On October 25, hundreds of people participated in a sit-in at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, calling on school administrators to cut ties with weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It was part of a wave of activism around Israel’s siege of Gaza on university campuses around the country, and it ended in increasingly typical fashion: Campus police arrested 57 of the demonstrators for trespassing because they remained in the university’s Whitmore Administration Building after it had closed at 6 p.m.
The incident at Amherst is reflective of a broader university crackdown against students participating in a form of protest with deep roots in the American civil rights movement: the sit-in. Elsewhere across the country, universities have met such sit-downs — often driven by demands related to divestment from companies selling arms to Israel, a tactic with roots in protests against apartheid South Africa — with disciplinary action, off-campus criminal charges, and an over-application of campus policies seldom used in similar circumstances.
“How can, on the one hand, [universities] pride themselves in teaching American values, free speech, and nonviolent political action, but on the other hand, when those students actually put those values into practice, they respond in an authoritarian way,” said Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University who co-authored a recent report called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine–Israel Discourse.”
“Usually through lawfare: by selectively enforcing policies, changing policies, with a particular political motivation to quash speech and quash political action, or to embroil students in frivolous and unrounded internal administrative complaints,” Aziz continued. “And the students are learning for themselves that the United States has never been a place where all people can exercise free speech and political freedom.”
– To read the full news article in The Intercept, click here.
