Shireen Akram-Boshar
Truthout / October 6, 2024
Students are fighting back against administrations’ efforts to challenge their right to organize.
This semester at U.S. universities, campuses are being transformed from centers of struggle against the genocide in Gaza to epicenters of repression against student activism. University administrations, desperate to prevent a return of the encampments that captured national and global attention in the spring, have issued new regulations curtailing student organizing, cancelled lectures and the classes of professors who stood by their students in the encampment movement, and in some cases, suspended Students for Justice in Palestine campus chapters for their activism. While student protest and activism was met with harsh repression in the spring semester — at Columbia, the university’s harsh response and ushering in of the NYPD brought about increased protest, which then generalized the encampment movement across the country — the repression has only intensified this fall semester. This time, universities aim to quash campus activism before it can take center stage as it did in the spring.
Universities have adopted draconian policies targeting individual professors, student organizers and student organizations. Northwestern University, for example, suspended journalism professor Steven Thrasher over the summer for standing alongside his students and protecting them from police assault at the encampment in the spring. In May, Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania fired Jewish anti-Zionist professor Maura Finkelstein for speaking in support of Palestine in the classroom and online; she continues to fight her dismissal. More recently, Cornell University suspended graduate student Momodou Taal after a September 18 Palestine solidarity action; he is now facing deportation, a terrifying precedent for international students involved in campus activism.
But the draconian policies are not limited to individual universities and cases. They are part of sweeping policy changes to institutionalize repression across universities, demanded by Democratic and Republican politicians alike and heeded by university administrators. Congressional hearings have pushed universities to crack down on activism and berated university administrators who have seen protests on their campus. In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation in September requiring public universities across the state to change their codes of conduct and train students in “how to protest with civility.”
As a result, campus organizers and Students for Justice in Palestine chapters — which were at the forefront of the encampment movement in the spring — have been forced to challenge administrations for their right to organize.
Truthout spoke with student organizers and leaders across the country to hear, in their own words, how the student movement is reacting to — and fighting back against — this new wave of repression.
Students fight back in court
In May, the administration at the University of Vermont (UVM) issued a temporary suspension to the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter on its campus, while the on-campus encampment in solidarity with Gaza was ongoing. It claimed that the chapter had used campus space and set up the encampment without permission, and also charged individual students with violations like failing to provide their identification — rules and regulations that universities across the country have now doubled down on in order to shut down student protest. In September, the SJP found the university still unwilling to revoke the suspension. Determined to challenge it, the chapter decided to sue the university, and filed a federal lawsuit against UVM on September 9. SJP at UVM explained in a press release that the university has “failed to provide evidence that UVMSJP engaged in any actions that are not protected by the first amendment.”
One of the UVM student organizers, a Palestinian student who asked to be anonymous due to mounting repression, explained the context of the lawsuit to Truthout:
Nearly every university administration in the U.S. is cracking down on what they rightfully see as a threat to their profits and investments in Israeli colonization, and UVM is no exception. At UVM, the administration is stretching itself thin trying to preserve its image as a progressive, socially conscious institution while remaining just as complicit in the genocide as any other neoliberal university. Instead of responding to the encampment period with riot police and tear gas like other universities, UVM placed our organization on an illegal suspension in an attempt to stifle the emergence of an organized mass student movement.
We are fighting this suspension in court.
It is no surprise that UVM has suspended our SJP chapter,” she continued. “UVM has historically silenced Palestinians and our struggles for liberation taking place on campus. From the cancellation of an event featuring Mohammed El Kurd in the fall of 2023, to saying the word “Palestinian” for the first time only after 3 Palestinian students were shot just a block away from campus, it is clear who UVM has deemed as their enemy.
Their attacks against us have become the testing ground for their ability to repress any form of dissent against an increasingly corporatized university profiting off the oppressed and exploited masses of the world. That is why we have filed a lawsuit aiming to reverse our unconstitutional suspension.
UVM SJP students hope the lawsuit they filed against the administration will show that students will not accept repression, and that challenges can be made to the all-but-arbitrary rules and regulations meant to demobilize them.
The UVM suspension is certainly not the only faced by SJPs — Rutgers University in New Jersey has suspended the campus SJP chapter twice, once in December 2023, and again before the start of the fall 2024 semester. On September 17, the SJP chapter at the University of Maryland sued the university after it cancelled a vigil planned to mark one year of the genocide — and won, with the court affirming their right to hold the event on October 1. This points to an important avenue for student organizations to successfully challenge the repression and silencing they are facing.
Arbitrary rule changes
The use of seemingly arbitrary rules to quell student organizing has become commonplace on university campuses this fall. Emma Wunderly, a member of the activist group Dissenters — an organization that opposes militarism and war and works alongside SJP — at the University of Virginia gave a vivid picture of these rules and their stifling effect:
In the latest crackdown by administration, the University of Virginia changed 11 different policies regarding their time, place, and manner policies for demonstrations, protests, and gatherings the day before classes started. These policies were approved in a rushed process, which ignored the process outlined on the ‘UVA Policy’ website.
These policies, including no camping or sleeping outside, no projection of images, no ‘disruptive’ amplified sound, and the ability of university officials to ask for ID of masked individuals, are nothing more than a sham in direct response to the encampment, designed to make it harder for students, staff, and community members to hold UVA accountable for its complicity in the Palestinian genocide. The mask ban is especially concerning as it stigmatizes those who are at high risk for wearing them and gives the impression that masking is no longer necessary.
These crackdowns will not stop our organizing — in fact — they are a sign that UVA is feeling the pressure and to continue fighting until divestment from Israel and the U.S. imperial war machine.
The adoption of new, strict policies is far from unique to UVA: it has become standard across dozens of campuses and is propelled by politicians, as shown in the case of Newsom’s legislation in California.
In addition to seemingly arbitrary rules and newfound strictness with regards to university policies, some universities have doubled down on their conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. At the end of August, New York University (NYU) announced that Zionists were now a protected class — the first time that a university has claimed that Zionism is a protected identity, rather than a political ideology. This too marks a worrisome precedent for the protection of Zionism and escalated repression of Palestine solidarity activists. At the same time, the university has also increased its repressive surveillance of student activists.
One Palestinian student and NYU SJP member, who asked to simply be called “Jen” due to the increase in repression, told Truthout that “NYU has cultivated an atmosphere that is incredibly repressive of student dissent and free speech against the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” She explained that NYU has used disciplinary action and also erected physical barriers “to impede student assembly and pro-Palestine activism. Security is heightened throughout campus, NYPD barricades are now on the side of our library, and the university’s new Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy has criminalized anti-Zionism by equating it to antisemitism.”
This policing on campus has made it more difficult for students to organize, the same student explained. “Due to the physical restrictions imposed throughout NYU, there are limitations on where we can gather on campus. Threats of disciplinary action and conduct hearings are used as rhetorical tactics to prevent students from organizing.”
At NYU, the administration’s policies have turned the campus into a site of policing and control, and for the time being, this has managed to put a damper on Palestine solidarity activism. Nonetheless, the SJP chapter is still organizing alongside other student groups and strategizing about how to counter the mounting repression.
Union solidarity
Students at Brown University have for the past year provided a model of organizing and activism in solidarity with Gaza and against university complicity with Israel’s genocide, and the latest attempts at repression have not succeeded in halting their efforts. The students, along with alumni supporters, have been waging a divestment campaign, its latest phase focused on pushing the university’s board to heed the call for divestment. In the spring, the Brown Divest Coalition came to an agreement with the university administration: it agreed to dismantle the encampment in exchange for a vote by the university’s corporation on divestment, as well as for charges to be dropped against 41 students who had been arrested for protesting in solidarity with Palestine. Students had waged a successful campaign calling for divestment in 2020, only for the university President Christina Paxson to refuse to bring the report to the board.
Sherena Razek, who co-founded the Palestine Solidarity Caucus within the Brown University Graduate Labor Organization (GLO), described the university’s contempt for the Palestine solidarity organizing, as well as the multi-racial and multi-religious coalition of activists and the varied tactics they have used over the past year to revive the push for divestment:
Since October 7th we have worked with our union, GLO, which I was the president of for the past two years, to mobilize towards divestment working with our undergraduate students and partners in the struggle, along with alumni, supportive faculty, staff and community members.
We have held multiple referenda, polls, protests, actions, and circulated enough petitions to know that the vast majority of the Brown community, like the majority of Americans at this time, oppose Israel’s brutal genocidal assault on Gaza and the unmitigated financial support for these crimes from this government and our institutions.
While we fight on all fronts to get the university to divest we also face a concerted Zionist effort — with outside organizations working with people on campus to spy on us, surveil us, harass and intimidate us, defame us, slander and silence any opposition we pose to the actions of the Israeli state as antisemitic, and then also recruit the university to investigate and interrogate us on these grounds. Unsurprisingly, these multi-billion-dollar endowed institutions, that accumulated their wealth historically through the exploitation of enslaved labour and theft of Indigenous lands, continue to operate entirely in the service of power. In the case of this genocide, that means that the Brown administration is working alongside their largest donors to undermine solidarity with the anti-colonial Palestinian struggle for liberation. They couch this complicity in the name of institutional neutrality, which is as deceitful and dehumanizing as it is untrue.
Sherena described the overlap between union organizing on campus and organizing for Palestine, including in the university’s repressive tactics against both:
The way they have tried to covertly stifle pro-Palestine protest is also the way they tried to bust our union. Quietly over the course of the year the university adopted very repressive policies around postering, protesting and the use of the campus greens. They also declared ‘Israeli’ as a protected class in their discrimination and harassment policy. The changes Brown made to policies that impact grad workers were made illegally. Considering that punishment for violating these policies could result in the termination of our jobs, this counts as a working condition and they are obligated to negotiate with the union over such changes. We have several active unfair labour practice charges filed against our employer due to these unilateral changes, refusal to bargain, surveillance of grad workers, as well as making retaliatory threats and targeting union leaders in doing so, myself included.
The repression is certainly a challenge to our ability to organize, but we are very steadfast and are strategizing ways to fight back against this repression. Last semester for example, after we were banned as grad workers from holding protests against our employer without university permission, we took our protests to the provost and president’s house on a May Day march on the mansions. Hundreds from the community joined us.
We will continue to mobilize our strength in numbers to combat the repression and protect our rights to political speech and our duty to oppose our employer’s complicity in the most well documented and publicly broadcasted genocide in history.
In October, Brown’s Corporation will finally vote on the Brown Divest Coalition’s proposal to divest from 10 companies involved in Israel’s occupation and apartheid. If the vote still fails to result in the university’s divestment, the Brown Divest Coalition, Brown’s GLO and the SJP chapter will continue to escalate their pressure. No matter the outcome, the students at Brown and elsewhere have demonstrated several avenues for challenging their administrations’ repression and silencing that can be generalized across campuses: lawsuits against draconian university policies, coalition efforts linking with activist graduate unions, and long-term divestment campaigns paired with escalations in pressure. These efforts will continue to be necessary in the struggle for student activism on campus, and in the long-term fight to challenge U.S. support for Israel and university complicity with Israel’s genocide.
Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist
