BY HASSAN MELEHY

“That flag will stand here as long as I’m chancellor,” Lee Roberts, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, proudly proclaimed on Tuesday, April 30, after restoring the American flag to the pole adorning Polk Place on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill. As the campus community and many others know, protestors had hoisted the flag of Palestine only to be stormed by police and a gaggle of fraternity brothers.

As a child of immigrants, I can understand Chancellor Roberts’s pride in our country. Both of my parents lived under repressive regimes: my mother endured the Nazi occupation of Holland, and my father grew up under King Farouk of Egypt. They wouldn’t have raised their children anywhere other than the US, and I’ll always be grateful for it. They loved America for the opportunities they found here along with the relative freedom from tyranny.

My parents never took America for granted. Unless Chancellor Roberts does, surely he can imagine what it’s like to belong to a people who have for almost eight decades been denied statehood, a people who, in the very land where their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were born, are routinely denied the joy of flying their own flag. These people are all too aware that the US is the strongest backer of Israel and its long-term denial of statehood to Palestine, despite our government having brokered and co-signed, since the 1970s, several peace agreements and paths to statehood. The lip service that the US has paid to Palestinian statehood even through the horror of Gaza didn’t keep it from exercising its veto power in the United Nations Security Council a few weeks ago over a measure to recognize this statehood. Palestinians and their allies living in America can’t help being aghast at the  role of the US in recent events, even as they fully appreciate much of what our country offers—which includes the right to protest.

As everyone interested in the history of American higher education knows, campus protests are a long tradition: among many other things, they contributed to the civil rights movement and to ending the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa. This history instructs us that when university administrators bring in the police, peaceful protests become violent, and antagonisms escalate. On April 30, when Chancellor Roberts unleashed the police on protestors, he revealed his indifference to this history.

Most ironic is that Chancellor Roberts was placed on our campus as part of a plan to end the one-sided indoctrination that the UNC System Board of Governors imagines a Chapel Hill education to be. He didn’t even try to understand the view of stateless persons and their allies, or their wish to temporarily see the flag of Palestine fly over the UNC campus. By shaking hands with the gang guarding the American flag while flanked by police officers inflicting bodily injury on students, Chancellor Roberts displayed his obstinate refusal to engage with the other side. He added insult by approving the suspension of student protestors. In what already looks like a defining moment of his chancellorship, he demonstrated the type of indoctrination he was supposedly hired to remedy.

I hope Chancellor Roberts makes an effort to learn more about higher education and the campus he oversees. He’ll discover that we not only teach our students to be fully aware of the multiple sides of every question, but also to empathize with and understand people different from themselves. If his pride in our country isn’t mere jingoism, he’ll also appreciate that sometimes people feel a duty to engage in vigorous protest. He could start his education by granting amnesty to the UNC students who’ve been suspended for following their conscience.

Hassan Melehy has taught French and comparative literature at UNC–Chapel Hill since 2004.