The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is an international membership association that represents more than 200 schools of architecture and 7,000 faculty around the world. Last month, as reported by AN, it canceled the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) themed on Palestine and fired its interim executive editor. The action resulted in the resignation of all 20 members of the JAE editorial board on March 10, shortly before the annual ACSA meeting. Its theme was Repair. Initial Steps Toward SolidarityWhile ACSA Executive Director Michael Monti and ACSA board leadership have framed the cancellation as the result of a reappraisal of the legal risks that have intensified with the reactionary political climate that arrived with the Trump administration, the conflict actually has a history as old as the latest round of the Israel-Palestine war.After Hamass attack on Jewish settlements on October 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and Israels subsequent bombing campaign and ground invasion that has killed more than 50,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians, thenJAE executive editor Nora Wendl, a professor at the University of New Mexico, began coordinating a statement of support for Palestine among the JAE editorial board. To her, it seemed appropriate and very much precedented: The previous year, ACSA had published a statement of support for Ukraine that called Russias invasion a blatant violation of sovereignty. She sent a draft to Monti and then-ACSA president Mo Zell. Their response was, This is so inappropriate, this is so offensive. What are you doing? Wendl recalled recently. (AN reached out to Monti about his reactions to this draft statement, along with nearly two dozen other questions. Monti did not answer the majority of these questions, including this one, but he did supply a timeline of events in the ACSA/JAE conflict.)ACSA leadership continued to push back on JAEs statement. If the word genocide was to be used, there would have to be a footnote and citation. The JAE had to prove it was a genocide, said Wendl. They kept picking apart the language, saying Its not apartheid, look what the ADL is saying! she said, referring to the Anti-Defamation League.Wendl was willing to comply. But more obstacles appeared. According to her, the JAE board was told they could publish a statement only if each individual board member was listed by name, and ACSA requested that the JAE board make it clear that the ACSA was not involved in the statement.The combination of identifying themselves individually without the institutional backing of ACSA made Wendl uncomfortable. She said she and her colleagues decided not to publish a statement under the auspices of ACSA and JAE. The experience informed JAEs board to bring the issue of Palestines geopolitical context and related built-environment ramifications into JAEs core function: scholarly publication. Lets do what we always do, Wendl said. Lets take it back to scholarship. Lets make a Palestine issue. I dont know that we would have been this aligned to do [this] issue if we hadnt gone through everything we went through trying to write that statement.This decision would break open a much wider fissure between the JAE and ACSA that has resulted in the resignation of ACSA board leadership and the exit of dues-paying member schools. For some, the conflict raises the question of the value and efficacy of this century-old professional association for contemporary architectural educators.A Call for Papers Sets Off a CrisisIn advance of a meeting between the ACSA board, the JAE board, and the Palestine issue theme editors in early September 2024, Monti and ACSA president Cathi Ho Schar shared the Palestine call for papers with Michael Zaretsky and Adrian Parr Zaretsky of the University of Oregon and Sharon Haar at the University of Michigan, before it had been made public. JAE board members, according to their resignation letter, said sharing the call beyond the bounds of the ACSAs leadership before it was published is a breach of ACSA bylaws and a violation of the peer review process.Billy Fleming, a former member of the JAE editorial board and an assistant professor at Temple University, who is Jewish, thought that Monti assembled this group to tell him what he wanted to do, which is to cancel this issue.To be discussed at the meeting last September was a list of sharply critical questions drafted by the ACSA and read aloud by Ho Schar, according to Cruz Garcia, a former member of the JAE editorial board and architecture professor at Iowa State University, who attended the meeting. The questions probed at the one-sided framing of conflict in the call for papers. There was concern that the call was rooted in a specific political framing. ACSA wanted to know why the JAE was not discussing other examples of genocide or settler-colonialism and asked if the call implied that Israel does not have a legitimate claim to its existence. Garcia felt the ACSA was looking for a false neutrality; an adherence to a journalistic model of discourse that was not relevant in an academic setting and would make it impossible for scholars to offer moral or ethical condemnation on anything.As discussed in an online town hall meeting in March, the JAE board felt that the ACSAs questions inappropriately sowed doubt about the journals scholarly integrity. Regardless, they moved forward and published the call in mid-September 2024. Its text has since been removed from the JAE website.The JAE board would later encounter similar talking points in a letter dated October 14, 2024. (AN has reviewed a copy of the letter.) It was signed by the educators ACSA leadership shared the call for papers withParr Zaretsky, Zaretsky, and Haaralong with Bijan Youssefzadeh, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. The letter criticized the call as deeply ideological and said ACSA had become a platform for hate speech. It asked ACSA and JAE to issue an apology and for JAE to retract the call for papers. Around that time, an open letter titled Architects United Against Anti-Semitism circulated, eventually gathering over 700 signatures, though many of the signatories are not identified as architects. The letter broadly aligns with popular interpretations of the Israel-Palestine war that center Hamas as a terror organization. (The call for papers did not mention Hamas.) The letter described the call for papers as an act of academic malpractice that was clearly aimed to glorify Hamas violence and demonize Israel under the pretense of scholarship. The letters text stridently objected to calling Israels actions genocide, a label the signatories feel is inappropriate because it requires the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in part or in whole. There is a clear distinction between that and what is happening in Gaza today. This is because the State of Israel is fighting a defensive war against Hamas. Despite Hamas embedding itself in civilian populations to maximize casualties, Israel has managed to maintain an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian deaths relative to enemy soldiers/terrorists when compared to other conflicts, the letter continues. This could not be possible if Israel were intent on committing genocide.The letter interpreted the call for papers itself as a prologue to genocide because of its criticism of Israel, declaring that the ASCA is one of many academic institutions getting swept up in the same type of behavior that preceded the Holocaust for over a decade in German intellectual society. If you ever wondered what you would have done if you were alive back in 1930s Germany, it will be how you will respond to this moment.The language of the JAE call was sharply decolonial and anti-Zionist. The text explicitly labeled Israeli military actions as genocide, a controversial stance that aligns with the viewpoints of international human rights organizations like the United Nations and Human Rights Watch.The goal for the Palestine issue was to reflect on the global reverberations and social, political, economic, and environmental implications of this historical juncture for design, research, and education in architecture, said Nora Akawi, a Palestinian architect and an assistant professor at Cooper Union, who commented on behalf of the issues four theme editors. (The three others were Nick Estes of the University of Minnesota, Zo Samudzi of Clark University, and Omar Jabary Salamanca of the Universit Libre de Bruxelles.) For more than a century, Palestine has been at the receiving end of imperial and zionist formations of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. She continued, Our call invited contributions to consider and document architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in such formations. A Possible Shift in ACSA ViewpointsDespite past tensions, some editorial board members, like Ersela Kripa, a founding partner of AGENCY, felt that the Palestine call was consistent with ACSAs generally progressive view of architecture pedagogy. A few days after the call was published, the ACSA issued a joint statement opposing the prohibition on diversity, equity, and inclusion in design education. ACSA and three other design education professional associations jointly communicate our opposition to any legislation that prevents educators from teaching and sharing complete and accurate knowledge about the built environment for the purpose of shielding students from divisive or disagreeable content related to the impact of race and racism in America and global society, as well as other pedagogy related to gender and LGBTQ+ identities.According to Monti, this truce was interrupted by the new presidential administration in Washington. Shortly after President Trumps inauguration, thousands of harassing emails were sent to ACSA and JAE board members, condemning the call for papers. One subject line read: Eff The PaliNazis!!! Strong Condemnation of the JAEs Alarming, Politically Charged Call for Papers. Angry letters from the faculty of member schools also made their way to the ACSA. Some voices described how Jewish faculty and students have felt unsafe on college campuses recently.In February, the ACSA initiated a legal review of the call for papers, and on February 21, the ACSA board voted to stop the Palestine issue in the middle of the peer-review process, before they had seen any of its contents.As reported in AN, which broke the news of the Palestine issues cancellation: The ACSA board decided the risks from publishing the issue have significantly increased as a result of new actions by the U.S. presidential administration as well as other actions at state levels. These substantial risks include personal threats to journal editors, authors, and reviewers, as well as to ACSA volunteers and staff. They also include legal and financial risks facing the organization overall. Monti and Ho Schar have noted that the definitions of antisemitism embraced by the Trump administration and developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) appear overly vague and restrictive of free speech. However, these laws exist, and are being applied widely. As such, ACSAs legal counsel advises that the JAE Call for Papers would not withstand a legal claim due to the calls language.Considering his other clients, it might be hard to imagine ACSAs legal counsel coming to any other conclusion. Previously, ACSA was advised by Jeffrey P. Altman of the law firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. Altman is also listed as general counsel for The Republican Jewish Coalition, which on March 2 issued a press release praising President Trump for expediting $4 billion of military aid to Israel. The ACSA board was not informed of Altmans relationship to this conservative pro-Israel organization, according to Marcelo Lpez-Dinardi, an associate professor at Texas A&M, and former ACSA board member. Asked for comment about this, Monti and Ho Schar did not respond to emails.Four days later, on February 25, Monti and Ho Schar informed the University of Michigans McLain Clutter (who became Interim Executive Editor of the JAE after Wendl stepped down in August 2024) of the ACSA boards decision. Clutter refused to work with the ACSA on a replacement issue and was fired on February 28. That same day, ACSA informed faculty conciliators and university administrators that they had stopped publication of the Palestine issue before reaching out to JAE board members, which Ho Schar would later apologize for in the annual ACSA business meeting, held on March 5.Further, Monti and Ho Schar, on behalf of the ACSA board, told AN that we regret that the decision to halt JAE 79.2 has caused members to question our values and intentions. We have started work to repair trust and relationships in the organization. Monti and Ho Schar also shared that ACSA learned that in two states, which include 12 colleges with architecture programs, presidents at member universities and governors were being urged to restrict the use of state funds for ACSA membership dues because of the Palestine JAE issue. They feared that, in states with IHRA antisemitism statutes, joining ACSA could be deemed illegal due to the call for papers. In their estimation, up to 87 of 132 U.S. member schools are potentially exposed and vulnerable.On March 3, the JAE editorial board sent a letter to ACSA demanding the reinstatement of Clutter and the reversal of the decision to terminate the Palestine issue. They criticized the decision as an attack on academic freedom, intellectual integrity, and ethical scholarship. The next day, they released an open letter that eventually garnered the signatures of 1,500 architectural educators, echoing their demands. The membership of our field is appalled by this, said Fleming.That was the last time the JAE editors attempted to work within the ACSA to resolve this rift. In a letter dated March 10, all members of the board announced their resignation. Three days later, the JAE board, now in exile, held a town hall meeting to lay out their timeline of events and discuss finding an alternative publisher for the Palestine issue.Resignations and a CancellationThe ACSAs own board has not been insulated from this wave of resignations. Due to the ACSAs handling of the Palestine issue, Lpez-Dinardi, the ACSA board member, resigned on March 16. Another board member, Vivian Lee, associate professor at the University of Toronto, also resigned, and Jos Ibarra, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who was to begin an ACSA board term, withdrewhis acceptanceof this board position.Ive tried my part, [from] within, to develop a dialogue that I thought was needed, Lpez-Dinardi said. He did not vote to cancel the Palestine issue.At least one school, Portland State University (PSU), has declined to renew its ACSA membership, in part because of the canceled Palestine issue. The architecture schools director Juan Manuel Heredia put the issue to a faculty vote and the result was unanimous, he said. Heredia called the decision a pragmatic one made in the context of budget cut austerity. It seems like we can use the funds that we pay ACSA for other purposes that could benefit the school more directly, he said. While PSU faculty have benefitted from ACSA publications, Heredia said the abrupt cancellation of an issue of its flagship journal calls into question their commitment to academic freedom and scholarly publication. (ACSA also publishes a second journal, TAD, that focuses on technology, architecture, and design. Four members of its editorial board also recently resigned.) This issueand not any broader political alignment among facultyis what prompted their unified objection. I dont think everyone is on the same [page] politically speaking, but everyone is on the same [page] in terms of this type of attempt at curtailing academic freedom, Heredia said.Much of ACSAs public programming has been broadly progressive, and supportive of a wide range of social justice or DEI initiatives, leaving ACSA and JAE board members wondering why this critically framed analysis of Palestine became such a red line. I couldnt see how we could support these other initiatives but not that one in particular, said Lpez-Dinardi.For instance, the ACSA Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture was established to support academics from marginalized backgrounds working in non-tenure-tracked positions. Recent examples of the ACSA research series Where Are My People have highlighted the experiences of LGBTQ+ architects and educators. A previous issue of the JAE was focused on reparations. Clutter, the former interim executive editor, sees a clear double-standard, he said. Whether [theres] a line or no line, to me its equally damning for the decision-making of the ACSA. Either theyre making decisions based on a racist double standard, or theyve proven themselves completely flaccid in the face of encroaching fascism.It feels to me as a Muslim scholar that some of the last truly acceptable forms of racism these days are Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, said former JAE editorial board member Ozayr Saloojee, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.Clutter hopes the rupture with ACSA can be fixed, but he said its likely not possible with Monti as executive director, a role he has held for 21 years. I hope that this rift creates deep, structural reforms in ACSA, he said. Its really hard to remake these kinds of organizations with decades-long history, [] so it would be a terrible shame if this actually initiates the complete downfall of ACSA.For now, the former JAE editorial board members are focusing on a publishing and scholarship future beyond ACSA, according to Fleming. During ASCAs annual meeting in New Orleans, held on March 2022, JAE board members worked with Dark Matter U on counterprogramming aimed at establishing a new academic research and professional organization thats actually capable of serving architectural education in the 21st century, which I do not think the ACSA is capable of doing any longer, said Fleming. Coming out of the New Orleans conference, these critiques have pushed ACSA to respond to membership that is unhappy with their decision to cancel the Palestine issue. On March 27, ACSA leadership sent an update to members notifying them that the organization would ask an independent consultant or task force to review the decisions, processes, and structures that led up to the initial call for papers and the subsequent cancellation.Canceling the Palestine issue sends a clear signal, Fleming said, to members that when any kind of stated commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, or justice has any challenge, [] the ACSA is willing to walk away from these commitments. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are essentially slogans to them, not material commitments. I dont think its beyond the scope of reason to believe that in the not-so-distant future, that things like climate research might be censored or have restrictions put on [them], said Clutter. People are going to wonder whether or not venues like the ACSA will be a reliable platform and advocate for that kind of research. He wondered, When and will ACSA be the kind of member organization that stands up for the freedom of its members?In a moment when an Indian doctoral candidate in urban planning at Columbia GSAPP has fled to Canada to avoid ICE and the Trump administration is demanding that Columbia Universitys Middle Eastern Studies program be put under receivership, the fragility of First Amendment rights doesnt seem like abstract quandary. Wendl said that canceling the Palestine issue could prompt higher education administrators to say, This is a topic we dont touch. This professional association said its verboten, so you dont talk about this, you dont write about this, you dont protest about this. I think that is really, really dangerous.A too-complicit academy is profoundly terrifying, said Saloojee. We are absolutely at a moment of reckoning.Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focused on architecture and landscape architectures relationship to public policy.