in front of CUNY Central against her firing and political blacklisting.

Around 100 students, workers, and community members gathered to picket, many wearing keffiyehs and pro-Palestine hats, chanting “McCarthyism No More, Reinstate the Fired Fourth!” and “Felo, Felo, what do you say? Rehire the Fourth today!” as campus security glared back at them. Protesters carried signs saying “Come for four, face us all!”, “Stop the War on Universities,” and “3 down, one to go!” At the center of the picket line was a wagon filled with 5,000 letters to CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez — sent to express solidarity with the Fired Fourth.

One of the fired four who was reinstated, Sally, made the reality plain: “I am one of the reinstated Fired Four, and I am here to say there is no conduct separating me from our comrade who remains fired.” All four adjuncts have strong teaching records, glowing student and faculty evaluations, and the support of their departments. What they shared — what made them targets — was their activism for Palestine and support for student activism.

CUNY has attempted to justify this political firing with the charge of “conduct unbecoming,” a term used in the McCarthy era, when universities purged communist and outspoken professors.

What is the so-called “conduct unbecoming” in this case? A five-dollar donation and a flyer bearing the CUNY name. For this, the Fired Fourth has been banned from teaching across all CUNY campuses for ten years, despite having no disciplinary history.

PSC president James Davis captured the absurdity: “Are you serious right now? Do you know why they’ve been placed on the do-not-rehire list, as if they are a danger to our students?”

He continued: “Where was the concern about the CUNY logo when members of this community were targeted by doxxing trucks labeled ‘Hunter College’s Worst Antisemite,’ stamped with that same logo? What did CUNY management say? ‘We can’t do anything about it.’”

Reinstated adjunct Corinna Mullin stated, “Just as imperialist wars are not about human rights or democracy, this case is not about policy violations. This is about political retaliation and McCarthyism, and it’s happening at CUNY, which claims to be a people’s university.”

These firings came just weeks before the CUNY Chancellor testified before the House Education Committee in a politically motivated spectacle aimed at attacking the movement for Palestine. The firing of the four adjuncts, alongside the suspension of students, including City College’s Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, was part of a broader crackdown on campus organizing.

Nevertheless, collective resistance has already won victories. Through sustained pressure from CUNY-PSC, students, workers, and community allies, three of the four have been reinstated.

Now, the movement continues with the same demand: reinstate the fourth.

The rally included a strong show of solidarity from the New School Part-Time Faculty union (ACT-UAW Local 7902), with several members in attendance. In a speech at the rally, one member declared, “We support you. When we say that when they come for one of us, they come for all of us, we mean all of us. What’s happening here is happening everywhere, which means when you fight it here, you fight it everywhere.”

Speakers emphasized continued solidarity against the continued genocide in Palestine as Israel also bombs and displaces Lebanese people under the guise of a U.S.-Israel war with Iran. As the New School speaker put it, “Solidarity with Palestine is both the most basic and the highest form of solidarity, a moral stance.”

Many also underscored that it is the Chancellor and the CUNY Board of Trustees who pose a real danger to students. They are the ones who called in police to taser, arrest, and brutalize students, terrorizing an entire campus. That’s why, as CUNY student and Left Voice member Carmin Maffea stated, “It’s not their CUNY, it’s our CUNY.”

As the rally came to a close, representatives from CUNY dressed in suits agreed to deliver the letters inside, carrying multiple bins into the building. There was a palpable sense of unity and hope. As one professor reflected, “They thought firing four adjuncts would frighten and divide us, but the opposite happened.”

Sally closed her speech saying:

Just like the McCarthy era,
this moment will pass.
History will judge them, as we have.
And we will be teaching the story of the Fired Fourth
how a movement brought her back.

We will celebrate the day
all four of us walk back through those gates,
heads held high,
fists raised,
ready to do the work of the university

which should never be to blacklist, punish,
lie, or divide us from our own people,
but to teach, to learn, and to struggle together
to build the world we all deserve.

So let’s not stop until we do.

The post CUNY Workers and Students Demand the Reinstatement of the Fired Fourth appeared first on Left Voice.

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