POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH
On April 23, 2024, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following statement.
We condemn in the strongest terms the wave of recent repression of students and faculty engaged in peaceful and principled protest by university administrations across the country. These include the draconian treatment of students by the administrations of Barnard and Columbia, aided by the NYPD whom administrators called to campus for the first time since 1968, expressly without the consent of the Columbia University Senate and thus in direct violation of shared governance. They also include copycat crackdowns on peaceful protesters at Yale University and at NYU, both of which authorized police to assault and arrest their own faculty and students—reportedly including the pepper spraying of legal observers and student journalists. These crackdowns extend and intensify the capricious and one-sided suppression of dissent at Penn this year, most recently seen in the unjustified ban of the student group Penn Against the Occupation. The sheer volume of administrative actions in violation of university statutes, shared governance, and faculty and student rights is too large to catalog in this statement, which itself reveals the perilous environment university administrations have created on our campuses. Notably, these administrations have repeatedly and consistently shown themselves to be biased in their selective suppression of students and faculty critical of Israel’s war on Palestinians, often apparently at the behest of right-wing donors, politicians, alumni, and lobbying groups. They purport to be concerned about the safety of Jewish students while actively suppressing the rights of Jewish students and faculty who express their own criticism of the current war on Gaza, and conflating antisemitism with all criticism of the State of Israel, which makes no one safer. Meanwhile, they show utter disdain for the safety and rights of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Persian, and other students and faculty offering the same criticism. As a result, with few notable exceptions, university administrators’ accounts of their actions can no longer be trusted, and their statements affirming an ostensible commitment to student safety—made while threatening or deliberately unleashing police violence on their own peaceably assembled students and faculty—have lost all credibility.
We echo our colleagues in AAUP-Columbia, AAUP-Barnard, and NYU-AAUP in demanding that all suspensions of their students be dismissed, all charges against their students be dropped and their records cleared, and the rights of faculty and students to peacefully protest be restored immediately and respected going forward. We are watching, in particular, to make sure that non-tenure-track and untenured faculty, students and faculty of color, and LGBTQ+ faculty and students—who are a significant number of those arrested and charged—do not face retaliatory actions from these universities. We demand the same of Penn’s administration, and call specifically for Penn Against the Occupation to be reinstated, and we call for the administration to cease its abuse of the student disciplinary system to silence and punish legitimate forms of speech, protest, and assembly. Our university administration must end its campaign of one-sided suppression of political dissent, which discredits the entire institution’s commitment to academic freedom, open expression, free inquiry, and freedom of association. We further demand that disciplinary procedures against students at Penn and at campuses across the country be reviewed and revised by faculty and students, not administrators, to protect the freedoms and due process rights of all. Finally, we demand that all universities cease the abhorrent practice of turning armed police on peaceful demonstrators.
While in the immediate term university administrators might seem to have demonstrated their own power, the draconian nature of their actions reveals the weakness of their position. We are confident that students, faculty, and staff who ally together in peaceful dissent against injustice will carry the day. The Executive Committee of AAUP-Penn stands with our colleagues, students, and allies in our national AAUP and at Columbia, Barnard, Yale, NYU, the University of Michigan, Pomona College, Stony Brook University, the City University of New York, Vanderbilt University, the University of Minnesota, Cal Poly Humboldt, and beyond, and we commit ourselves to a more just future for all.
Universities have a legal obligation to prevent the development of a hostile environment on their campuses for Jewish and Israeli students. Mass demos calling for driving “Zionists” off campus and praising the 10/7 Hamas butchery at the same time clearly creates a hostile environment and no amount of repetition that the demonstrations are peaceful changes that. Not to mention the fact that we know that there have been violent attacks against “Zionists” and Jews at Columbia and Yale.
While all rational readers of this blog recognize that free expression is the sacrosanct cornerstone of learning, not all readers understand its limits.
This AAUP-Penn group seems to think that the protesting students’ behavior – no matter how much it violates the school’s Code of Conduct – is immune from disciplinary action merely because it involves speech. Not so.
Wrongful conduct gets no free pass simply because speech is a part of it. A robber gets no 1st Amendment protection when he verbally demands that a victim give him money. Likewise, a student on a college campus gets no 1st Amendment protection when he/she uses speech or conduct that violates the terms of the school’s code of conduct. (Appropriately, these codes include proscriptions against creating a hostile environment, harassing, and bullying.)
While, it is a given that universities should encourage and defend free and open debate, how that is accomplished and the form that it takes can be critical. Right now – for all practical purposes – there is no free and open debate taking place with these protests. What is happening instead is that mobs of students are mindlessly screaming childish phrases in the faces of other students and robotically spewing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic chants. Of course, not all anti-Israel slogans are anti-Semitic, but too many are; enough so, that the very nature of these protests create a hostile environment. It is part and parcel of the protests’ DNA.
What is happening now on college campuses is a disgrace and abomination.
There are crazed mobs of students who somehow think that they are entitled to take over sections of a campus, block entries, and harass and intimidate fellow students.
And, as if that is not bad enough, the AAUP-Penn somehow ignores reality and claims that these demonstrations are simply “peaceful protests.” Who are they trying to “gaslight?”
Hint: When students are intimidated and instructed to stay home and not come on campus, then, by definition, the protests are not “peaceful.”
One has to wonder why AAUP-Penn cannot see that many of the pro-Palestinian students are having a serious temper tantrum and are unjustly taking their frustrations out on fellow Jewish students who, of course, have absolutely no control over what has happened or continues to happen in the Middle East.
And, unfortunately, weak administrators – whose job number one is to protect vulnerable students – are mostly putting up with this nonsense, in large part, because of pressure from the AAUP’s misguided position and misapprehension of free speech.
If a university’s job is to teach critical thinking and how one should strive to behave in polite society, then the AAUP-Penn leaders ought to be calling for an organized formal university sanctioned debate (symposium) on the Middle East. One where students can hear a panel of experts discuss and analyze all the convoluted issues… in a civilized and controlled atmosphere, i.e., one conducive to learning.
But no, AAUP-Penn would rather criticize opponents of these protests and mislabel efforts to restore calm as “Repression of Dissent.” When, in fact, the attempts to disband the unauthorized and hostile protests should rightfully be labelled as “Enforcing the Code of Conduct” or “Restoring Sanity.”