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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Agree completely about the schools where that appears to have been tolerated. WTF?

At my son's school, the school and the police stood by and did nothing as right-wing Jewish (and others? Proud Boys?) attacked the pro-Palestinian protestors, 25 of whom were hospitalized.

I find the schools' inaction re all of the above completely baffling.

Wow, this article makes Columbia sound even worse than I'd thought. What a total train wreck of a school administration.

A taste:

But in November, we got a new rulebook. All of the above would be superseded by a new directive: In the case of speech about Israel-Palestine that upsets those with strong commitments to the state of Israel, all feelings would be considered facts, and all perceptions of threat would be treated as real ones. If you feel a commitment to the state of Israel and you see a keffiyeh or the flag of Palestine and don’t like it, the full force of university discipline and policy will be at your disposal.

It was this sabotaging of my educational mission, along with the advertised erasure of anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty like myself, that first mobilized me into campus activism. And I was not alone: Faculty massed in mid-November around the statue of Athena to protest these suspensions, and a chapter was formed of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine to support our students and carry on their mission.

I struggle to adequately state the extent of the university’s failing. It contradicts core tenets of freedom of expression enshrined in our university statutes, which affirm that “free expression would mean little if it did not include the right to express what others may reject or loathe.”

But worse, the effects on combating real prejudice were immediate and calamitous. Actual prejudice against Jews became hard to combat, because any discussion of antisemitism was tainted by the nakedly repressive project of the university. I fear that student protesters struggled to sufficiently distance themselves from real harassment of Jewish or Israeli students in part because the charges of such prejudice had been so delegitimized. Meanwhile, actual prejudice and violence against Muslim and Palestinian students went unaddressed and sometimes unreported to an institution that obviously had no capacity or interest for addressing them on the same scale.