The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom decry in the strongest of terms the growing number of cases of colleges and universities calling on local police, often anti-riot squads using brutal force, to repress and disperse what have overwhelmingly been peaceful student protests calling for an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and for university divestment from companies profiting from or contributing to the Israeli military assault on Palestine. We also deplore actions and statements from national, state and local officials that seek to delegitimize student and faculty activists and their criticism of the war as chaotic, dangerous, or antisemitic.
Since our statement of 24 April, protests and encampments have continued to grow on campuses, public and private, across the US, as have attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize such protests. Even more concerning is the growing propensity of university leaderships to call upon not only campus security, but also city and state police forces, often in riot gear, to disperse peaceful protesters and uproot student encampments.[1] Further, there have been troubling instances in which student journalists have reportedly been censored or targeted for their reporting, while some police departments have released doctored footage and provided a distorted account of campus protests, amplified by mainstream media.[2]
As of this writing, there have reportedly been nearly 2,500 arrests nationwide of student protesters, largely for “trespass,” as their universities impose time, manner, and place restrictions on protest that effectively turn students into trespassers on their own campuses and thereby criminalize them.
The basic demands of these Palestine solidarity protests have been and remain an end to the genocide in Gaza, a permanent ceasefire and divestment from the Israeli military campaign. Yet media coverage and commentary have both marginalized the central political issues driving the protests and adopted two false narratives which have put the protesters in peril: first, that they are chaotic and dangerous, and second, that they are antisemitic in comportment and demands. In fact, reports from inside these encampments are replete with examples of peaceful operation and organization, and it is clear that there are many Jewish students and faculty among the protesters.
Further contributing to the framings that put students and faculty in real danger have been statements from and actions by members of the US government.[3] Statements from local and national officials and recent Congressional action are not intended to promote campus security or academic freedom. Rather, they are intended to diminish academic freedom, undermine faculty governance, and terminate curricular diversity. It is likely no coincidence that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block declared the peaceful protest encampment on that campus “unlawful” on the same day that it was reported he had been called to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for the next in the series of inquisitorial hearings of university presidents begun in December. These hearings need to be seen, not as part of a serious campaign to combat antisemitism in the US, but as a part of an ongoing campaign to demonize pro-Palestinian mobilization on campuses, itself part of a longer-standing and broader strategy to discredit and undermine the US’s leading institutions of higher education, and with them, the US academy, academic freedom, indeed, free speech more broadly.
We therefore reiterate what is an increasingly urgent call to college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and peaceful protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, college and university leaders must fulfill their responsibility to their profession and their campus community by defending peaceful protesters, seeking non-securitized solutions to addressing protest encampments, upholding the safety and academic freedom of all of their students, faculty and staff, and rejecting pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war.
[1] While the first example of such a militarized response of which we are aware took place at Pomona College on 5 April, the most prominent example to date came on the night of 30 April when Columbia University called on the NYPD to break up the student encampment, in the course of which some 300 protesters, a majority of them students, were arrested. The university has also requested that the NYPD remain on the campus until 17 May. On 24 April, the University of Southern California’s leadership sent in not only the campus police, but the LAPD and its anti-riot wing, LAPD metro, to break up a protest, arresting 93, the majority of whom were students, along with 3 faculty, who had remained to protect the students and document the arrests. Students then established an encampment, but shortly after 4am on 5 May the university again sent in the LAPD metro to clear all the tents and protesters.
At Washington University, during protests on 27 April longtime MESA member Steve Tamari, a faculty member from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville who was visiting the encampment, was badly beaten by police. Six faculty members from Washington University have since been placed on leave pending an investigation of their involvement with the encampment on that campus, though the faculty in question have described their involvement as “minimal or nonexistent.” At Indiana University, which has called in campus security, local police, and the Indiana State Police to disperse the protests, professors and students were arrested for “criminal trespass”; at Emory University the president called in the campus police, the Atlanta Police, and the Georgia State Patrol which then used tear gas, zip ties, and stun guns to clear an encampment and make arrests; and at the University of Texas, Austin there have been two major police interventions on campus, resulting in tens of arrests. At Dartmouth University, a 65-year old professor was among the 90 people arrested, zip-tied, and charged with criminal trespass on 1 May when the university president called in police to clear an encampment within hours of its appearance.
At UCLA, just before dawn on 2 May, the LAPD, California Highway Patrol and campus security, which had deployed to the UCLA campus over the previous ten hours, uprooted the protest encampment there, arresting more than 130 people. Notably this protest had been peaceful until the night of 30 April-1 May when a group of vigilante counter-protesters violently attacked the encampment; in this case some three hours passed before the LAPD was called to “restore order.” Despite clear and contemporaneous evidence that the UCLA encampment was not only overwhelmingly peaceful but had also resisted earlier attempts at provocation by counter-protesters, the university issued an ambiguous statement failing to clearly identify those responsible for the violence. Moreover, despite belated statements by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass suggesting the attackers would be investigated and prosecuted, the only arrests to date have been of over 200 of the peaceful protesters. Peaceful protests have been broken up through coercion and police action at other campuses across the country as well.
[2] The campus radio stations at both Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles, were reportedly barred from access to their offices at various moments when police raids were occurring on their campuses. Student journalists from the UCLA campus paper, the Daily Bruin, also reported being threatened with arrest by the Los Angeles Police Department during the police raid on their campus on 2 May. Any threats against or restrictions on the work of student journalists are unacceptable and constitute an especially worrying development at a time when many student journalists have garnered widespread praise for doing a better job of objective and rigorous reporting on campus protests than the mainstream media.
[3] President Biden spoke for the first time at any length on the pro-Palestinian protests on 2 May. While he affirmed the right to free speech and freedom of assembly and rejected the suggestion by some that the National Guard be called in to put an end to the protests, he also stated there is no “right to cause chaos,” thereby adopting the framing of protesters as security threats. Biden went on to say that “there should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism, or threats of violence against Jewish students.” We agree with this statement. Yet in the context of overwhelmingly peaceful protests that include many Jewish protesters, the statement is misleading because it falsely insinuates that the protests are violent and conflates anti-war activism with antisemitism.
On the congressional level, on 24 April Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, surrounded by other members of Congress, spoke at Columbia University and called for President Nemat Shafik’s resignation if she proved unable to contain the protests. He expressed concern, not for the security of all students and faculty on campus, but only for Jewish students’ safety, promised to punish colleges and universities if they failed to contain the protests, and called for a possible deployment of the National Guard. On 30 April House Republicans announced an investigation into federal funding for universities where there have been protests against the Gaza war. The following day the US House of Representatives passed HR 6090, essentially incorporating into federal law the widely criticized IHRA definition of antisemitism.
In some instances, local officials have also been responsible for disseminating misinformation about the protests in terms that echo the worst forms of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was especially egregious and irresponsible in justifying the deployment of a massive, militarized anti-riot force against protesters on Columbia’s campus. Adams publicly and falsely claimed that the police had to intervene to stop “outside agitators,” including those associated with individuals “convicted for terrorism,” from “radicaliz[ing] our children.” These smears go beyond mischaracterizing protests as violent or chaotic. Adams serves as the mayor of a city whose police department had to pay a landmark settlement to Muslim communities — including campus student associations — for unlawful surveillance based on their religious and ethnic identities as part of its long history of targeting and abusing people of color. His attempt to link campus protests to support for terrorism is a fresh example of the racist and bigoted strategy of weaponizing terrorism designations and laws against pro-Palestinian activists.