The founder of a nonprofit organization that supports the Palestinian rights movement will speak at a University of Michigan lecture dedicated to free speech and academic freedom.

Dima Khalidi, director of Chicago-based Palestine Legal, will give the 31st annual Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture from 4-5:30 p.m. March 14 in Forum Hall in Palmer Commons. It also can be viewed via Zoom or YouTube. Zoom users and in-person attendees will be able to submit questions.

Khalidi’s lecture is titled “A New McCarthyism? Academic Freedom and Palestine.” U-M’s Faculty Senate organizes and sponsors the event.

“I’ll be discussing the ways in which discourse about Palestine on campuses, whether it’s in the classroom or on the quad, is being increasingly censored in a way that harkens back to the McCarthyite period,” Khalidi told The University Record in an email.

“The three Michigan professors after whom this lecture is named were called to testify in front of (a panel of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities) in what is now widely recognized as a witch hunt that contradicts fundamental values of free speech and academic freedom. We have to recognize that there are ways in which the treatment of discourse on Palestine in academia — and beyond — is also undermining these same values.”

Khalidi, who received her undergraduate degree from U-M, founded Palestine Legal in 2012. She oversees the organization’s legal and advocacy work to protect the civil and constitutional rights of people who speak out for Palestinian freedom.

The abstract of Khalidi’s lecture says that amid a nationwide push to curtail the teaching of institutional racism and the dark sides of U.S. history, there are lessons to be learned from another subject that has led to attacks on free speech and academic freedom in campus communities: Palestine.

“In what can only be characterized as a ‘Palestine exception to free speech,’ academics, students, and others who speak out for Palestinian rights are routinely falsely accused, investigated, surveilled, harassed, and sometimes suffer severe consequences to their reputations and careers,” the abstract says.

In her email to the Record, Khalidi said, “If we can’t talk about Palestinian histories and experiences, or discuss the meaning and real world implications of Zionism, or debate the most pressing human rights issues of our time on college campuses, which are intended to be so-called ‘free marketplaces of ideas,’ what does that portend for free speech off campuses?”

She said she hopes people who watch the lecture take away the realization that they can’t take for granted the role of universities as bastions of academic freedom and the pursuit of truth and knowledge.

“Academic freedom around Palestine is one illustration of the ways that universities are microcosms of what’s happening all around us, and it’s critical that university communities come together to preserve these spaces for the most robust and honest interrogation of our past, present and future,” she said.

Khalidi has a juris doctor degree from DePaul University College of Law, a Master of Arts degree in international and comparative legal studies from SOAS University of London, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and Near Eastern studies from U-M.

The academic freedom lecture is named after three U-M faculty members — Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson — who were called in 1954 to testify before a panel of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities.

All three men invoked their constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations. They were suspended from the university. Davis and Nickerson were fired, while Markert was retained but censured. He left U-M soon afterward.

Several years later, there was a push to get the Board of Regents to apologize for what happened. The board did not issue an apology, so U-M’s Senate Assembly passed a resolution in 1990 that said it deeply regretted “the failure of the University Community to protect the values of intellectual freedom” in 1954 and established the annual lecture in honor of the three men.

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• Davis Markert Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture