On October 7, the Tahrir Coalition, a union of pro-Palestinian organizations at the University of Michigan, posted on social media what it said was recorded by the university’s president, Santa Ono.
In the audio file, a man’s voice can be heard talking about pressure from “powerful groups” and threatening to withhold federal funding if the university administration does not focus almost entirely on anti-Semitism.
He says: “The government could call me tomorrow and say, in a very unproportioned way, that the university is not doing enough to fight anti-Semitism. And I would say it doesn’t do enough to fight Islamophobia, and that’s not what they want to hear. “
Although the Tahrir Coalition has not explained how or when and where it obtained the recording, neither Ono nor the university has disputed its authenticity. Instead, the university administration issued a statement to the local newspaper Metro Times, saying: “The University of Michigan is strongly committed to ensuring that our community remains a safe and supportive place, where all students – regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or other characteristics. – have the opportunity to learn and prosper.”
The problem is that the university is not committed to protecting and supporting Muslim and Arab students. Of course, we didn’t need the leaked footage to know that, but it gives the general public a sense of the university’s complete failure to support disadvantaged students.
Over the past year, we’ve watched in horror as mass killings continued in Palestine – and, since September, in Lebanon. Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including more than 16,000 children, and more than 2,300 Lebanese, including more than 120 children.
For students in Palestine and Lebanon, the pain is great. We have watched our homes destroyed, our people killed, tortured and starved to death. However, as we, along with many allies, have tried to process this trauma and struggle for human rights, we have been vilified and silenced on campus. Our existence has been reduced to a problem, our grief weaponized, our pleas for justice criminalized.
The same cannot be said of students who have championed Israel’s “right to self-defense” – a right Israel does not have when it comes to opposing its own people.
The result of this “unbalanced” approach is that today Muslim and Arab students face increased harassment and discrimination, and their attackers are emboldened because they know there will be no consequences for what they do.
The hypocrisy of the university became apparent to me and other Palestinian students almost immediately after October 7, 2023. On October 9, Michigan Law School students used an open public law server, an email chain that connects everyone at the law school, to explain. The Palestinians are like “animals” and their Muslim and Arab classmates are “happy[ing] to mass murder” and supporting rape. This language was reported to management, who took no action.
As Michigan’s largest student body began organizing and protesting on campus, the university’s discrimination against disadvantaged students became even more visible. It also sent campus police to break up our protests and sit-ins, students were harassed, pepper-sprayed and arrested, while female students had their hijabs ripped from them.
It also increased surveillance. The police presence and the number of surveillance cameras surrounding the Arab lounge in the center have increased significantly.
The administration has never apologized for or condemned the egregious acts of police violence against students who were protesting the university-sponsored killings.
And it didn’t work as accusations that we were anti-Semitic started to be thrown at us. It did not intervene to distinguish between hatred against the Jewish people and legitimate criticism and criticism of genocidal Israel. It did not protect our right to protest and freedom of speech. Instead, it seems to accept the false equivalence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
In the summer, the Ministry of Education released a report on the university’s “failure” to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism. Among them were allegations that protests against the killings had created a “hostile environment” that the university did not investigate.
The university easily succumbed to the pressure and independently changed campus policies to facilitate the crackdown on students involved in the struggle for Palestine. It did not contact the teachers or the student body about them.
The university administration has done all they can to deal with the feelings of the Jewish students on campus but they have yet to speak a single word to us, the Palestinians. One has to wonder how many Palestinians must be exterminated before Ono and other university leaders see our suffering, or if they see that we are human at all?
Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students increasingly feel that our administration is comfortable with the killing of our people and the bombing of our world.
This attitude is not unique to the University of Michigan. Nationwide, more than 3,000 people have been arrested for representing Palestine on college campuses in just six months. Universities that once championed free speech have become hostile environments for Muslim and Arab students and their allies.
The cooling effect this has had is obvious. Many Muslim and Arab students now feel unsafe to express their identity or opinions, fearing academic, legal and professional consequences. For Palestinian students, this silence is very sad – we are denied the right to publicly mourn or call for justice.
Adding to our pain is that our tuition dollars are invested in companies that support violence against Muslims and Palestinians abroad. Despite the protests, the University of Michigan maintains investments in companies linked to Israel, although it was quick to divest from companies linked to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.
In response to the leaked audio, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan Chapter (CAIR-MI) filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Human Rights. The complaint calls for an investigation into whether the University of Michigan followed “its obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and its obligations under the Consent Decision the University entered into with the Office of Human Rights in June of this year”.
However, given that the pressure on universities to focus on the lives of Jewish students comes from the federal government itself, it is doubtful that this appeal will yield any significant results.
Ono’s leaked comments reveal the widespread theft of ethical leadership by university administrators across the country. By giving in to outside pressure, they fail to protect all students equally, sending a clear message that some lives are more important than others.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
Source link
