Universities across the United States have been ablaze with student protest in opposition to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, resulting in arrests and disciplinary action.
Over 100 students were arrested and numerous suspended at Columbia University on April 18 in response to a days-long tent encampment on the campus’ South Lawn. The arrests were requested by university president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, who on the same day sent a letter calling on the New York City Police Department to “remove” students for being “in violation of university rules and policies.” The violation in question was peacefully pitching tents on university property.
The breakup of the encampment followed Shafik’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives at a hearing duplicitously titled “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” where Shafik scapegoated pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist faculty and student organizations, including Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace, for reported antisemitism on campus.
Soon after the political “crisis” hit a boiling point at Columbia, on Friday, April 19, 400 students at Yale University in New Haven launched an encampment to demand that the Yale Corporation — the administrative equivalent to the University of Connecticut Board of Trustees — disclose and divest the university’s $40.7 billion endowment from weapons manufacturers, according to Yale Daily News. Yale police arrested nearly 50 people the morning of April 22 following the encampment’s third consecutive night, resulting in street protests by students and community members.
120 students at New York University were arrested and charged with trespassing for organizing an encampment within a plywood barricade on Monday, April 22. Additional encampments have sprung up around the country, including at MIT, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Maryland and more. Protests continue at Columbia and Yale despite mass arrests, and each protest held a Seder for the first night of Passover.
It may not be clear what the direct implications of this recent wave of protests are to UConn students. However, The Daily Campus Editorial Board holds that restrictions on the rights of students to protest on one campus (or several) threaten the rights of students to protest everywhere. Beginning with Shafik’s authorization of the arrest of peaceful protesters, college administrations, even if those colleges are private, establish a concerning precedent that it is justifiable to arrest students for peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights and weaponize banal conduct rules to chill free — truly free — expression.
The Editorial Board writes in support of students and faculty at universities across the country who are organizing against their respective schools’ financial ties to occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in and around Palestine. As a student press organization, we have a responsibility to categorically reject public and private universities’ attempts to stifle expression and support students when their administrations — and the vested interests within them — don’t. Accordingly, we also reject the insidious and cynical accusations that student pro-Palestine protests have anything to do with antisemitism whatsoever; as Shafik’s political theater demonstrates, these charges are being increasingly leveled against pro-Palestinian students to shut down their right to organize.
We also call on the University of Connecticut to break from the nationwide status quo of repressing pro-Palestinian activism by stretching university policy to conveniently fit their interests. We urge UConn administrators to stand by the university’s commitment to free expression and remind them that students can clearly see when the administration weaponizes the Student Code of Conduct to chill speech instead of working toward the safety of all students regardless of nationality or religious identity.
2001 Alumnus Paul Norton here, nothing will stop citizens taking a moral stand. Goon squads ate unleashed. The only weapons are the cell phones to document abuses.
Three major flaws in this opinion piece. First, the Editorial Board assumes that all of the protesters are students. They are not and do not claim to be. A university has every right to remove non-students and many rights to remove actual students. Second, there is an assumption that the protests are peaceful. They are not. Protestors have physically assaulted people simply trying to walk-through campus. Moreover, by definition, calls to “Globalize the Intifada” are calls for violence not peace. Third, the Editorial Board seems very concerned that first amendment rights are being violated. They are not. People have the right generally to say what they want. As any first year law student would tell you, people do not have the right to scream “fire” in a crowded building. Protestors are not limited from calling for divestment, even as they do so from their Iphones which are powered with Israeli technology and which use Israeli apps. They can make those calls all day. What they can’t do is occupy a public space (whether owned by a public or private institution, while calling for and often using violence.
Lack of intelligence. These students should study the history of the Jews and Israel before they gather and look like imbeciles. Glad my daughter knows better to not associate with them.