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The University of California, Berkeley, is investigating whether a law professor harassed a Muslim student when the student interrupted a dinner last month at the professor’s house with a pro-Palestinian speech and the professor attempted to stop her, NBC News reports.
Catherine Fisk, according to viral video on social media, touched the graduating law student, Malak Afaneh, as Afaneh was speaking during a dinner hosted by Fisk and her husband, Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, at their home. Chemerinksy, a free speech scholar, has written that the presidents of the third-year law school class had asked him and Fisk to have graduating law students over for dinner last month.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations shared on X a video showing Fisk coming up behind Afaneh, grabbing the phone in her hand from which she was reading the speech, putting her arm around Afaneh’s shoulder and saying, “Leave, this is not your house, it is my house.” Chemerinksy also says “Please leave our house.” Fisk then tries to pull Afaneh’s microphone out of her hands. Afaneh says UC is funding weapons manufacturers and Fisk, relinquishing the mic, says “I have nothing to do with what the UC does.”
NBC reported that Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination [OPHD] provided Afaneh a document confirming the investigation, which said “it was reported that on April 9, 2024 … respondent physically grabbed you, attempted to forcibly take your cell phone and microphone from your hand and asked you to leave a university event when you began to speak in support of Palestine and about Ramadan.”
A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “OPHD investigations are generally confidential, consequently we would not state whether any such case does or does not exist.” Fisk didn’t respond to a request for comment. The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it welcomed the “Title IX civil rights investigation,” saying that Fisk committed “an apparent act of Islamophobia and silencing based on [Afaneh’s] pro-Palestinian beliefs.”
