BY BENJAMIN ROBINSON

This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here.

At the end of July of this year, the Indiana University Board of Trustees approved a new Expressive Activity Policy, which took effect on August 1, banning all legally protected expression on IU campuses—whether a protest or just a peep—from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Since then, hundreds have joined weekly candlelight vigils on the Bloomington campus at 11 p.m. every Sunday in defiance of the ban. I and twenty others have been cited for violation of this absurd policy and sanctioned with reprimands in our personnel files. For staff, the reprimands spell out that further violation means termination; for faculty that has been softened with a warning that it “may result in . . . termination of appointment.” While surely many more than nineteen people at IU have expressed themselves after 11 p.m., IU police and administrators are targeting only the expression the courts hold to be at the core of the First Amendment: namely, public political speech.

What’s more shocking even than such blanket crackdowns on expression since students first began establishing encampments in support of peace in Gaza in April and May of this year is the shamelessness with which university leaders across the country are now claiming to be acting in the interest of “institutional neutrality” and securing “expressive activity” for all. The duplicity reminds me of developers who tear down a stand of oaks only to name their tidy development “Oak Grove.”

Photo by Bloomington, Indiana, photographer Jeremy Hogan taken at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow after the administration cleared protesters’ encampment.

Seeing the fury with which my administration—once it had torn down the Gaza encampment in IU Bloomington’s historic assembly ground this August 1—proceeded to ring the Dunn Meadow protest site with hurricane fencing, dig it up with bulldozers, and post notification that the chain-link fence was protecting expressive activity, a student I know commented bitterly, “It’s like they’re saying, ‘This chair is for everyone, so no one can sit in it.’”

It’s urgent that we ask ourselves honestly and exactly what is going on at our campuses, with the extraordinary police violence last spring (resulting in over 3,100 arrests), followed this fall by nationwide policies intended to stifle any new protest. The basic answer seems to be this: In order to avoid any acknowledgment of the moral courage of students whose protests have succeeded in rupturing the country’s most charged political taboo—against criticizing Israel’s ethnonationalist siege of the Palestinian people—top administrators, with a single voice, have dubbed the protests “a national and international disgrace” and invented the story that an outbreak of disruptive expression this past spring had disfigured our campuses, undermined our educational missions, and deprived bystanders of their own expressive rights. This administrative lie has become so pervasive that it is hard to see how thoroughly it’s chilling and corrupting every aspect of campus life across the country.

In Bloomington, those of us who joined with students last April didn’t see protesters failing to understand civil discourse—a supposed failure that many a pious campus committee has now been convened to address. What we saw were students, faculty, and staff gathering to fulfill their most profound civil obligation to bear witness against injustice: in this case, Israeli crimes of apartheid and genocide tolerated by our national leaders. What we saw, too, was a university administration willing to call out snipers and riot police, camouflaged troopers, armed with assault rifles and tear gas, helicopters, BearCat armored vehicles, and drones, to arrest fifty-seven protesters (including me)—and to do so mere hours after it had clandestinely changed a policy in place for fifty-five years protecting the right to protest. This short-lived new policy, in effect just long enough for the April arrests, sought a pretext for police action by removing existing language abjuring force (“the University should not use physical force to enforce these rules”) and adding a requirement for advanced approval for the tents and signage that students on the verge of assembling in the meadow had no time to seek.

Any reasonable person not caught up in our leaders’ fictions would place the failure of civil discourse elsewhere rather than among the protesters on Dunn Meadow. Might not the four administrators who met at 11:49 p.m. to change the historic free expression policy be the ones who need a lesson in civil discourse? What about the Indiana State Police superintendent, whose comments on the spring arrests need to be read to be believed?

Haven’t our top administrators failed to grasp something important about civil discourse? After all, the crackdown on expressive activity this August provides solid evidence that they haven’t learned the most basic lessons about democracy since their midnight policy change in April. Indeed they are defendants in two lawsuits we have brought with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): one for banning us from campus in April and one for banning overnight free expression as of August.

It is quite clearly administrators, not protesters, who disrupted and disfigured our campuses this past spring. But a lie needs no evidence, and none has been offered to show that there has been any substantial increase in the number of disruptive incidents by students this past year. Nor is there any evidence showing that students are responsible for an impeded campus learning environment. While danger and safety are omnipresent concerns for administrators, available data, such as those collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard and University of Connecticut, show no such rise of dangerous incivility.

Rather than evidence for a crisis of expression among the rank-and-file—one so urgent that new time, manner, and place restrictions and pervasive surveillance must be imposed without faculty involvement—we have seen overwhelming evidence for a crisis of leadership, as administrators have capitulated helplessly to threats by strident pro-Israel donors, legislators, and litigants. Bullying by donors such as Bill Ackman, Leon Cooperman, Ken Griffin, Robert Kraft, Ronald Lauder, and Marc Rowan is well-known, as are the McCarthyite attacks by legislators such as Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx, and Jim Banks. Less high-profile, but increasingly important to the crackdown, are civil suits by litigants who claim antigenocide protests violate their rights. The most prominent cases are Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, brought by three students who claim “a religious obligation to support the Jewish state of Israel,” and Kestenbaum v. Harvard, which alleges that protests, walkouts, and die-ins—as well as a public statement by student groups and a law exam on the Israel-Gaza conflict—constitute “bullying of Jewish students.” Recently, suits have been filed against individual protesters and organizations supporting Palestine, such as Manhart v. AJP Education Foundation, which alleges a connection between protesters and “foreign terrorist organizations,” claiming that “defendants’ tortious conduct as a form of purported protest will metastasize in the body politic.” Cases like this attack the historic tradition of civil disobedience itself in order to protect Israel from criticism.

This crisis of cowardice among campus leaders means that our universities have abandoned neutrality to become virtual fortresses of repression and to silence protest involving Israel’s actions in Palestine. Let me make this institutional partisanship tangible by listing the projects for which IU has earmarked millions of dollars since last April alone:

• $400K on a Cooley LLP “Independent Post-Action Review” whitewashing IU’s suppression of the spring protests and concluding with recommendations for sharpened curtailment of expressive activity, centralization of police operations, increased use of drones, CCTV surveillance, encryption, and tighter top-down information management;
• another $100K on fencing off, digging up, and installing a sprinkler system on the campus assembly grounds;
• an undisclosed amount to equip a police Emergency Operations Center with heightened surveillance capacity, as recommended by Cooley LLP;
• hundreds of thousands per year to establish and fill a new police operations role, appointing Anthony Williams as chief law enforcement officer to begin on August 1, the first day of IU’s new expressive activity policy;
• over $2 million per year for an across-the-board police pay raise for more than two hundred IU police department officers; and
• between $1 and $3 million per year more for “leadership enhancements for the Bloomington campus,” including a new Office of the Chancellor to oversee campus operations and insulate our president from her faculty.

When we see expenditures in this amount to silence dissent, the critical importance of the new expressive activity policies comes into focus. After all, a key problem that emerged with the administration’s police action last April is that, despite changing policy a few hours earlier to suit them, the state police troopers could still find no plausible reason for arrest. As an investigation of police and administration emails sent the day of the arrests reveals:

More than two hours before Indiana State Police began making arrests on April 25, it appears ISP and IUPD were looking for a reason to arrest protesters. Monroe County Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Kehr told [IUPD Public Safety Superintendent Ben] Hunter in an email that declaring the Dunn Meadow group an “unlawful assembly,” as ISP had apparently advised, could not occur unless the group became a riot. “(W)hich is not what you have (yet anyway),” Kehr wrote.

Of course, under these circumstances the county prosecutor dropped charges against the protesters like hot potatoes, declaring the arrests “constitutionally dubious.”

This is where the $400K report by the Palo Alto firm Cooley LLP comes in. One of twenty-four firms that threatened law school deans to blacklist their graduates if they were found to be among the protesters, Cooley was hired to give better legal cover for the next round of repression. What’s so dumbfounding is just how badly spent IU’s $400K was. The policy recommended by Cooley—“to prevent disruptive and dangerous incidents” —and eventually drafted by IU’s Office of the Vice President & General Counsel, has no peer for sheer stupidity. Among its many awful provisions, the one that the community is defying at our 11 p.m. vigils, bans all expression at that hour. Without a verbatim quote it’s hard to believe what it explicitly forbids:

(1) Participating in speech or conduct protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
(2) Communicating by any lawful verbal, written, audio visual, or electronic means
(3) Participating in peaceful assembly

It is a violation to talk, email, or wear a graphic T-shirt on IU property after 11 p.m. You can’t even text your family to say you’re on your way home after a long evening of grading or let off steam “discussing current events with a friend,” as our ACLU suit points out. Meanwhile, having dropped $400K on Cooley to be told that it had been a bad look to enforce policy inconsistently, the administration has been goaded into going after everyone and not just those speaking up for Palestine.

Every Sunday night the police are out fingering faculty, students, and staff for reading aloud civil rights quotes by candlelight at the campus gates. Of course, ratting on friends, neighbors, and colleagues at midnight is unpopular, so the Office of Student Conduct has been sending extraordinary emails, reminiscent of East Germany’s Stasi, pressuring faculty and administrators to show up at 11 p.m. to assist the brand-new chief law enforcement offer in identifying colleagues for disciplinary referral.

My own disciplinary referral from August 25 alleged that I “gestur[ed] for people . . . to form a circle . . . and provided remarks to the group” as “people were intently listening and nodding their heads.” While to the uninitiated that might sound like material for a teaching dossier providing evidence of effective instruction, it resulted instead in an official letter of reprimand in my personnel file. But such details, as harmful as they are, are the farcical part of what’s happening, something only an expensive law firm like Cooley could cook up to collect fees from an incompetent administration such as ours.

Much more serious than the farce—what we have to keep front and center in our efforts to restore sanity to our university and help bring just peace to Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel—is the poisonous compact between repression and deception coming from the highest level of our administrations. Our trustees (with a pair of dissenting allies on the board) just passed a resolution declaring “Institutional Neutrality”—the same board that didn’t blanch at approving millions to gag and cow our campus into silence on Palestine. This is the same neutrality enjoined by H.R. 7683, the campus free expression and neutrality bill that the US House of Representatives rushed to approve just last week. While our campuses like to see themselves as places of moral principle, the neutrality on our leaders’ lips is not that of prudence—it is the neutrality of the graveyard.

As worn out as we are at IU Bloomington, though, I want my AAUP readers to know that every day I see new faces—students, friends, neighbors, colleagues—stepping up with their light. We’re keeping watch, and we refuse to let IU be the place where civil courage goes to die.

Benjamin Robinson is associate professor of Germanic studies at Indiana University Bloomington and is a member of the IUB AAUP chapter’s executive committee