JVP Academic Council Statement in Solidarity with GWU’s CC Culver

27 May 2025

Dr. Ellen M. Granberg
President, George Washington University

Christopher Alan Bracey
Provost, George Washington University

Dr. Paul Wahlbeck
Dean, Columbia College of Arts & Sciences, George Washington University

Grace E. Speights
President, Board of Trustees, George Washington University

cc: Committee A of the American Association of University Professors

Dear President Granberg, Provost Bracey, Dean Wahlbeck, and Chair Speights:

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) extends its admiration, gratitude, and support to Cecilia “CC” Culver. Ms. Culver used her platform at the graduation ceremony of George Washington University’s College of Arts and Sciences to do exactly what must always be done at a university: tell the truth—in this case, the urgent truth about (i) the continuing Israeli genocide in Gaza and (ii) the complicity in the genocide of GW’s trustees and administration through the university’s investments in corporate genocide profiteers.   

Following the graduation ceremony, GW’s administration exposed its support for the ongoing genocide by “apologizing” to “graduates and families” for Ms. Culver’s bearing public witness at the ceremony to the harms and wrongs of the genocide and the university’s investments in it.   

The GW administration also announced it is banning Ms. Culver from campus and searching through its own rules with the goal of finding one or more to use to punish Ms. Culver. Banning persons from campus, especially those who are members of a university community, for acts of peaceful dissent is inimical to the educational mission of a university. And the search for a rule or rules to apply after the fact is a charade of procedural fairness–a rule through weaponized law and not a rule of law. All of this is both dangerous and risible. 

What, finally, is most disturbing in the administration’s punitive response to Ms. Culver’s speech is the disregard shown for the crucial lesson Rev. King taught in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he wrote that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust” laws and rules. Any university rule or code that bars a student from telling the truth, or from bearing honest witness to immoral conduct–should such a rule be found at GW–is necessarily unjust and thus a rule that should and must be disobeyed.

This support for Israel and its genocide by the GW administration is not new.  Earlier in the academic year, GWU suspended nine organizations, including the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, for protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide.

In a welcome contrast to the wrongful response of GW’s administration to Ms. Culver’s comments at the graduation ceremony, GW’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) responded by (i) affirming her right to speak about Palestine and Israel “without retribution,” (ii) joining her call for the divestment of GW’s endowment “from companies tied to Israel,” and (iii) urging the GW administration to “resist” Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the repression and dismantling of the Palestinian solidarity movement by the Trump administration.  The Academic Council fully endorses GW’s FSJP’s principled response to Ms. Culver’s intervention at the graduation ceremony. 

Since criticizing Israel for conducting genocide is in no sense an attack on Jews or Judaism, GW’s administration’s bad conduct in this incident, and in remaining invested in genocide profiteers, in no way fights antisemitism or contributes to Jewish safety.  This conduct by the administration is, however, antithetical to, and an attack on, our Jewish values of standing against injustice and oppression in all cases.

Unfortunately, the GW administration’s bad conduct in support of the Israeli state and its genocide is anything but unusual in US higher education today.  It is, to the contrary, but one more case in a virtual epidemic of intellectual and moral failure by higher education administrators in this time of genocide in Gaza and emergent fascism in the U.S.  

Finally, we want to turn again to Ms. Culver and say that what we find most commendable about her conduct and words is that in speaking at the GW graduation, she did precisely what must be done at this moment: she centered Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza in the cause of justice.

Sincerely, 

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.

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