The Israeli genocide in Gaza continues with no end in sight. Settler violence and frequent military raids have Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank fearing a similar fate. Meanwhile, Lebanon has become a new battlefield where dozens of civilians are killed every day.
As a result, with the start of a new academic year, protests in support of the Palestinians and against Israeli aggression in the region have resumed on college campuses across the United States.
Once again, student protesters are demanding a ceasefire and an end to the occupation, and to achieve these goals, they are calling on their institutions to urgently divest from Israel.
In the spring, university leaders made it clear that they would not negotiate with Palestine solidarity activists. Rather than listening to their students, they invited campus police to violently dismantle their encampments. Dozens of students have been censored, suspended and even criminally charged for demanding that their institutions end their complicity in Israeli war crimes and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
When protests resumed on campus in September, it became clear that the position of university leaders had not changed over the summer.
Rather than reflecting on their actions that objectively harmed students and stifled their rights to free speech and assembly, most of them appear to have spent the summer devising new campus strategies and policies to better suppress demonstrations and minimize their impact on the daily functioning of their establishments. .
Take Columbia University in New York.
After the resignation of President Minouche Shafik in mid-August due to her dismal management of solidarity camps in Gaza, the university appears determined to put a stop to the situation this fall.
Access to campus is now limited to those with university ID and pre-arranged visitors. Additional private security guards stand guard at various entry points. Green spaces on campus have been fenced off and camps are prohibited.
The university’s protest guidelines have also been revised. They now demand that the university be informed in advance “of any planned demonstration”. The guidelines also prohibit any demonstration that “poses ‘a real threat of harassment’ or ‘significantly impedes the primary purposes’ of the university space.”
Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia University, has issued new guidelines prohibiting professors from posting signs on their office doors “supporting a geopolitical point of view or perspective.” They are also required to speak from the opposing perspective (i.e. both sides) if they choose to publicly express support for a particular political perspective.
As might be expected in light of these new policies and guidelines, the fall semester began with New York City police officers arresting two student protesters from Columbia who were participating in a demonstration on the campus calling on the university to divest from its companies with ties to Israel. The students were “detained on suspicion of crimes” and received tickets “ordering their appearance in court.” On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, Columbia Law School administrators sent an email to faculty asking them to call campus police on students if they tried to disrupt classes.
Another New York City institution, New York University (NYU), has taken similar steps to curb campus activism. In a clear desire to stifle pro-Palestinian discourse, for example, he announced that he now considered “Zionist” to be a protected identity, in the same way as race, national origin or gender identity. This means that activists who criticize Zionism may be considered in violation of NYU’s non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy.
Across the country, leaders of the University of California (UC) system have demanded that the chancellors of all UC schools strictly enforce a “zero tolerance” policy against “encampments, protests that block passages and masking that protect identities.”
The California State University (CSU) system has implemented new campus policies seemingly intended to curb campus activism. Disrupting someone’s speech, camping, nighttime protests, building temporary structures, barricades and barriers, concealing identity, and occupying a building or facility are now banned in CSU schools.
In mid-September, 10 people, including two professors and four students at the University of California, Irvine, were charged with “failure to disperse” for their participation in a Palestine solidarity demonstration on campus in the spring.
The University of California Council of Faculty Associations said UC administrators – in violation of state labor law – threatened professors “for teaching the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have initiated disciplinary proceedings against faculty for supporting student encampments on campus as well as supporting a university student strike this spring.”
Yale University also updated its “free speech policies” over the summer. Now all outdoor events must end by 11 p.m. and sleeping outside or hosting events on the Cross Campus quad is prohibited. Those who violate these charges could be subject to “dispersal, disciplinary action or criminal charges.”
For the 2024-2025 academic year, the University of Pennsylvania also released a set of “Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations.” This includes restrictions on amplified sound (including “bullhorns, musical instruments and amplified speakers”). Night camps and demonstrations are not permitted. “Structures, walls, barriers, sculptures or other objects on university property” built without the authorization of the vice-rector for university life must be immediately removed. It is also prohibited to climb on university statues and sculptures or to cover them “with any material whatsoever”.
At the University of Michigan, 45 protesters staged a “die-in” demonstration in late August. They sat on the ground, holding Palestinian flags and signs with photos of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army. Police broke up the demonstration so violently that two people had to be hospitalized.
Recently, Maura Finkelstein, who had worked for nine years as an anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, became the first tenured professor to be fired because of her pro-Palestinian stance. Specifically, his job was fired for sharing a message by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi “calling for the rejection of Zionist ideology and its supporters.”
Of course, untenured faculty and students are most vulnerable to this latest crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech at American universities.
Momodou Taal, a doctoral student at Cornell University and a British citizen born in Gambia, was, for example, threatened with academic suspension and expulsion for participating in a demonstration calling on the university to divest from companies selling arms to Israel. After significant pressure, the university ultimately allowed Taal to remain a registered student, but with some restrictions, allowing him to keep his visa and submit his thesis.
These new policies and regulations intended to curb pro-Palestinian discourse, however, were not developed entirely organically by university leaders.
Wealthy alumni and donors have long pressured university administrators to take steps to permanently silence Palestinian solidarity activism on campus. Lawmakers also threatened to revoke the accreditation and withdraw federal funding from U.S. universities that allow Palestine solidarity protests.
The reluctance of university leaders to respond to the substantive demands of campus activists does not only concern the finances of these institutions. It also reflects the type of leaders who tend to run the neoliberal university. They are hired, not to be educators, but managers. And they believe their job is to ensure that the product (i.e. higher education) is delivered to paying customers (i.e. students). They have little interest in the other equally, if not more, crucial functions of these institutions, such as their role as vectors of change and social progress.
So, from their perspective, demands from students and faculty that their institutions divest from a rogue state that is committing genocide only disrupts what the neoliberal university is supposed to do. Their immediate instinct is to find a way to avoid this disruption.
But with more than 42,000 Palestinians killed and civilian infrastructure reduced to rubble in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank face increasing violence from the Israeli army and settlers, the war now raging in Lebanon and to the globalization of the “liberal-democratic” West. being in tatters in light of its insistence on funding and defending this carnage, things cannot continue as usual in neoliberal academia.
Students and faculty will continue to demand change and insist that change begin within their own institutions. Demands for justice in Palestine and an end to Western universities’ complicity in Israeli crimes cannot be erased by policies aimed at stifling free speech and campus protests. University leaders must recognize that institutions of higher education have always been crucibles of social change and act accordingly. They must ensure that the institutions they represent take a moral stand against the ongoing genocide. Their refusal to do so might save their jobs and funding in the short term, but in the long term it would put them on the wrong side of history and further reinforce the dire perception that American higher education is today now only a lucrative sector. business.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.