With words they try to jail us: US universities are not citadels of freedom

Universities in the United States have been especially repressive over the past year. Several like Columbia University and New York University have redefined protests against the state of Israel and its founding ideology Zionism as acts of anti-Semitism. Campus after campus brought in law enforcement to have their own students, faculty, and staff arrested and charged for demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ever expanding illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Many universities denied graduating students their degrees and suspended, expelled, or threatened to expel students for their participation in protests.

It wasn’t as if universities in the US had been tolerant of mass protests in the past. Universities called the cops on their students back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when they staged sit-ins for civil rights or protested against America’s war in Vietnam as well. In May 1970, the US National Guard killed four student protesters and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio. That same month, two students were also killed and 12 others wounded by local law enforcement at Jackson State University in Mississippi.

It has always been in the nature of universities in the US – with their top-down approaches to running campuses – to do everything they can to suppress civil disobedience in any form, to punish students for even attempting to organise protests. With the widespread strong-armed responses to the anti-genocide protests this spring and the broad revisions to regulation at almost every campus aimed at squashing any potential renewal of such protests this fall, however, one thing is clear. Today, the American university – just like the American nation-state – is once again at peak repression. It has transformed fully into a corporate-like entity that view silencing dissent and maintaining order and obedience as part of its mission statement.

At Towson University, for example, the punishment for the handful of students who did a “die-in” in November 2023 to draw attention to Israel’s genocide in Gaza included requiring them to write essays explaining how they mobilised student protests. Illinois state’s attorney Julia Rietz, at the behest of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is still considering filing felony “mob action charges” against four students for building a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. Many others have required students to complete mandatory modules about the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, expression, and assembly, which include explanations on various limits universities can legally impose on each. Other institutions now require students to register themselves as an organised group and seek prior approval for where, when, and how they can protest.

The overall result has been far fewer protests in the fall of 2024 than there were back in the spring. It’s as if higher education leaders and university donors do not understand that the purpose of protest – and really, any organised attempt at civil disobedience – is to disrupt. Disruption ensures those in power cannot turn their heads away from the issues protesters amplify, like with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and America’s complicity in it.

It seems as if universities only want weak protests, the kind that will not force them to change how they operate or how they invest their endowments – protests with no teeth at all.

I have experienced this first hand, many decades before the beginning of the genocide in Gaza that laid bare the oppressive nature of the American university in the past year. As an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, I was a member of the Black Action Society (BAS). After years of meetings, flyers, and petitions demanding that the university divest from the apartheid regime in South Africa, Pitt’s administration agreed to allow BAS to march around the campus. By then it was my senior year, the fall of 1990, and our little march was too little too late. South Africa was already on the path toward a post-apartheid future by the time Pitt’s administration acquiesced.

Our university-approved protest was in stark contrast with the anti-apartheid protests that hit New York in 1985, as part of which a coalition of student groups blockaded Hamilton Hall (now Mandela Hall) at Columbia University for three weeks. These unauthorised protests eventually forced Columbia to divest from its financial holdings in South Africa.

Universities approve protest action only when they know it is unlikely to make much difference. And polite protests seldom achieve anything other than uneasy complacency.

This year, besides students who missed out on graduation, an untold number of faculty and staff have seen themselves out of jobs or outright fired over their participation in pro-Palestine protests. Most of them, though, are not like former Muhlenberg College professor Maura Finkelstein, so far the only tenured faculty member fired because of her anti-genocide speech. Colleges have sacked a considerable number of anti-genocide contingent and adjunct faculty, who were already vulnerable due to their “short-time contract labour” status. Many more contingent faculty who have spoken out about Palestine, however, have simply been put “under investigation,” and their contracts quietly allowed to expire without renewals. As Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) said during an interview with The Intercept earlier this year, “the bulk of our inquiries, even our cases, have to do with violations of due process” for contingent faculty.

I may be one of these contingent academics whose contract was not renewed and employment ended without any due process. A month after publishing my Al Jazeera article “The American centre’s embrace of the far right fuels Israel’s war machine” in October 2023, my history department chair at Loyola University Maryland gave me unofficial word that my contract would not be renewed. I reached out to Loyola through AAUP for more details in June 2024, but they refused to provide any explanation. I will likely never be sure what role my anti-genocidal stance against Israel played in my non-renewal compared to other politics internal to my department and my university. But the timing of my unofficial notification of my contract’s non-renewal is quite curious.

Last March, anti-genocide students slapped a Palestinian flag sticker on my office hours sign. My department wanted to know if I wanted this sign taken down, calling it “an act of vandalism”. I said, “No, it’s perfectly fine. Students should be able to express themselves. Who am I not to support them?” None of my colleagues stopped by my office for the remainder of the spring semester, except to ask about my departure date so that they could move a new faculty member into my office.

That I am not alone in what some have called “the new McCarthyism” at US universities is cold comfort. It is not lost on me that a disproportionate number of the encampments, protests, arrests, suspensions, and non-renewals that took place and are in the public record occurred at elite public and private universities. The crackdown over the past year has had a chilling effect in quashing protests at predominantly white universities attended by America’s educational and socioeconomic elites. For the rest of academia, the academic freedom and the liberal arts aspect of a college education is on life support. The sheer amount of pressure coming from centre-right and far-right politicians, state legislatures, and the US Congress – not to mention university donors and boards – has put even the most well-meaning university administration in a repressive role.

All US universities – whatever their size, influence and economic power, want an unpolitical and uncritical faculty and student body, that would not cause trouble, scare donors or hinder their day-to-day comfort. They hope for a campus community that remains as quiet and docile as church mice after drinking communion wine.

Apparently so do both political parties. Just before Thanksgiving, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved another resolution essentially adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, which classifies many straightforward critiques of the state of Israel, and its policies against Palestinians living under its occupation, as anti-Semitic.

Whether this is a new era of McCarthyism remains to be seen. In light of the past year of protest, though, maybe one’s right to say something about an injustice and to express it in art and in protest with other like-minded individuals should be a serious criterion when students consider what college they would like to attend. If anyone were to rank universities by their willingness to embrace protests, I suspect nearly all higher education institutions would flunk this measure. The blanket attempt to shut down and shut up students and faculty will likely backfire, perhaps even leading to violent protests and a disproportionately deadly and violent response. But whatever this era is, the idea that the US university is a place of critical thinking, social justice, liberal arts, and making the world a better place is as false as the day is long.