A growing and vocal group of architecture professors are shocked, disappointed and angry that the Board of Directors and the Executive Director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) recently stepped in and cancelled the Journal of Architectural Education’s(JAE) upcoming Fall 2025 Theme Issue 79.2 Palestine.  The JAE is the preeminent peer reviewed scholarly academic journal for the discipline of architecture, and it is managed, funded and published by the ACSA. As such, the ACSA’s leadership has fiduciary responsibility for the JAE and for what it publishes. The group of angry professors along with the fired JAE Executive Editor & some members of the JAE Editorial Board are claiming that the ACSA Leaderships cancellation is censorship and an infringement upon academic freedom.  They have also claimed that the ACSA’s actions are complicit with the Trump administration’s attempt at silencing academics.  If in fact the ACSA’s leadership cancelled the JAE’s theme issue on Palestine because the Trump Administration or any other political entity told them explicitly or implicitly to do so, I would also be enraged and I would defend the JAE from such inappropriate interference.  However, the simple truth is that the JAE’s Fall 2025 Theme Issue 79.2 Palestine was cancelled because it’s published “Call for Submissions” was so divorced from basic standards of scholarship and intellectual inquiry that it and the theme issue itself could not withstand any serious challenge to their scholarly legitimacy.  In short, the ACSA stepped in because it had to and because the JAE’s editors failed to do their job.  

The Theme Issue’s Call for Submissions was shamefully bursting with antisemitism, and hateful accusations of blood libel. It normalized the October 7th slaughter of Israeli non-combatants and glorified terrorist infrastructure designed to support terrorist activity and the slaughter of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians.  The ACSA leadership had no other responsible option but to step in and stop the editors from proceeding with publication.  While the blatant bias and the normalization of hate gave ample cause for the ACSA leadership to fire the Executive Editor and cancel the Theme Issue, there were other equally legitimate reasons to justify their actions.  The outrageously partisan and unbalanced premise of the Call for Submissions was so devoid of scholarly rigor, so lacking in cultural, historical and geopolitical understanding and so blind to the region’s multiple narratives and historical contexts that it should have been cancelled for these reasons alone.  The Issue’s “Call for Submissions” was so filled with selective bias and so clearly an attempt to justify and affect political change and the erasure of a sovereign state and its people that any Board of Directors that takes its fiduciary responsibilities seriously would have had no choice but to stop such rhetoric from being published under its watch. If the Theme Issue’s Guest Editors (all of whom are self-declared antizionist activists) wanted to have a critical, fact based, historically informed and nuanced dialog on the conflict and its relationship to architecture, they could have done so and it might have made an important contribution to architectural discourse. But the Guest Editors had no interest in such a laudable goal.  Clearly, their only goal was to turn the JAE’s Theme Issue into a one sided, hate-filled, antisemitic and accusatory screed while simultaneously chilling divergent positions and viewpoints. If anyone was attempting to silence the voices of the “other”, it was the four Guest editors of the Theme Issue.   

In short, the Theme Issue was cancelled because its Guest Editors failed to give an important topic what it deserves, and what the JAE’s readers deserve; a thoughtful, fact-based rigorous exploration with well-argued, diverse and even hotly divergent positions expressed. The JAE should have been a platform for vigorous informed debate on Palestine, but the JAE’s now fired Executive Editor and Guest Editors failed to set that in motion.   The ACSA Leadership was well aware of the looming disaster when in September of 2024, they posed a series of pertinent critiques and questions to the Journal’s Editorial Board, its Executive Editor and to the Theme Issue’s Guest Editors. They did this before the Call for Submissions went public.  The ACSA leadership wisely made the following points and asked the following legitimate questions;

“The [C]all [for Submissions] could be characterized, both by those who agree and those who disagree with assertions in it, as rooted in a specific political framing and theoretical point of view.”

“The language of the call may be perceived as one-sided or to presume one or more conclusions about Israel, Israeli people, and/or the history of the region. Does the [C]all [for Submissions] imply that Israel does not have a legitimate claim to its existence?”

“Was the [C]all [for Submissions] reviewed by anyone who might have a critical perspective on it or find the [C]all [for Submissions] controversial?”

These questions and concerns were ignored by the JAE’s Editorial Board, by the now fired Executive Editor and by the four Theme Issue Guest Editors.  If they gave these queries and viewpoints the consideration they deserved, things would be different.  Ironically, their supporters are claiming that they are victims of “epistemic violence”, when in fact, it was their successful exclusion of any legitimate positions contrary to theirs, and their own prohibition of any alternative voices, and their own rejection of differing ideologies that was and remains the only real example of epistemic violence, marginalization and exclusion in this matter.    

The serious claims of censorship and infringement upon Academic Freedom must be dealt with head on.  They sadly reveal a complete misunderstanding of Academic Freedom. This is shocking as the claims are being made by academics.  Academe is not a democracy. As such, neither the academy writ large nor an academic scholarly journal such as the JAE should be confused with the public square or with freedom of speech rights. Faculty always have the right – as we all do – to express their political opinions in in the public square.  Again, academia is not the public square and neither public opinion nor the government controls the development of knowledge, or its various venues and instruments for the dissemination of that knowledge. The production of knowledge is crafted through serious scholarship, and it requires that the scholarly work be subject to a rigorous disciplinary authority that scrupulously distinguishes good ideas from bad ideas. As Robert Post, renowned scholar of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech put it: disciplines require hierarchy. They “are grounded on the premise that some ideas are better than others; disciplinary communities claim the prerogative to discriminate between competent and incompetent work.”   Sadly, the “Call for Submissions” was an example of the latter and as such created a deeply flawed foundation from which to build an entire theme Issue.  This is another reason why the Theme Issue - as constituted -  should have been cancelled.  While it was indeed brimming with antisemitic and hateful rhetoric, it did so through unserious, unsupported and subjective argumentation.  In short, it was a discriminatory work of propaganda that negated long accepted standards of fact-based inquiry and scholarship.

 It is for these very legitimate and defensible reasons that the ACSA cancelled what would have been a deeply flawed and intellectually bankrupt JAE theme Issue on Palestine.