Universities in the United States have been particularly violent over the past year. There are several like Columbia University and New York University has redefined protests against the state of Israel and its founding ideology Zionism as acts of anti-Semitism. Campus after campus brought in law enforcement arrest and prosecute their own students, faculty and staff for stopping the Israeli genocide in Gaza and expanding illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Many universities students refused to graduate their degrees and canceled, expelled, or threatened to be expelled students to participate in protests.
It was not as if universities in the US had been immune to major protests in the past. Universities called the cops on their students back in the 1960s and 1970s when they organized sit-ins for civil rights or when they protested the American war in Vietnam as well. In May 1970, the US National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio. That same month, two students were also killed and 12 others injured local law enforcement at Jackson State University in Mississippi.
It has always been in the nature of US universities – with their top-down approaches to running campuses – to do everything they can to suppress civil disobedience in any form, to to punish students for even trying to organize protests. With the widespread strong military responses to the anti-genocide protests this spring and the extensive revisions of governance at almost all campuses aimed at any possible renewal on such protests this fall, however, one thing is clear. Today, the American university – just like the American nation-state – is once again at the forefront. It has completely transformed into a corporation that sees quiet dissent and maintains order and obedience as part of its mission statement.
At Towson University, for example, the punishment for the handful of students who did a “die-in” in November 2023 to draw attention to Israel's genocide in Gaza including asking them to write essays explaining how they staged student protests. Illinois State Attorney Julia Rietz, at the behest of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, still considering adding “mob action charges”. against four students for building a non-Palestinian camp on campus. Many others have asked students to finish mandatory models about First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, expression, and assembly, which includes an explanation of different university boundaries he can legally impose on each. Other institutions are now requiring students to register themselves as an organized group and get permission in advance for where, when, and how they can protest.
The overall result has been far fewer complaints in the fall of 2024 than back in the spring. It's as if higher education leaders and university donors don't understand that the point of protest—and really, any organized attempt at civil disobedience—is to be upset. Turmoil ensures that those in power cannot turn their heads away from the issues activists are raising, such as Israel's ongoing genocide in Palestine and America's predicament.
Universities seem to only want weak complaints, the kind that won't force them to change how they operate or how they invest their endowments – toothless complaints.
I have experienced this first-hand, several decades before the beginning of the genocide in Gaza that exposed the oppressive nature of the American university in the past 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 petitions demanding that the university move away from the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Pitt administration agreed to allow BAS to march around campus. By then it was my senior year, the fall of 1990, and our little parade was too little too late. South Africa was already well on its way to a post-apartheid future by the time the Pitt administration agreed.
Our protest approved by the university was completely different from the anti-apartheid protests that hit New York in 1985, as part of a coalition of student groups blockaded Hamilton Hall (now Mandela Hall) at Columbia University for three weeks. These unauthorized protests eventually forced Columbia to divest itself of its financial holdings in South Africa.
Universities allow protest action only when they know it is unlikely to make much of a difference. And polite complaints rarely achieve anything but complacency.
This year, in addition to the students who missed out on graduation, an unknown number of faculty and staff have found themselves out of jobs or completely fired after being involved in anti-Palestinian protests. Most of them, however, are not similar former Muhlenberg College professor Maura Finkelsteinso far the only tenured faculty member has been fired because of her anti-genocide speech. Colleges have dismissed large numbers of anti-genocide contingent faculty, who were already vulnerable because of their “short-term contract labor” status. Many more contingent faculty who have spoken out about Palestine, however, have simply been placed “under investigation,” and their contracts have been allowed to expire without renewal. As Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) said in an interview with The Intercept earlier this year, “most of our investigations, even our cases, require apply to due process violations “for an emergency. faculty.
I may be one of those accidental academics whose contract was not renewed and whose employment ended without any due process. A month after I published my Al Jazeera article “The takeover of the American center on the far right is fueling Israel's war machine” In October 2023, the chair of my history department at Loyola University Maryland gave me the unofficial word that my contract would not be renewed. me we got to Loyola through AAUP for more information in June 2024, but refused to provide any explanation. I may never be sure what role my genocidal anti-Israel stance played in my non-renewal compared to other politics within my department and my university. But the timing of my unofficial notification of non-renewal of my contract is very strange.
Last March, anti-genocide students slapped a Palestinian flag sticker on my office hours sign. My department wanted to know if I wanted to take this sign down, saying it was an “act of vandalism”. I said, “No, it's fine. Students should be able to express themselves. Who, but I, will support them?” None of my colleagues stopped by my office for the rest of the spring semester, except to ask about my departure date so they could move a new faculty member into my office. .
It is cold comfort that I am not alone in what some have called “the new McCarthyism” at US universities. It is not lost on me that a disproportionate number of the encampments, protests, arrests, bans, and non-renewals that occurred are in the public record. occur at elite public and private universities. The crackdown over the past year has had a chilling effect on quelling protests at predominantly white universities attended by America's educational and socioeconomic elites. For the rest of the academy, academic freedom and the liberal arts aspect of a college education are on life support. The enormous pressure coming from center-right and far-right politicians, state legislatures, and the US Congress—not to mention donors and university boards—has overwhelmed even the most sophisticated university administrations. in a brutal role.
All US universities – regardless of size, influence and economic power – want a non-political and non-judgmental faculty and student body that will not cause trouble, intimidate contribution or would interfere with their daily comfort. They hope for a campus community that will remain as still and quiet as church mice after drinking the communion wine.
Apparently, both parties are political too. Just before Thanksgiving, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly agreed another resolution basically accepting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitismwhich classifies many straightforward critics of the state of Israel, and its policies against Palestinians who live under its occupation, as anti-Semitic.
Whether this is a new era of McCarthyism remains to be seen. As a result of the last year of protest, however, one may have the right to say something about injustice and express it in art and against other like-minded people to be a a true benchmark when students consider the college they would like to attend. . If one were to rank universities by their willingness to accept complaints, I suspect that almost all institutions of higher education would exceed this measure. The widespread effort to shut down and shut down students and faculty is likely to backfire, perhaps even leading to violent protests and a disproportionately deadly and violent response. But regardless of the time, the idea that the US university is a place for critical thinking, social justice, liberal arts, and making the world a better place is as false as the day is long.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
