Pennsylvania State University - University Park: Student Sues for Art Censorship

The exhibit "Portraits of Terror" explores the promotion of terrorism and anti-Semitism in the Palestinian territories. Pennsylvania State University student Joshua Stulman, who is Jewish, focuses on the origins of anti-Israeli terrorism, and in a previous project had focused on the "appropriation" of Nazi imagery by Hamas and Hezbollah. For this, he was called into a meeting with his art professor, Robert Yarber, where he was told that he was a racist, that his art was racist, that it promoted Islamophobia, and that he "was calling all Arabs murderers and deliberately misleading uninformed university students to promote the idea that all Arabs are terrorists," according to a lawsuit later filed by Stulman against Penn State University and the two professors who censored him. Perhaps in order to highlight the fierce political disagreement between Yarber and Stulman, Stulman's complaint alleges that Yarber also said that "Israel is a terrorist state" and that Israel had "no right to exist." Indeed, the Daily Collegian, Penn State's student newspaper, reported at the time that the university had justified canceling the exhibit by claiming that it "did not promote cultural diversity" or "opportunities for democratic dialogue," and that another professor claimed it "did not mesh with the university's educational mission."