FJP Statement About Campus Repression
The Steering Committee of the national network of Faculty for Justice in Palestine condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent spate of arrests of peaceful student activists (at Pomona, Vanderbilt and SUNY-Stony Brook). These students assembled on campus property to voice their opposition to institutional study abroad programs in Israel that violate college nondiscrimination policies; college and university investments in U.S. companies that produce weapons for sale to Israel; and Israeli companies that develop surveillance and policing technologies deployed to advance the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The criminalization of nonviolent student protesters constitutes a willful and cynical flouting of the mission of universities as speech havens, where the strong protections of academic freedom must apply and be upheld. It also gravely impacts the criminalized students’ careers and sustenance, contributes to the moral panic that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism and terrorism, and reinforces the rise of the new McCarthyism across society.
Student activism, and student protest in particular, is a time-honored social and political tradition in the United States. The student movements of the late 1960s, in particular, saw millions of students nationwide voicing their opposition to everything from university policy to international atrocities such as the Vietnam War, and in so doing they joined a worldwide movement of students, sometimes termed the “Global 1968,” that used institutions of higher education as epicenters for the cultivation of mass consciousness of national and international wrongs. Even the most cursory survey of the history of student activism in the United States reveals that today’s student protests in opposition to the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza or the Israeli apartheid state are, in fact, not the exception but the rule. From apartheid in South Africa to the Gulf Wars, from the murders of Black children and adults at the hands of municipal police to university investment in fossil fuels, the walk-out, the sit-in, the march or rally, and the occupation of administrative buildings are some of the most venerable tools by which students have registered their dissent. That university administrators have sought to disproportionately penalize and even criminalize students joining their voices in protest— frequently as a result of the pressure of wealthy ideologue donors— is a refusal to learn from the mistakes of administrators in the past, whose highly reactionary and repressive efforts yielded, to point to a particularly painful example, the Kent State Massacre of May 1970.
We need no clearer evidence of the sacrosanct political importance of higher education than the fact that, in Gaza, the Israeli military has specifically and comprehensively targeted educational institutions at all levels, from U.N. schools for young children to the destruction of every university in the Gaza strip. This military assault should be understood as a blatant effort to effect what the Right 2 Education campaign at Bir Zeit University (Palestine) has termed scholasticide ( “the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education”) and what others have termed epistemicide (the “killing, silencing, annihilation or devaluing of a knowledge system”). University and college administrators should be the first to condemn this wholesale effort to eradicate the entire educational infrastructure of a people.
Institutions of higher education have never been apolitical spaces, and choosing to remain neutral in the face of a genocide is, itself, a political position. Criminalizing students for peaceful protest demonstrates Pomona’s, Vanderbilt’s, and SUNY-Stony Brook’s deplorable commitment to the repression of academic inquiry and the shackling of critical thought. These political choices are not opposed to, but are rather in complicity with, broader efforts toward Palestinian epistemicide. For these reasons, we proudly stand with our undergraduate comrades and call on University and College Administrators to:
immediately drop all charges against students;
refrain from further suspending students, who are exercising their protected rights to free speech and protest, and immediately reinstate any students who have been suspended;
issue an apology to their university and college communities for this violent and inappropriate escalation and for their decisions to allow police intervention on campus;
outline a policy for the future protection of speech, including and especially dissent;
take seriously student demands that universities and colleges divest from companies supporting Israeli state violence, genocide, apartheid, and occupation; and
take seriously student demands that universities and colleges boycott Israeli academic institutions.