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Join us for a conversation with leading scholars, activists, and organizers about how we can combat the attacks on people in our streets, our communities, and our universities. How do we defend ourselves and organize against ICE, academic repression, racism, and attempts to silence us? The panel will feature those who have been targets of right-wing attacks as well as those who have been writing and organizing about the long history of repression in the US, including Tom Alter, A. Naomi Paik, Ellen Schrecker, and Erik Wallenberg, and will be moderated by Bill Mullen.

Tom Alter, a respected and tenured professor of history at Texas State University, was fired in September for remarks he made at a socialist conference in his capacity as a private citizen. He was fired without due process, a clear violation of both Texas State University policy and Texas state law. Alter is a published labor historian, a popular teacher and adviser, a proud union member, a father of two, a socialist activist, and author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas.

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II. She coedited four special issues of the Radical History Review on militarism and capitalism, sanctuary, policing, and the Anthropocene. She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books and “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog at the Smithsonian. She is a part of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and a founding member of the Sanctuary Campus Network and Sanctuary for All UIC. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian and author, Professor emeritus at Yeshiva University. Her many books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the University; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and most recently the co-edited collection, The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is a member of Historians for Peace and Democracy, for which she serves on the steering committee.

Erik Wallenberg is Historian at the Miami Center for Racial Justice, worker-owner at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, and co-host at CounterPunch Radio. He was visiting assistant professor of history at New College of Florida from 2022 to 2023, teaching classes in U.S. history and environmental history. He was part of the struggle to save New College from a hostile takeover and continues to work on teaching and preserving Black history. He is co-author of a forthcoming book on the Black freedom struggle in Chicago, out in 2027 from Haymarket Books.

Bill Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue University. He is a long-time activist and organizer and active in the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist Network. His books include We Charge Genocide: American Fascism and the Rule of Law, James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition.