In words they try to arrest us: US universities are not bastions of freedom Demonstrations

Universities in the United States have been particularly stressed over the past year. Several such as Columbia University and New York University have redefined the protests against the state of Israel and its idea of ​​founding Zionism as acts of anti-Semitism. Campus after campus brought in law enforcement officers to arrest their students, faculty and staff and charge them with demanding an end to Israel’s massacres in Gaza and expanding illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. Many universities deny students their degrees and suspend, expel, or threaten to expel students for their participation in the protests.

It wasn’t as if US universities had tolerated large-scale protests before. Universities called the police as their students back in the 1960s and 1970s when they organized civil rights campaigns or protested the American war in Vietnam. In May 1970, the US National Guard killed four protesting students and injured nine others at Kent State University in Ohio. That same month, two students died and 12 others were injured local law enforcement at Jackson State University in Mississippi.

It has always been the nature of US universities – with their bottom-up ways of running campuses – to do everything possible to suppress civil disobedience of any kind, punishing students and even trying to organize protests. With widespread armed responses to anti-genocide protests this spring and extensive revisions to regulations on nearly every campus aimed at eliminating any potential renewal of such protests this fall, however, one thing is clear. Today, the American university – like the American country – is again under high pressure. It has completely transformed into a business-like enterprise that views silencing dissent and maintaining order and obedience as part of its mission statement.

For example, at Towson University, the punishment for several students who staged a “death row” in November 2023 to draw attention to Israel’s massacre in Gaza included requiring them to write essays explaining how they organized student protests. Illinois State Attorney Julia Rietz, at the behest of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is considering criminal charges against four students for building a pro-Palestinian camp on campus. Many others have required students to complete mandatory modules on First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, expression, and association, which include explanations of the various restrictions universities can legally impose on each. Some institutions now require students to register as an organized group and seek prior approval of where, when, and how they can protest.

The net result was significantly fewer protests in the fall of 2024 than there were in the spring. It’s as if higher education leaders and university patrons don’t understand that the purpose of protest — and indeed, any organized civil disobedience — is to disrupt. The disruption ensures that those in power cannot turn their heads away from the issues the protesters are raising, such as Israel’s genocide of Palestine and America’s complicity in it.

It seems that universities are only looking for weak protests, the kind that won’t force them to change the way they operate or invest their money – protests that have absolutely no teeth.

I have seen this first hand, many decades before the start of the massacre in Gaza that exposed the oppressive state of the American university last year. As an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, I was a member of the Black Action Society (BAS). After years of meetings, pamphlets, and pleas for the university to distance itself from the apartheid regime in South Africa, Pitt’s administration agreed to allow the BAS to march around campus. By then it was my senior year, in the fall of 1990, and our little march was too late. South Africa was already well on its way to a post-apartheid future when the Pitt administration agreed.

Our university-sanctioned protest was very different from the anti-apartheid protests that swept New York in 1985, when a section of student groups blocked Hamilton Hall (now Mandela Hall) at Columbia University for three weeks. These unauthorized protests eventually forced Columbia to part with its funds in South Africa.

Universities only sanction protest action if they know it is unlikely to make much of a difference. And polite protests rarely achieve anything but discontent.

This year, in addition to the students who missed graduation, an unknown number of teachers and staff have either lost their jobs or been fired because of their participation in pro-Palestinian protests. Most of them, however, are not like former Muhlenberg College professor Maura Finkelstein, so far the only faculty member fired for her anti-genocide speech. Colleges fired large numbers of anti-genocide students and adjunct faculty, who were already vulnerable due to their “temporary contract worker” status. Many existing officials who have spoken out about Palestine, however, have been placed “under investigation,” and their contracts have been quietly allowed to expire without renewal. As Anita Levy, chief program officer of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) said in an interview with The Intercept earlier this year, “many of our questions, even our lawsuits, are related to due process violations” faculty.

I might be one of those aspiring students whose contract was not renewed and employment was terminated without due process. A month after I published my Al Jazeera article “The acceptance of the US establishment by Israel’s right-wing war machine” in October 2023, my history department chair at Loyola University Maryland gave me the unofficial word that my contract would not be renewed. I reached out to Loyola through AAUP for more information on June 2024, but they refused to give me an explanation. I will probably never be sure what role my anti-genocide campaign against Israel played in my non-renewal​​​​ compared to other internal politics in my department and my university. But the timing of my illegal notice of non-renewal of my contract is curious.

Last March, anti-genocide students slapped a Palestinian flag sticker on my office hours sign. My department wanted to know if I want this sign taken down, calling it “vandalism”. I said, “No, it’s perfectly fine. Students should be able to express their feelings. Who am I not to support them?” None of my colleagues came to my office the rest of the spring semester, except to ask about the date of my departure so they could move a new faculty member to my office.

That I am not alone in what some have called the “new McCarthyism” in American universities is comforting. It is not lost on me that the disproportionate number of sit-ins, protests, arrests, suspensions, and non-renewals that occur and are on the public record occur at private and public universities. The crackdown last year had little effect on ending protests at predominantly white universities attended by America’s academic and socioeconomic elite. For all other academics, academic freedom and the liberal arts component of a college education are lifelines. The sheer amount of pressure from center-right and far-right politicians, state legislatures, and the US Congress — not to mention university donors and boards — has put even the most well-intentioned university administrators in a role of repression.

All US universities – regardless of their size, influence and economic power, want an impartial political and non-critical faculty and student body, which will not cause trouble, scare donors or prevent their daily comfort. They hope the campus community will remain as quiet and docile as church mice after drinking communion wine.

Apparently so are both political parties. Just before Thanksgiving, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved another resolution to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, which separates many direct criticisms of the state of Israel, and their policies against the Palestinians who live under it. , as anti-Semitic.

Whether this is the new era of McCarthyism remains to be seen. However, because of the last year of protests, perhaps the right of a person to speak out about injustice and express it in art and to argue with other like-minded people should be an important criterion when students consider which college they would like to attend. . If one were to measure universities by their willingness to accept protests, I suspect that almost all institutions of higher education would ignore this move. The attempt to shut down and shut down students and teachers will backfire, perhaps even leading to violent protests and a deadly and violent backlash. But whatever the moment, the idea that the US university is a place of critical thinking, social justice, liberal arts, and making the world a better place is as false as day.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.