What we are witnessing on various campuses--Columbia, NYU, UT Austin, Emory and others--is a predictable consequence of the campaign by the awful Congresswoman Foxx to terrorize universities into suppressing pro-Palestinian speech. This video from Emory is representative: an economics professor, concerned by the way the police are manhandling a student, tries to intervene, which police cannot tolerate, and she herself is then thrown to the ground (literally) and handcuffed. Student encampments in open spaces may violate university rules, although as one report I received from UT Austin indicated, the student protesters were not disrupting classes at all, whereas the heavy-handed police intervention (what else would one expect from the authoritarian-minded Texas Governor Gregg Abbott?) created such a ruckus (including endless bullhorn announcements and orders) that classes were disrupted. But if encampments violate content-neutral university rules, the correct response is through the university disciplinary process, not mass arrests by the police. Only where protests actually interfere with university business--teaching and research--might a police response be warranted, but that has not been the case at Columbia or UT Austin, the two cases I've learned the most about. Will some university leadership finally have the courage to stand up to the Republicans? After all, what the students are protesting--the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the mass slaughter there--deserves protest, and goes to the alleged core of the First Amendment, namely, political speech.
(There has been some very bad behavior at Columbia, but not by students: once the unnecessary police intervention last week turned Columbia into a media spectacle, area activists, many openly anti-semitic, descended on Columbia, but their antics have been confined to the streets outside the campus. Many clueless folks on social media, who don't know the layout of the campus, are circulating videos which clearly show bad behavior by non-students on the streets outside the campus.)
ADDENDUM: For those not on Twitter, you can see the full video of the police assault on the Emory economics professor here.
MORE: The economics professor from the video has been criminally charged with "simple battery," a misdemeanor in Georgia. The video seems to confirm that, given that she physically resisted the officer. On the other hand, what the officer did would be criminal battery if he were not a police officer. I trust civil rights attorneys have reached out to the economics professor. My guess is the prosectuors will decline to prosecute her.
ANOTHER: A philosopher elsewhere, who agreed with my original post, did point out one quite stupid bit of behavior by the students on the Columbia campus, captured in this video. I say "stupid," because the students in the encampment had no right of privacy, and no right to exclude others from that space. The forming of the line was obviously menacing behavior, although I assume we would have heard if they had actually prompted a physical confrontation (and they would then be liable to arrest for assault and maybe battery). It is striking how the mindless invocation of "Zionist" serves as a rallying cry and term of abuse. It reminds me of how, in the 1970s, the PLO was simply a "terrorist" organization that no one in the U.S. took seriously. That Zionism was a response by a persecuted minority to a long history of legally sanctioned abuse and disadvantage in Europe is unknown to these students: now it is simply an instance of the wicked 'settler-colonialism,' another strange charge as we have noted before.
Recent Comments