The editorial board of an architecture journal has resigned after its parent association cancelled an upcoming theme issue titled “Palestine.”
The Journal of Architectural Education planned to publish the issue in fall 2025, according to an archived version of the call for papers, which refers to the “Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.”
“In the face of the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education calls for urgent reflections on this historical moment’s implications for design, research, and education in architecture,” the call for papers read.
On February 28, the nonprofit Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, which owns the journal, released a statement saying it was halting the issue for increased risks due to “new actions by the U.S. federal administration.” The statement listed “potential risks” such as “personal threats to journal editors, authors, and reviewers, as well as to ACSA volunteers and staff” as well as “legal and financial risks facing the organization.” ACSA did not respond to our request for comment to expand on what these risks might be.
In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump suggested Palestinians be permanently relocated from Gaza, and claimed the United States would take over the Gaza Strip. This week immigration agents arrested a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and Trump withheld funding from the school, saying it failed to protect Jewish students from anti-semitism. Trump claimed more arrests would follow.
The Palestine issue’s call for papers has been removed from the journal’s website.
The same day the ACSA released its statement, the organization fired McLain Clutter, executive editor of the journal, whose term was set to end in 2026. He told The Architect’s Newspaper he was fired for refusing to endorse the ACSA’s decision to halt publication. “ACSA will be on the wrong side of history, and they leave faculty at member institutions with little reason for faith in their support,” he told the newspaper.
Clutter did not respond to our request for comment.
In a post on X, Omar Jabary Salamanca, a former member of the editorial board and a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, posted a letter addressed to the ACSA Board of Directors announcing the board’s “collective resignation, effective immediately.”
According to the letter, the resignation resulted from “insulting treatment of its theme editors and the anti-Palestinian nature of their interrogation” as well as “wanton disrespect for the peer-review process.”
“Over the past few months, the ACSA has been unwilling to uphold its commitment to the values of academic freedom and ethical scholarship, contradicting the organization’s stated commitment to equity and justice,” they wrote.
The letter is unsigned, so whether the entire current board has resigned is unclear. At press time, the journal’s editorial board page returned “Page not found.” Social media posts by Salamanca, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoé Samudzi indicate they are among those resigning. The resigning board members plan to host a town hall meeting on March 13 to discuss the decisions and their implications.
Jennifer McMillan, the vice president of external communications for Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal, told us in an email the decision to cancel the issue “was made by the ACSA Board. As their publishing partners we are respectful of the decision they have made.”
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The journal did the right action!
Read the text below … which is hardly the text one finds in an academic journal.
The editorial board of an architecture journal has resigned after its parent association cancelled an upcoming theme issue titled “Palestine.”
The Journal of Architectural Education planned to publish the issue in fall 2025, according to an archived version of the call for papers, which refers to the “Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.”
“In the face of the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education calls for urgent reflections on this historical moment’s implications for design, research, and education in architecture,” the call for papers read.
That is not a call for papers.. that is a political, anti-Israel statement. It is not surprising, representing as it does the nastiness of the anti-Israel contingent.
I think they had no choice but to cancel it. It sounds like antisemitic propaganda.
How was it that is supposedly responsible scientific journal becomes a focus group advocating violence and terrorism?
Interesting – explain how that is the case, please.
Exactly! Even Twitter may not allow this!!
Opposing violence is advocating violence? 1984 stuff here.
The same way that some American Universities have been infiltrated.
The message of hatred will never die.
Islamic Jihad is a cult of death and will thrive among the credulous.
The text of the call for papers to be included in the proposed issue was a undisguised solicitation for hate mongers to spread their message. Fortunately, more informed opinions prevailed. That the board self-identified and resigned is a plus.
Walter Freeman
If wondering how your profession can respect human rights and avoid violating the Genocide Convention is “political”, then yes, it is necessary for a journal to be “political”.
As a reminder:
> The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate:
>
> Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192/summaries
> The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
> The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that the abovementioned conduct deprived a significant portion of the civilian population in Gaza of their fundamental rights, including the rights to life and health, and that the population was targeted based on political and/or national grounds. It therefore found that the crime against humanity of persecution was committed.
> Finally, the Chamber assessed that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza. In this regard, the Chamber found that the material provided by the Prosecution only allowed it to make findings on two incidents that qualified as attacks that were intentionally directed against civilians. Reasonable grounds to believe exist that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant, despite having measures available to them to prevent or repress the commission of crimes or ensure the submittal of the matter to the competent authorities, failed to do so.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges
The Theme Issue’s Call for Submissions was shamefully bursting with antisemitism, and hateful accusations of blood libel. It normalized the October 7th slaughter of Israeli non-combatants and glorified terrorist infrastructure designed to support terrorist activity and the slaughter of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians. The ACSA leadership had no other responsible option but to step in and stop the editors from proceeding with publication. While the blatant bias and the normalization of hate gave ample cause for the ACSA leadership to fire the Executive Editor and cancel the Theme Issue, there were other equally legitimate reasons to justify their actions. The outrageously partisan and unbalanced premise of the Call for Submissions was so devoid of scholarly rigor, so lacking in cultural, historical and geopolitical understanding and so blind to the region’s multiple narratives and historical contexts that it should have been cancelled for these reasons alone. The Issue’s “Call for Submissions” was so filled with selective bias and so clearly an attempt to justify and affect political change and the erasure of a sovereign state and its people that any Board of Directors that takes its fiduciary responsibilities seriously would have had no choice but to stop such rhetoric from being published under its watch. If the Theme Issue’s Guest Editors (all of whom are self-declared antizionist activists) wanted to have a critical, fact based, historically informed and nuanced dialog on the conflict and its relationship to architecture, they could have done so and it might have made an important contribution to architectural discourse. But the Guest Editors had no interest in such a laudable goal. Clearly, their only goal was to turn the JAE’s Theme Issue into a one sided, hate-filled, antisemitic and accusatory screed while simultaneously chilling divergent positions and viewpoints. If anyone was attempting to silence the voices of the “other”, it was the four Guest editors of the Theme Issue.
In short, the Theme Issue was cancelled because its Guest Editors failed to give an important topic what it deserves, and what the JAE’s readers deserve; a thoughtful, fact-based rigorous exploration with well-argued, diverse and even hotly divergent positions expressed. The JAE should have been a platform for vigorous informed debate on Palestine, but the JAE’s now fired Executive Editor and Guest Editors failed to set that in motion.
The serious claims of censorship and infringement upon Academic Freedom must be dealt with head on. They sadly reveal a complete misunderstanding of Academic Freedom. This is shocking as the claims are being made by academics. Academe is not a democracy. As such, neither the academy writ large nor an academic scholarly journal such as the JAE should be confused with the public square or with freedom of speech rights. Faculty always have the right – as we all do – to express their political opinions in in the public square. Again, academia is not the public square and neither public opinion nor the government controls the development of knowledge, or its various venues and instruments for the dissemination of that knowledge. The production of knowledge is crafted through serious scholarship, and it requires that the scholarly work be subject to a rigorous disciplinary authority that scrupulously distinguishes good ideas from bad ideas. As Robert Post, renowned scholar of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech put it: disciplines require hierarchy. They “are grounded on the premise that some ideas are better than others; disciplinary communities claim the prerogative to discriminate between competent and incompetent work.” Sadly, the “Call for Submissions” was an example of the latter and as such created a deeply flawed foundation from which to build an entire theme Issue. This is yet another reason why the Theme Issue – as constituted – should have been cancelled. The Call was indeed brimming with antisemitic and hateful rhetoric, and it did so through unserious, unsupported and subjective argumentation. It exceeded commonly accepted bounds of academic and scholarly conduct by failing to show respect for the rights of other to hold and to disseminate views that differ from the guest editors’ views. In short, the call was an exclusionary work of propaganda that negated long accepted standards of fact-based inquiry and scholarship. It was a challenge to the core values of academic inquiry. It is for these legitimate and defensible reasons that the ACSA leadership should be defended for rebuking the Call and for cancelling what would have been a deeply flawed and intellectually bankrupt theme Issue based upon that Call. The ACSA leadership did the right thing.
Excellent comment
The “scholars” who concocted the “special issue” on “Palestine” never thought about a special issue on the 10/07 pogrom, Syria, South Sudan, Congo, Myanmar…They belong to the crowd fixated with Israel and its “lobby”, for reasons that are easy to guess. There is an adjective for those reasons. Ninety years ago, the Germans elected a chancellor who shared exactly those reasons.
The attack on free speech by the Israel Lobby is fanatical.
Good riddance of these “editors.” Time to replace these censorious folks. I look forward to this edition of the Journal. The brutal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israel is shameful, with wanton destruction of sites of education, worship, and healthcare. Shedding light on this from an academic and architectural perspective seems like reasonable academic expression.