It’s protest season again

The weather is warming, the crocuses are starting to poke their leaves above ground, and you know what that means. It’s Protest Season again on American campuses!

The poster below appeared on the University of Chicago Students for Justice in Palestine (spuchicago), University of Chicago United, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine sites.  It announces a pro-Palestinian protest at noon today on our Quad, sponsored by these organizations and, as you can see on the poster, also by the American Association of University professors (AAUP). The text accompanying the poster:

sjpuchicago On Saturday night, the federal government abducted Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from his home, in collaboration with Columbia University. He is currently being held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. Join us at noon this Tuesday to stand in solidarity with Mahmoud and rally against the Trump administration’s fascist escalations against the student movement! We demand that UChicago refuse collaboration with DHS/ICE and that UChicago admin and DA Eileen Burke drop all disciplinary proceedings and charges against Student A and Mamayan.

“Mamayan” apparently refers to Mamayan Jabateh, one of two students put on indefinite involuntary leave from the U of C this January after being arrested charged with “aggravated battery of a peace officer and resisting/obstructing a peace officer”.  The demonstration was last October, and I described it here.

As I noted this morning, Mahmoud Khalil was a Syrian-born, pro-Palestinian grad student at Columbia University who engaged in many activist activities there but, as far as I can see, none of them illegal.  He’s married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant and holds a green card as well.  Nevertheless, he was snatched up by ICE and spirited away, apparently to Louisiana.

This looks to me like Trump pulling another illegal move to punish the kind of speech he doesn’t like. (Note that Ilya Shapiro argues otherwise at the City Journal.) Now make no mistake, I don’t like this kind of speech, either, and I know that the aim of most of these organizations (save the AAUP, which seems to be going bonkers) is to destroy American democracy and its professed values. But the test of free speech is whether you give the okay to legal speech even when it says things you detest, and so, given that this is a legal protest (which I suspect it is), here’s what I think right now.

1. As far as I know about the law, the snatching up and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil is unconscionable, a violation of the First Amendment. (There may be other things Khalil did that I don’t know.)  And right now a federal judge agrees: “On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while the judge reviewed a petition challenging the legality of his detention. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York.”
2. While I don’t particularly want to live another summer on a campus roiled by protests, with pro-Palestinians shouting through speakers, if the University deems this protest to be legal, then I can’t say it’s wrong.  That said, however, our administration has been very lax on protestors, both faculty and students, and as far as I know, despite at least five illegal pri-Palestinian protests, only the two students mentioned above hav been sanctioned. (SJP was given a toothless “warning by the University).
3. I do deplore the AAUP abandoning institutional neutrality, though one might argue that they are defending free speech here. But given their decision to stop opposing academic boycotts, an implicitly anti-Israel move, the AAUP may be taking political sides. If they are, they’re going the way of the ACLU and SPLC.

I do have a queasy feeling in my stomach, because I simply don’t want to live through another protest season like last year’s. Several of the protests, including the encampment, were illegal and disruptive, but little was done by our administration, although eventually, after a couple of warnings, University police did remove the encampment. But nobody was ever punished. J’accuse!  Legal demonstrations are okay, but many college administrations, including ours, don’t seem to have grasped that failure to punish those who participate in illegal demonstrations not only promote more of them, but erode the reputation of universities.

Here’s what will happen today.  Although I’d like to go and take pictures, one of my friends is giving a biology talk on evolution, and that takes precedence.

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