“Despite the McCarthyite environment, the new anti-speech policies, the attempts to throw the book at students for minor violations of such policies, the student movement is still going strong,” says Palestine Legal attorney Radhika Sainath.
STUDENT ENCAMPMENT FOR GAZA AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN WASHINGTON, DC, ON APRIL 25, 2024. (PHOTO: LAURA ALBAST)This semester returning university students have encountered stricter anti-protest regulations at their schools, while advocates continue to deal with fallout from last spring’s Gaza solidarity
“University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” wrote National SJP organizer Carrie Zaremba in September. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this Fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.”
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath told Mondoweiss those changes have included new encampment bans, stricter rules against wearing masks, a weaponization of ‘Time, place, and manner restrictions’, and stricter rules for holding protests.
However, Sainath also points out that groups like Palestine Legal are still wading through disciplinary actions from last semester.
“We were really busy over the summer and continue to be busy,” she said. “We have student conduct hearings where schools have either been late to file charges or have filed charges, but the hearings haven’t occurred yet. We’re dealing with appeals. There’s a lot of ongoing work.”
One such example that recently came to light is the case of Maura Finkelstein, who is a tenured associate professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
In January, Finkelstein temporarily shared a statement from a Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi on Instagram.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” read the post. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide-loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat-out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
Finkelstein was initially suspended from campus for allegedly violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies, then fired months later. She was the first tenured professor to be terminated over pro-Palestine speech.
She’s appealing the decision.
Finkelstein didn’t go public with her story until sharing it with The Intercept’sNatasha Lennard last month. In her piece, Lennard reported that Finkelstein was the target of “a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators.”
Finkelstein told Mondoweiss that administration anxiety over donor contributions is undoubtedly a big part of such suppression.
“I think this is the worst-case scenario of what we’ve been seeing for decades: a rolling back of federal funding for higher education, which has been replaced with a donor model,” she explained. “This is what happens when schools become a marketplace and not a space for education. In some ways, I don’t think we should be surprised.”
“I think the neoliberal model of higher education is failing everyone. I don’t need to feel compassion against the administrators at my college who terminated me, but I can also see how they have been placed in an impossible position,” she continued. “A small school like Muhlenberg is not Harvard, it’s not Brown. We don’t have a big endowment. If the pressure was such that they had to make a decision between the financial stability of the institution or supporting a faculty member who was speaking out against genocide in a way that their donors wanted shut down? That’s a terrible position for the administration and that hurts everybody.”
Repression on campus
The climate that Finkelstein described has seemingly gotten even worse in recent months.
Over the summer New York University (NYU) updated its code of conduct to make “Zionist” and “Zionism” protected classes in its nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy.
At Columbia University an Antisemitism task force recommended student organizations to “have a robust consultation process before issuing statements or joining coalitions” and called on the school to adopt a working definition of antisemitism that includes some criticisms of Israel.
Just a couple weeks into the fall semester Cornell University targeted British-Gambian graduate student Momodou Taal for suspension after he participated in a September 18 campus protest against the genocide in Gaza. A suspension would have meant that Taal’s F-1 visa status would have been revoked and he would have to leave the country.
Taal’s situation led to a massive pressure campaign and the school’s administration eventually backed down.
“I think ever since October, I’ve been a visible face for the for what’s happening on campus in terms of I’ve been speaking at rallies, holding teach-ins, I have an online presence as well. I feel like these have all contributed to making me a target,” Taal told Mondoweiss. “I think what the new president [Michael Kotlikoff] is trying to do is trying to break the movement on campus.
“I keep saying that these repressive tactics cannot be divorced from the issue itself,” he continued. “The issue is that it’s because it’s about Palestine because it, it touches the heart of university investment. It goes to the heart of for the heart of Empire.”
Similar scenes have played out around the country.
The University of Maryland (UMD) blocked the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter from holding a vigil for Gaza on the anniversary of October 7, before a federal judge ruled against the school’s decision.
Tufts University recently suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter due “to multiple violations of university policies.”
According to Tufts executive director of media relations Patrick Collins these infractions included an Instagram post calling on students to “Join the Student Intifada” and “escalate” at a campus demonstration.
Sainath says she expects student activists to shift their tactics, but doesn’t see the protesters scaling back.
“I think the thing to keep an eye on going forward, is that despite the McCarthyite environment, the new anti-speech policies, the attempts to throw the book at students for minor violations of such policies, that the student movement is still going strong,” she said. “These are principled students speaking out against an ongoing genocide and the movement will evolve both to respond to the attacks against it and in creative new ways that students feel best get their message out.”
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