Colleges are attacking students for supporting Palestine

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Jack Petocz, a 19-year-old student at Vanderbilt University, is among multiple students who have just been expelled from school, while others have been suspended. Their offense? Protesting for Palestine. As Jack writes, “After exhausting every other avenue, 27 students engaged in a sit-in at our chancellor’s office.” In response to a protest the week, the school called the cops. Three were arrested and 16 were immediately suspended. Police even arrested a local reporter covering the protests. Now, a second round of punishment has come down on Vanderbilt students for their protest demanding the school divest from Israel and do more to oppose the ongoing genocide.

And these students are not alone. Last fall, after Congress held multiple hearings about college students protesting Palestine, the President of Harvard was forced to step down, and countless headlines were published about the terribleness of pro-Palestine college protests on the front pages of major publications. But the current university crackdown is flying well under the radar. Right now, as colleges are in the middle of a McCarthyite backlash against their own students for opposing genocide, there is no blanket coverage. Instead, minimal attention is being paid to universities calling riot cops on their own students, banning protest, and ushering in a host of anti-free speech policies as they both punish their students and seek to prevent future campus organizing. The dozens of conservative writers who were supposedly obsessed with “free speech on campus” are silent. Of course.

What we’re seeing now is infinitely more important than college kids shutting down the arguments of their conservative peers, or making those kids and their harmful ideas feel unwelcome, and yet it’s getting far less attention. Universities, powerful institutions backed by powerful people, are enacting policies that suppress free speech and punish students harshly for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But whereas a cultural shift to the left among young people provoked countless panicked op-eds, the actual powerful parties on campuses suppressing the right to speech and activism is met largely with silence by mass media. And for this reason it’s on us to lift up these brave students and hold these major institutions to account.

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The students at Vanderbilt are not alone. Riot police were just called on students at Pomona College protesting for Palestine. The University of Michigan is responding to a strong wave of student activism around Gaza by trying to restrict their students’ right to protest, prompting a massive outcry at the public institution. American University has banned indoor protests. Stanford has announced a ban on overnight sit-in protests. Four Columbia students were just suspended and told to leave campus for their anti-genocide organizing and protesting, but they’re refusing to leave student housing. The list goes on. And on.

To many people it’s been clear for some time that “free speech absolutists” never really cared about speech on college campuses. They cared about conservatism and many of its regressive ideas going massively out of style with young people. Right now, when free speech is genuinely under attack from the administrations and boards of several of America’s most prestigious universities, they are nowhere to be found. And that’s because anti-Zionist voices are the ones being repressed, and left-leaning students are the ones being punished, which fits neatly with their true goals of conservative power building. This motive has always been present, current circumstances are just bringing that reality into the open. It’s good to be clear and unequivocal about what they’re trying, and have been trying, to do.

For-profit media is also exposed by these recent events. Whereas students rallying for Palestine apparently deserve to get blasted on the front page of the country’s biggest papers, and by the country’s biggest news programs, universities using their vastly greater power to crush student organizing and speech get no such treatment. Even when a shift in the liberal establishment can be seen from Morning Joe to Nancy Pelosi in the wake of the murder of World Central Kitchen aid workers, the capitalist class still supports the suppression of college student activism, a site of struggle that has historically been a powerful anti-establishment incubator, and could be once again. In this moment Israel and the United States are radicalizing young people against the status quo, and the rich and powerful understand that as a real danger to their long-term grip on this country and the world economy. 

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What we’re seeing here is the real balance of power. If we focus solely on what appears to be the hypocrisy of these major universities, conservatives, and the media, we miss the consistency in their stances. The arguments they make openly are just a distraction. It’s not really about disruption, or rules, or decorum. It’s about enforcing imperialism and capitalism, it’s about maintaining an imbalance of power between these institutions and the students who attend them, and an imbalance of power in society at large. The wealthy people who populate private college boards don’t want students rocking the boat politically, either at these schools or outside of them. And the political actors who control public universities often feel the same.

So we don’t need to engage with arguments that are presented to us dishonestly. There is a massive freedom in this simple bit of knowledge. When people decry anti-Zionist protesters at Columbia University, for example, then fail to denounce the how former IDF soldiers who attend the school skunk sprayed their peers, or the administration that has relentlessly attacked its own students and their right to speech, we don’t have to spend time calling them hypocrites and debating the merits of their arguments. This applies to the discourse around, or with, any disingenuous actor. We can instead say, “I see you for what you are.” When schools and their boards are willing to hurt their students to defend Israel, defend their own power, and defend the broader status quo of this lopsided society, we don’t have to treat the arguments they put out as legitimate.

We can instead openly lead with the truth, undercut their arguments, and combat them on an honest terrain instead of a playing field where we become disadvantaged because we’ve legitimized their dishonest and illegitimate arguments. There is a great power in that undercutting, in that refusal to let disingenuous people set the terms of engagement, the terms of debate. If conservatives and Zionists cared about academic freedom, they would have raised their voices about Israel leveling every university in Gaza. They have not. So we can free ourselves to confront them with the truth, on a playing field of our choosing. These schools are suppressing and attacking their own students for speaking up, for protesting, for opposing genocide. And since that reality will not be granted significant visibility by mainstream outlets, it’s on us to call it out, confront the powerful, and help student organizers. Colleges are one of the many fronts where the battle for a better future will be won or lost, and we need to lend our strength to the side of liberation, as we do in every struggle.