As the debate around free speech on campus rages across the country two and a half months after Hamas killed 1,100 people in Israel and Israel began a retaliatory campaign that has killed more than 20,000 people in Gaza, San Antonio has not dodged the conversation — including at San Antonio College.
Now, a student at UT Health San Antonio now says their administration has ended the sponsorship of a health equity in Palestine series, forcing students to cancel two events planned for mid-December and effectively delaying any eventual events by weeks or more.
A group of medical students at UT Health San Antonio sent a letter to their university administration on Nov. 7 calling on them to make a statement supporting health care workers in Gaza who are struggling to function amidst the ongoing humanitarian and medical crisis following weeks of Israel’s retaliation to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
The group met with the university’s president and top administrators a week later.
During the conversation, UT Health SA President William Henrich agreed that the best entity at the university to manage conversations about the healthcare situation in Gaza was the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics (CMHE), according to the fourth-year Palestinian American student who led the group.
“So I suggested the center, and he really liked that idea, so I was put in contact with the directors of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, and with them we agreed that it was within the center’s capacity and role and that the center is well-equipped to have these conversations,” the student said.
TPR is not using the student’s name over her fear that it could harm her career.
She said she collaborated with faculty at CMHE to come up with a teach-in series titled “Health Equity in Palestine,” largely based off of recordings of Harvard Medical School’s Health Equity in Palestine series that began in November.
They would play recordings of the streamed Harvard series and then have a discussion with local experts afterwards.
“The goal of our session was to educate our community about the ongoing medical catastrophe, but also to create spaces of community for all of our Palestinian trainees, staff, anyone who felt affected by the conflict, and all of our allied community members by kind of platforming these Palestinian experiences,” she said.
The student said she and the CMHE planned to host three events before the New Year — the first on cancer treatment, the second on pregnancy, and the third on pediatric care.
The medical student said the first event had a high turnout and was a productive discussion but that in the week before their second event, a CMHE faculty member told her over email that the center would be ending its sponsorship of the program.
A section of the email reads: “1) a worry that our campus is not well-equipped to moderate conversations on such a complex—and unfortunately extremely divisive—evolving crisis. We worry that we simply don’t have the right faculty resources to do this well now. 2) a worry about potential unwanted/unpredictable (and certainly unintended) harms arising from the sessions.”
The student said she reached out to administration repeatedly to see if students could hold the event as planned without CMHE’s sponsorship, but that she felt forced to cancel after receiving no response.
Harry Gunkel, a former faculty member at UT Health San Antonio who assisted neonatal care efforts in the West Bank for five years with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, had planned to be one of the speaker’s at the canceled session.
He said he was frustrated that the event would not be going forward as planned.
“That’s deeply concerning,” Gunkel said. “That’s disappointing, and that’s, I mean in my mind, that really sullies the reputation of UT Health San Antonio in the community. If a healthcare center — a health science center — can’t deal with the complexities of health inequity, then what is it there for?”
UT Health SA Chief Marketing Communications Officer Heather Adkins said in a statement that the decision to end CMHE’s sponsorship of the Health Equity in Palestine teach-in series had nothing to do with its content.
Instead, she said, the proper protocol for these sorts of events was for registered student organizations (RSOs) to host them themselves — though CMHE had already hosted the first event in the series, and the medical student said administration was aware that two further events had been planned.
The student said the only explanation she was ever given was from the CMHE faculty member about the content’s complexity and divisiveness.
“The center is supposed to be having these discussions on campus, and the fact that they forced the center to shut it down is really the problem,” she said.
She said she is now in the process of forming an RSO called “San Antonio Healthcare Workers for Palestine” so that they can resume hosting health equity events as soon as possible.
But she said because of the process to form an RSO and then get an event approved, they may not be able to restart the Health Equity in Palestine events until late January.
