“A vote of no confidence in the President & her administration is the only way to begin rebuilding our shattered community & re-establishing the University’s core values of free speech, the right to peaceful assembly, & shared governance.'
– AAUP Columbia University Chapter
thehill.com/homenews/educa…

It bears repeating: it is unacceptable to respond to peaceful campus demonstrations with violent repression.

🧵

'campus resistance has expanded to include faculty & students who...are disturbed by what they rightly see as violations of free expression, the erosion of faculty governance & the overreach of administrators.' Tyler Austin Harper theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

This is VERY important. Everyone should read this.

Brilliant, must-read article from Tyler Austin Harper on the breathtaking displays of institutional hypocrisy, as colleges & unis call in the police to crack-down on student activists--see screenshot excerpt in reply...

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Spot on as always Musa al-Gharbi! The way the battle lines are being drawn is plain WRONG.

This is one of the key points, as I see it. Just as a general matter, universities need to be stricter than the law demands in preventing actions that silence speech but more forgiving than the law allows in permitting speech that disrupts. They have utterly failed on both.

I'm disgusted by universities' draconian response to peaceful protests and their efforts to sanction legitimate political speech. Reasonable people can disagree about the protesters' message or strategy.

What is not debatable is that these universities are mired in hypocrisy. 2/

We object, however, to the use of the IHRA definition, which expands the definition of antisemitism to encompass political criticisms of the state of Israel, which is speech protected by the First Amendment & #academicfreedom .

2/

aaup.org/report/legisla…

Colombia, the country, is now fully cutting diplomatic ties with Israel.

In his May Day speech President Gustavo Petro said:

'The era of genocide, of the extermination of an entire people before our eyes, before our humanity, cannot return. If Palestine dies, humanity dies.'

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Former Center Fellows Amna Khalid & Jeffrey Aaron Snyder wrote the following The Chronicle of Higher Education article about student activism and the mission of higher ed: chronicle.com/article/studen…

Should-out to Amna Khalid & Jeffrey Aaron Snyder who sparked a great conversation about #FreeSpeech when they visited Wesleyan University
time.com/6969851/academ…

Listen to the new single 'Raat Ki Rani' by arooj aftab on Spotify!

My marvelous colleague Prof Christopher Brown (CU History Department) brought the 🔥 at today's Columbia faculty action opposing the arrests of students, suppression of free speech and the congressional threat to independence in higher education. Here's the whole thing.
#NoCopsOnCampus …

Seconded. Per this piece I wrote in Washington Monthly a few yrs back: *It’s not that America’s racist past is being ignored in the classroom. It’s that we’re not teaching history well enough for many students to remember it.*

washingtonmonthly.com/2021/12/10/why…

This piece about threats to student activism on campus by Will Bunch is well worth reading. Includes commentary from Amna Khalid & yrs truly--

inquirer.com/opinion/colleg…

'Israel champions itself as...a bastion of press freedom...Its actions tell a very different story' -- 'the high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests,' laws allowing it 'to shut down foreign news outlets,' & the barring of foreign journalists from Gaza. nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opi…

Time to kick ass for the teaching class American Association of University Professors