LONDON: The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has scrapped plans for the fall 2025 edition of its Journal of Architectural Education, which would have focused on Palestine, and dismissed the publication’s interim executive editor.
The decision followed a vote on Feb. 21 by the association’s board of directors, which cited “substantial risks” at both personal and editorial levels, The Architect’s Newspaper reported over the weekend.
“The decision followed an extended series of difficult discussions within the organization about the potential risks from publishing the issue,” the board said.
“The ACSA board decided that the risks from publishing the issue have significantly increased as a result of new actions by the US federal 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.”
The same day, the association dismissed the journal’s interim executive editor, McLain Clutter, who is also an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Clutter, whose position with the journal was supposed to continue until 2026, told The Architect’s Newspaper that he was fired because he refused to support the decision to cancel the issue, and accused the association of being “on the wrong side of history.”
He added: “I am deeply disappointed by the actions of the ACSA Board. This decision represents a blatant violation of the principles of academic freedom, intellectual integrity and ethical scholarship that the organization claims to uphold.”
Founded in 1912, ACSA is an international organization that represents academic architectural programs and faculty, primarily in the US and Canada. It publishes the Journal of Architectural Education, and Technology: Architecture + Design.
Plans for the Fall 2025 issue of the former included a focus on the “ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza” and “urgent reflections on this historical moment’s implications for design, research and education in architecture,” according to a call for papers issued last fall.
The editors of the issue — including Palestinian scholar Nora Akawi, an assistant professor at The Cooper Union in New York — criticized the cancellation and Clutter’s dismissal as part of a broader trend of censorship in the US and Europe of topics related to Palestine.
They said they were “dismayed by the decision” but “not surprised,” given that the ACSA had sought to block the plans for the issue even before the call for papers went out in September 2024. They accused the organization of using “new actions by the US presidential administration” as a pretext for its latest actions.
The ACSA said the fall 2025 issue of the publication would proceed with a different theme, and it was “evaluating its options for the journal within a broader framework.”
The spring 2025 issue, titled “Architecture Beyond Extraction,” which explores the relationship between architecture and extractivism and resource use, will be published in the coming weeks as scheduled.
