University Seeks to Fire Palestinian Professor

A Palestinian professor whose fate is considered a litmus test of academic liberty by many of his peers was accused Wednesday of long-standing ties to terrorism by the University of South Florida, which asked a judge for the green light to fire him.

Since September, Sami A. Arian has been on paid leave from his tenured post and barred from the Tampa campus while administrators and trustees pondered what to do with him. The professor of computer science has never been charged with a crime, though the FBI investigated him in the mid-1990s on suspicions that a think tank he founded might have been a front for Muslim extremism. In February, federal prosecutors said Arian still was being investigated but gave no details.

On Dec. 19, trustees of the state-run school recommended firing Arian, saying his outside activities had caused immense disruption at the university. But after university President Judy Genshaft announced plans to terminate Arian’s employment, saying he posed a safety risk, the faculty senate voted against that decision. In June, a committee of the American Assn. of University Professors sided with Arian, warning that it could censure the university if he was fired on Genshaft’s grounds.

On Wednesday, Genshaft said she had spent months in discussions with law enforcement officials, faculty members, students, lawyers and representatives of the professors’ group. She said she believes “Arian has abused his position at the university and is using academic freedom as a shield to cover improper activities.”

In court papers filed Wednesday, the university alleges that beginning in 1988, Arian had engaged in “activities which were directed to inciting or producing lawless action,” including sponsoring Islamic terrorists’ entry into the United States under the guise of attending academic conferences, and raising money to help finance suicide bombings against Israel.

In June, the Tampa Tribune quoted former and current Israeli security and intelligence officials as describing Arian as a founding member of the governing council of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Arian has long maintained he has never advocated the use of violence and has no links to Islamic Jihad or any other terrorist group. He downplays his anti-Israeli statements, including “death to Israel,” as slogans against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

In its court papers, the university asks a state judge in Tampa to agree that Arian can be fired without infringing on his constitutional rights. The decision reached by the courts would be accepted as final, said R. B. Friedlander, a counsel for the school.

Arian predicted Wednesday that the university’s legal bid would fail. “It’s still a case of academic freedom,” he said. “That hasn’t changed. It’s just an indication of how politicized the university has become.”

Friedlander disagreed. “We pretty strongly feel it’s not an issue of academic freedom, because that deals with what you teach in the classroom, and your work in your discipline,” she said.

Mark Klisch, vice president of the university’s faculty union, said that despite the allegations aired Wednesday, the administration still hasn’t made its case for getting rid of the controversial professor.

“Punishing a man and threatening to fire a man based on rumors, that’s just not the American way,” Klisch said. “All the faculty union has wanted all along is to give this man the due process he deserves.” He said he believed the university took the case to the courts, a process that could take months, to stall to see whether the Justice Department would act against Arian.

The professor’s brother-in-law, Mazen Najjar, who is also Palestinian, is expected to be deported this week from a maximum-security federal lockdown. Najjar, who holds a doctorate in engineering and taught at the University of South Florida, spent more than 3 1/2 years in jail on secret evidence that the U.S. government said linked him to terrorists.

“If they had enough evidence, don’t you think they would have gone after Arian, arrested him and deported him, the way they are doing against his brother-in-law?” asked Klisch. “Now if such evidence shows up, that’s a different story.”

Friedlander said she wasn’t privy to the government’s reasoning about Arian. “I do know they have taken [the] extraordinary step of announcing publicly that he is under active criminal investigation,” she said.

Associated Press contributed to this report.