Crackdowns have chilling effect on pro-palestinian speech
At the University of Pennsylvania, approval for the screening of a documentary critical of Israel was denied.
At Brandeis University — which expressed a public commitment to free speech — a pro-palestinian student group was barred for statements-made by its national chapter.
At the University of Vermont, a Palestinian poet was set to deliver a talk, but the school pulled the meeting space after students complained he was antisemitic.
There are growing signs that colleges are starting to clamp down on pro-palestinian protests and events on campus, as the institutions face pressure from donors, alumni and politicians, who are furious over what they say is an antisemitic campaign against Jews.
Some schools have simply canceled events or delayed them. A handful of schools have shut down student groups and disciplined students. Some students have simply stopped participating in protests, concerned for their own safety, spooked by alumni who have started donot-hire lists and outside groups that have doxxed students.
The war in the Middle East is laying bare the difficulties American universities are confronting in navigating free expression. Already under attack in recent years from conservatives for closing off debate on other topics, university leaders are now struggling to balance open expression with fears and complaints from some Jewish students that the language of pro-palestinian protest calls for violence against them.
As video of some protests went viral— with some devolving into physical altercations — university officials have been undermore and more pressure to find a way to contain the demonstrations.
Radhika Sainath, an attorney with Palestine Legal, a civil rights group, said her organization has received more than 450 requests for help for campus-related cases since the Hamas attack, more than a tenfold increase from the same period last year. The cases include students who have had scholarships revoked or been doxxed, professors who have been disciplined, and administrators who have gotten pressured by trustees.
“It’s truly like nothing else we’ve ever seen before,” Sainath said. “We’re having a ‘60s-levelmoment here, both as far as the repression but also the mass student mobilization.”
In the past few months, the most prominent proPalestinian campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine, has been suspended from at least four universities, including Columbia, Brandeis, Georgewashington and Rutgers. In some cases, the universities accused the group of being supportive of Hamas, disrupting classes and intimidating other students.
The group, a loosely connected network of autonomous chapters founded about 30 years ago, has denied those allegations.
“These suspensions are a dangerous escalation of the repressive measures administrators have been taking to characterize anti-zionist student organizers as a violent and existential threat,” the national Students for Justice in Palestine group said in a statement, adding that administrators “have crafted the infrastructure for mass repression, censorship and intellectual manipulation.”
In Florida, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida wrote a letter in late October to school presidents that chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine in the state must be “deactivated” — an order civil rights groups say clearly violates the First Amendment.
School leaders are in a tough position, said Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor and founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice. Universities, he said, “will pay a price in intellectual openness if they are unduly restrictive in speech that they allow on their campuses,” but “on the other hand, you’ve got traumatized and frightened young people; you don’t want to ignore them.”
Administrators at the University of Vermont canceled an in-person event in late October featuring Palestinian poet Mohammed el-kurd, after some students said he was antisemitic. El-kurd could not be reached for comment.
The Anti- Defamation League, which tracks antisemitism, describes el-kurd on its website as displaying a “troubling pattern of rhetoric and slander that ranges far beyond reasoned criticism of Israel.”
Lecture organizers rejected the charges of antisemitism. “The conflation of critics of Israel and anti-Zionism with antisemitism is false and used to curb academic freedom,” said Helen Scott, a professor involved in planning the event, adding that many of the lecture series board members are Jewish.
The university cited security reasons, but a university lawyer later acknowledged to faculty there were no threats to the venue or speaker, according to a video reviewed by The New York Times. The event was held online instead. University officials could not immediately be reached for comment.