Thursday Op-Ed: In Defense of Academic Freedom
Rutgers' Suspension of a Pro-Palestine Student Group Sets a Bad Precedent and Enables the Right
Protests are meant to be disruptive. That's their primary goal. To create “tension,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Protests, marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, even building takeovers (see antiwar movement and the Flint sit-down strike), are part of a tapestry of action designed, as King said,
to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
There is a need, he says citing Socrates, “to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.”
King was focused on the question of race. His protest in early 1963 was against the Jim Crow South, against segregation laws that turned Blacks into non-citizens. The protests we are witnessing today on college campuses have a different focus — ending Israel’s war against Hamas and Palestine. These protests, like all protests, are designed to make people uncomfortable. And they start from a position that not all will respect, using language that — that Israel is wrong or, in some cases, that Israel is even illegitimate. Some view these arguments as antisemitic (some maybe, others are definitely not), and there have been demands to rein in the activities of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students and groups, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine.
These calls — which mostly come from right wing sources, but also from knee-jerk pro-Israel liberals — have born fruit, with suspensions of SJP chapters around the country, the latest being the chapter at Rutgers, where I teach.
Francine Conway, chancellor of the New Brunswick campus, issued a campus letter that described some recent protest events as “ characterized by moments of unrest that have caused members of our community to fear for their safety.”
She went on to describe a protest at the Rutgers Business School that she says “has raised questions about the use of academic buildings and the disruption of activities therein.” She’s asked the university police to investigate and would not go into detail, saying that should “share only that, as with other related incidents, individual students and a student organization have been notified of possible conduct violations.”
The notification to SJP came yesterday in the form of a letter informing the group that it was suspended and banned from campus activities, as reported by the Daily Targum and other news organizations.
ROI-NJ, a business site, interviewed faculty affiliated the Rutgers Business School and the Rutgers Center for Real Estate. “(B)oth groups said they are outraged the university has done little to stop what are considered genocidal chants: ‘From the river to the sea; Palestine will be free,’ and, ‘Say it loud, say it clear; we don’t want Zionists here.’” They also cited a Nov. 29 protest at the business school in which “demonstrators entered the building and disrupted activity, actions specifically prohibited.”
These narratives — and statements from a Jewish faculty group — are painting what I think is an inaccurate picture of life on the New Brunswick campus as the fall semester comes to a close. I can only speak for my experience, but I feel safe and my students have felt free enough to discuss news stories about the conflict. I can’t vouch for the experience of others, and I admit my experiences are likely not representative of the whole, but to characterize Rutgers as a hotbed of conflict just isn’t accurate.
I’ve attended two pro-Palestine rallies as an observer and what I’ve witnessed were raucous but peaceful actions (aside from a brief moment when a pro-israel counter protester rushed across College Avenue and nearly started a fight). I found the language used during the protests — in slogans and on signs — discomforting as a Jew, though many of my fellow Jews might see some of the slogans as antisemitic. I disagree, but we can debate the intent and meaning of the language — which is a key point. It was language. Speech. And we are supposed to have a right to speak freely and openly in the United States, without our speech being mischaracterized as threats or harassment.
Suspending SJP — as numerous other universities have done — sends a signal that the Palestinian side of the debate over the past, present, and future of Israel and Palestine carries less weight, and it underscores just how deeply anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry has seeped into mainstream thinking. The image of the Arab, of the Muslim as violent, as terrorist, as only understanding brute force, has a long history in propaganda-novels like Leon Uris’ Exodus and assorted action films. This generalization is the foundation on which sit the assumptions that pro-Palestine demonstrations are inherently dangerous.
They also offer a convenient fall guy to explain the persistence and growth of actual antisemitic violence in the United States, most of which has been perpetrated by right-wingers who — like U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik — have bought into the oldest antisemitic conspiracies and tropes in existence. These longstanding tropes — that Jews are perpetual victims or that we are the behind-the-scenes puppet masters, that we are a model minority have infected some left-wing and anti-Zionist discourse, but the lion’s share of the anti-Jew hate and ugly generalizing comes from the right — and not just the fringe right. Tucker Carlson had the highest rated show on cable for several years and used his platform to press ahead with a variety of conspiracies, most notably the Great Replacement Theory (i.e., that Jews — or sometimes just Democrats, but usually a Soros-funded entity — were recruiting non-citizens to dilute the power of white Americans), an argument frequently made by his replacement on Fox, Jesse Watters, and other hosts on the network.
Legitimate Jewish fears are being weaponized by the right, and universities like Rutgers are allowing themselves to be played as patsies in a much larger culture war that , unless we fight back, will damage the ability of institutions of higher ed to engage in the kinds of scholarship and debate needed for us to understand the world and make it better.