These political attacks have a chilling effect upon the entirety of public thought and discourse, writes Andrea Brower.
Students inside the gates of Columbia University in New York wave Palestinian flags through the bars, April 22, 2024. (SWinxy, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Andrea Brower
Common Dreams
For months before U.S. President Donald Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life.
New York University suspended 11 students who were part of a peaceful flyer distribution and sit-in, including students who simply sat in the library lobby in solidarity. Eleven students at Swarthmore College faced expulsion on assault charges for using a bullhorn. Emerson College laid off 10 staff members, blaming protests for Palestine as a cause for low enrollment, and then using layoffs to target pro-Palestine employees.
Emerson also put four students on probation for leafleting on a public sidewalk. Thirteen students at Princeton are being criminalized for “trespassing” on their own campus after they participated in a sit-in.
Seven students and faculty at Duke have been called before a University Judicial Board, and without notice or due process are facing termination for participating in nonviolent protest. Tenured professors at Emory are facing similar trials. MIT demoted a tenured professor after he proposed a course entitled “Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, & Israel.” Professors at Muhlenberg College, Columbia, John Jay College, City University of New York, NYU, and more, have been fired or forced out for advocating for Palestinian rights.
I have spoken with a university librarian fired after teaching a workshop in which they discussed “scholasticide” in Gaza, a K-12 teacher fired for a social media post critical of Israel and the U.S., and scores of K-12 teachers who have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for speaking about the suffering of Palestinians.
An avalanche of Title VI Civil Rights Act complaints are being weaponized against educators, many of them filed by individuals or organizations with absolutely no connection to the school in question.
I am personally facing a Title VI investigation at Gonzaga University, where I was hired as an “activist scholar” to be the lead instructor in a Solidarity and Social Justice program.
The allegations against me are over attending a peaceful student “walkout for Palestine,” and forwarding to our faculty listserve an open student letter (signed by hundreds of our students) against Gonzaga’s anti-protest policy. A range of outcomes are possible, including termination.
Because I went on a pre-approved medical leave the day after my first interrogation, I have been denied the right to submit further statements or participate in any way until May. In essence, I will be on trial for five months with no representation or ability to advocate for myself.
Silence & Isolation
Riot police on the main lawn of the University of Texas on April 29, 2024, during pro-Palestine student demonstrations. (Irisoptical, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The number of similar cases is impossible to know, due in part to near media omission. Many people who have faced or are currently facing investigations are instructed that they must remain silent (and isolated) as to not “compromise” the investigation. Some are quiet because their jobs, prospects for future employment, and safety are at stake.
What is clear is that the trials are wide-reaching, extraordinarily punitive, largely coordinated, and were coming down rapidly across the country at educational institutions of all types before Trump was sworn in.
The witch-hunting of educators and students is combined with related measures, including a nationwide rollout of campus anti-protest policies that appears at least influenced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, advisers to Project 2025.
At the start of the school year around 100 campuses issued broad policy changes that essentially ban meaningful protest. Some universities have gone as far as to fortress entire campuses with checkpoints and surveillance drones, block common gathering areas with fences, and station security guards outside of classrooms.
These are political attacks, designed to crush a movement that is standing with and for people at the brutal bottom of violent systems of oppression. They have a chilling effect, not just upon those they are wielded against, but upon the entirety of public thought and discourse. Some experts have warned that we are witnessing a new McCarthyism, and one that may well exceed the repression of the 1950s.
The new McCarthyism began before Trump and has been partly initiated by “liberal” higher-ed institutions, but Trump’s tyrannical regime will strive to take the trend to harrowing new extremes.
Less than two weeks in office, Trump has already issued an executive order — pulled directly from Project Esther — to deport pro-Palestine students who are not citizens and take “forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all federal resources” against what he described as campuses “infested with radicalism” and “pro-jihadist protests.”
The crackdown on students and educators — being swiftly and terrifyingly exploited and extended by Trump — is a major assault on free speech and academic freedom. It is a grim threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist all of the assaults of authoritarianism and oligarchy that we are up against. It is an alarming slippery slope, that began in large part as a bipartisan attack on a movement that is challenging U.S.-led racist empire.
Activism for Palestinian freedom and equality necessarily confronts American and Western capitalist and imperial interests. It upends supremacist, dehumanizing ideologies — in the case of Palestine, Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia — that rationalize and sustain a remarkably violent and hierarchical global order.
To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is — in part — why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe, garnering broad support from the far-right and liberals alike.
The witch hunt across educational institutions plays on longstanding Anti-Palestinian racism to vilify all forms of protest for Palestine as terroristic and anti-Semitic, issuing sweeping charges of antisemitism against any expression of concern for Palestinian life. In this, there is a largely intentional conflation of criticism of Israeli government apartheid and genocide with anti-Semitism.
This misconstruing is also dangerous and oppressive to Jews. According to History and Jewish Studies Professor Annelise Orleck, it seeks to enforce a right-wing Pro-Israel political stance to which all Jews must adhere, and attempts to eviscerate Jewish identities rooted in a long tradition of standing for the rights of the oppressed, democratic pluralism and social justice.
Both Jews and Palestinians have been disproportionately targeted in the campus crackdowns.
While the protection of Jewish life has become the pretext for persecuting those who express concern for Palestinian life, a haunting rise in anti-Semitism on the far-right and at the top is being ignored; at times even defended by groups whose stated mission is to “combat antisemitism.” British-Israeli author Rachel Shabi recently wrote in the The Guardian,
“If antisemitism is so blatantly wielded as a political weapon, it creates the impression of a fundamental unseriousness about the subject.”
It also undermines the very humanistic movements that are our hope for a world beyond both anti-Semitism and Anti-Arab racism. To restate words I spoke to students at the protest for which I am being accused of “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act:
“In a moment of such intensive propaganda and power, the world needs your moral clarity. Your moral clarity that all of our lives are inherently interconnected. That the movement for Palestinian liberation is a movement for human liberation. That liberation for Palestinians forces a reckoning with all interlocking systems of oppression, which is core to — not in competition with — Jewish, Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, Collective liberation. Your moral clarity [shows] that human solidarity, mutual safety, and freedom is possible. That love, rather than domination, could be the guiding force of our lives together on this one beautiful planet.”
We are going to need to hold firm to the principle and aim of collective liberation in the times ahead, and stand with linked arms against attempts to distort our common humanity. I find tremendous hope in the students and educators who have been brave enough to do so, in spite of intense repression and retaliation. It is the courageous acts of ordinary people that will stop the cruel trajectories we are on.
Andrea Brower is an activist and scholar from Kaua‘i. She is an assistant professor in the Solidarity & Social Justice Program with Gonzaga University’s Department of Sociology. Her research, writing, and teaching on capitalism, colonialism, the environment, food, and agriculture is embedded in social movements for justice, equality, liberation, and ecological regeneration.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
A desperately needed voice in support of Jewish and Christian
belief systems.
True Jews are deeply committed to alleviate the crushing forces
of oppression: “On the side of their oppressors there was power,
and there was no one to to comfort them” (Ecclesiastes 4.1).
And for the Christians the cross of the Christ says it all.
Universities are no longer forums for public discourse and thought. Universities were once such places, in some places at least. However. today. look at where their money comes from. Government grants for research make up a large part. With the DOD and other areas of ‘national security’ and ‘public safety’ being dominant. Universities are also depended on corporate funds and partnerships. When you see government and corporate money, you will find control.
Today’s universities are merely corporate training schools. They take from their corporate partners their mission to supply ‘trained’ graduates into the corporate machines, while taking a bunch of money to research better ways to kill people on DOD grants.
Given corporate control, being disobedient now in a college gets the same result that being disobedient later in a corporate job will get. Immediate termination … probably with ‘campus security’ walking you to your car with your box of personal belongings in your arms. Probably the best day of your life, when you look back on it.
Get out now. Leave it all behind. You really don’t want that corporate job that you were being trained for. Talk to a 50 year old who’s been laid off about just how much that ‘career’ was worth. Not much.
From the age of Punk Rock …
” The men in the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothing, so boy get running!
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal!”
— The Clash, “Clampdown” (a very good song that worth finding and a listen)
The biggest joke is that on certain college campuses it’s A-Ok to say the United States is a racist country but dare to say Israel’s a racist country and one risks suspension or possible expulsion. Bizzaro world.
Trump, and I would include most the ignorant rubes in Washington don’t even understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are not Jihadist organizations. The Jihadists are Sunni. As in Saudi Arabia and affiliated countries. In other words, those aligned with Israel and the US. The US employs Jihadists to be their regime change shock troops as just happened in Syria. As per usual, turning reality on its head.
In my state of Massachusetts, the legislature passed a law to force public school students to be indoctrinated with an ADL controlled program on combatting antisemitism. It’s truly Orwellian. If I still had kids in school, I’d pull them out and home school them.
We are in a police state situation. We can’t deny it anymore.
To understand Hamas and Hezbollah, look at the pictures that even might make it into the American “news”. Right now, the people of Gaza and Lebanon are voting with their feet and trying to reclaim their homes. Going north in Gaza, or south in Lebanon. In both cases, they risk receiving the fire that has not ceased, but the people still won’t stop.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are popular based organizations. The reason why Israel/America/Palestinian Authority never utter the word “elections” is that the PA candidates who’ve been in bed with Israel for decades would lose. The Free World would have to treat it like a Romanian election and just pretend the whole thing never happened because the ‘wrong’ people won …. again. After all of the bombs stenciled with “made in the USA”, there is still popular resistance and you can see them out in the streets carrying signs, flags and banners – and going home.
This is why the decapitation attacks don’t work. This is why the American fantasies of hitting the secret hq with a super, multi-million dollar bomb don’t ever work. That will cause mourning within a popular based organization, but it will not defeat one. A new leader will always rise from the masses that remain loyal to their cause. You can kill a person, but you can’t kill an idea.
Of course, no American politician understands the phrase “popular support”. Our Presidents always have 40% support, and have to ride in armored limousines and conduct inaugurations indoors. The Left now openly hates “populism” and with it “the people”, while the Trumps use it as a big lie while keeping elites firmly in control. Neither understands the sort of popular movement like the ones marching home in West Asia right now, because they’ve always needed guards to keep the people away from them.
I almost got sacked for doing similar actions in my experience: as a grad student, refusing to cross the picket line; as a professor, pointing out the U.S. imperial program and addressing the Israeli occupation. In today’s context, I would be sacked. Hang tight, this reactionary junk has to stop. Be safe.
Welcome to fascism. Its revival has been in the works for decades.
Ever since Israel decided its road to world domination lay in controlling the United States. And thank you for using the word fascism; sometimes one wonders how fascistic our society has to become to get liberals to open their eyes.
America was heading there on its own long before then. I still laugh when I hear Hunter S. Thompson’s line in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” where he refers to “the Sixth Reich.” McCarthyism (4), Democrat Vietnam War and crack down on protests (5) and into the era of Richard Milhouse Nixon when the book was written (6). That was when Kissinger still felt it was necessary to make the planes full of new bombs for yet another Israeli war land at night to avoid publicity.
“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos… but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.”
–“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” Hunter S. Thompson. Johnny Depp got to star in the movie, although apparently some studio lawyer kept them from referring to the old, now demolished Circus Circus.
America was going seriously fascist in the 50’s and 60’s, then there was a revolt against it in the late 60’s and 70’s. That put things on hold for a short while, until the fascists could get rid of the pro-freedom, pro-democracy “Vietnam Syndrome”. But, really, ever since the CIA helped put Reagan in with their October Surprise, America’s fascist train has been rolling down the rails towards its final destination.
You’re gonna get the part of me that used to talk to older 1960’s radicals going. :)
The traditional definition of American “Liberals”: The political faction that wants the minimum amount of change necessary to keep the machine going. Liberals don’t want to change things. Not really. But Liberals are willing to accept a little change if it keeps the machine running. ‘Sigh, if you insist, you can have a minimum wage. As long as you stop talking about socialism.’
Different from the traditional definition of American “Conservatives”: which are the people who believe in the traditional methods of whipping the slaves until morale improves. But, it is always key to remember that Liberals were always Elites who pretty much liked America just the way it was.
That was of course before far-right-wingers like Joe Biden started calling themselves “Liberals”, and so we had a Liberal President who believed in sending in the storm troopers to put down campus protests and not giving an inch to anyone on any real “change.” Its a surreal world out there when a modern “Liberal” is far to the right of Richard Nixon. But at the very least, that should warn anyone to expect nothing from modern liberals. The modern Liberals are nothing like the Old Liberals, and the old liberals turned out to be useless and ineffective. All the Old Liberals actually accomplished was a delay in the return of fascism.
Quote from article
” The new McCarthyism began before Trump and has been partly initiated by “liberal” higher-ed institutions, but Trump’s tyrannical regime will strive to take the trend to harrowing new extremes. ”
How can I say this , I went same school that Joe graduated from . I know people who met or were in his class in school . Some I know/knew fairly well . I realize I am not adding alot to discuss with this statement but have personally heard/read stances about him . I understand the “coined term” . Your take is not lost with me . I hope you understand my aloof post .
And its not wrongthink .
Clinton – politics of personal destruction
Ingrained indocturnal fear we witness with power mad egos amassed against nonconformity .
A boil in the middle of your forehead that you hope comes to a head before it needs lancing . How long can calamine mask it to fool those who would otherwise ridicule and seek others for saftey in numbers to share the stare they want you to bear ? Can we at lest hold hands .
Hey come see this freak not knowing whats in the mirror .
The who’s who of who exactly ? An army of friends or just friends of an army ?
You at least are not alone , you may need each other to afford and share an omelet with the price of eggs .
Tolstoy’s ” The Snowstorm” comes to mind .
Don’t laugh at this please I am jumping fences while I write this .
In support of your position, I observe the antisemitism in the equation that a position opposing Israeli crimes against Palestinians is “antisemitic” (meaning anti-Jewish)… both parties are Semitic peoples. That this fact is habitually overlooked strikes me as part and parcel of the disenfranchisement and dehumanization of Palestinians, and by definition, in itself antisemitic (in its actual, more inclusive sense).
I applaud your opposition to injustice and continued protest in the face of suppression and censorship.
Of course these kinds of oppression only end when confronted seriously by the majority … as famously said, power never constrains itself willingly; it must be forced.
So where’s everyone else? In the face of such outrageous McCarthyism, where are the rest of the university professors striking in solidarity with the few targeted ones? Why aren’t the students in these schools striking against the mistreatment of their fellows?
A one-week strike would do wonders to show the weak presidents and school governing boards that their servile catering to powerful interests has a real reputational and fiscal cost and light a fire under their yellow bellies. The cowardice and lack of historical vision of one and all is astonishing.
These “schools” are nothing but businesses, the sort of businesses controlled by the lowest forms of life in our society (i.e., billionaires). Most of the teachers and students are only interested in their careers — kind of funny in a collapsing society — and do not concern themselves with issues outside their narrow self-interest. There’s a reason it’s called QUACKADEMIA.
America loves its hierarchies and this system. Very few Americans even think to object, and most of those keep quiet. Most of the people you mention probably complained about ‘the disruption.’ After the Democrats sent in the riot police, they’d have appreciated ‘the quiet’ and ‘getting back to normal.’
Don’t worry, by the time this all gets to the stage of world trials looking into America’s genocides and wars for world domination, all of those same professors will be telling official interviewers just how supportive they were of those students and how strongly they opposed the school administration. Every college student will claim to have taken part in the protests. They will of course claim to be the Good Americans who disagreed with both Biden and Trump, and therefore can not be blamed for what has happened and all those big piles of corpses around the world.
Strangely enough, some day in the future, a vast majority of these Good Americans will claim that they opposed both Biden or Trump. And every American will claim to have protested at all three inaugurations. So, in the way the children of Lake Woebegone were “all above average”, in the future, all Americans will claim to have supported 3rd parties. That’s what all the Good Americans will tell all of the official investigators in all of the interview rooms.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” -George Santayana.
In the early 1970s I had to actually do something substantial in protesting the Vietnam War to get fired from the college where I was teaching; times have changed!