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Campus Movement

No More Research For Genocide At MIT

December 22, 2024 MIT Coalition For Palestine, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
On November 7th, we published an op-ed titled “Daniela Rus, The People Demand: No More Research for Genocide” in the MIT Tech. Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in “multirobot security defense and surveillance.” Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under the guidance of Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed. MIT sent several of us “no contact” and “no harassment” orders for Prof. Rus, disciplining one student for simply writing our Op-Ed’s title on a public chalkboard!

University Of Rochester Students Face Seven Years In Jail

December 15, 2024 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
Last month four students at the University of Rochester were charged with second-degree criminal mischief for their connection to “Wanted” posters that were put up around campus. The posters accused a small number of faculty members of enabling genocide and supporting the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Not all the faculty members identified are Jewish, but the university immediately sent out emails tagging the action as antisemitic. Pro-Israel campus groups condemned the posters, including the school’s Hillel chapter which claimed they “disproportionately singled out Jewish faculty and staff and used language that spreads harmful, antisemitic ideas about Jewish people.”

Universities Continue To Retaliate Against Staff For Gaza Protests

December 11, 2024 Claudia Gohn, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
Clara C. began working at Columbia University one month after the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. She was hired in the Germanic Languages Department as a Department Assistant. Like many incoming members of the Columbia community, she had high hopes for her time at the university. Seven months later, the illusion of Ivy League ambition and a rich intellectual environment vanished when she was suspended from her post, ostensibly because of her involvement in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. By early summer, she was terminated.

Wisconsin Students Charge UW Board Of Regents With Genocide

December 9, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , , , , , , ,
Madison, WI – In a show of student power, nearly 50 protesters marched into the UW board of regents meeting Thursday, December 5, to put Palestine and divestment on the Finance Committee agenda. This latest militant action comes after a large-scale administration failure to uphold the Madison and Milwaukee encampment agreements on disclosure and divestment from apartheid Israel. Despite the freezing temperatures, the students opened with a rally outside the event hall. During the rally, SDS and Freedom Road Socialist Organization member Kayla Patterson told the crowd, “The simple truth is that the board of regents stands on the wrong side of history.

Private Israeli Security Firms Are Killing Free Speech On College Campuses

December 6, 2024 Robert Inlakesh, MintPress News. , , , , , , ,
Following the unprecedented proliferation of student-led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza across U.S. and international college campuses, educational institutions have found themselves under immense pressure to crush the movement from private Israeli security firms. Following a surge of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience in protests of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by students across U.S. college campuses, university administrations faced immense pressure to strengthen security measures and suppress the movement.

Berkeley Free Speech Movement Forged An Organizing Blueprint

December 1, 2024 Derek Seidman, Truthout. , , , , ,
U.S. universities have always been sites of contestation and political struggle. Today, their governing bodies are dominated by representatives of corporate power. Issues like the student debt crisis and military research are bound up with universities. The right wing, often joined by establishment Democrats, attacks college curricula and scapegoats students to score political points. Student activists today are challenging university ties to everything from fossil fuels to racist policing — and, of course, to the genocide in Palestine.

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Targeting Pro-Palestine Activists

November 25, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , , ,
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken severe measures to suppress the voices of two prominent pro-Palestine activists on campus: PhD student Prahlad Iyengar and Dr. Michel DeGraff, a professor who has taught linguistics at the university for over 28 years. Iyengar has been banned from campus, which is also his place of work, without due process. He has also been denied union representation by MIT’s administration, despite himself being a union steward. He faces imminent threat of suspension as well as expulsion. MIT prohibited Dr. Degraff from teaching a course on Palestine, suspended his annual pay raise, and had his official status at the university changed from “Professor of Linguistics” to “Faculty-at-Large,” also without due process.

Week Of Action For Tulane Encampment Defendants

November 25, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , , , , ,
New Orleans, LA – Protesters gathered twice at New Orleans Municipal Court during the week of November 18, as six activists who were arrested during the student-led Popular University for Gaza encampment attended their first days of trial. They all face misdemeanor charges, ranging from trespassing to battery on an officer. The activists were all arrested by Tulane University Police Department in the first hours of the Encampment, which was held for two nights in April and May this year. Supporters of the defendants held a “phone zap” on Monday to flood the phone lines of the city attorney’s office.

Northwestern’s Campaign Against Palestine And Anti-Zionist Jews

November 13, 2024 Paz Baum, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , , ,
On the first day of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest holiday, I joined my fellow members of Northwestern Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in constructing a sukkah on our campus. Just hours later, Northwestern staff tore down our religious structure — allegedly, they claimed, in the name of fighting antisemitism — but really because it dared express solidarity with Palestinians. Sukkot honors the displacement of our ancestors and the temporary structures they inhabited while fleeing slavery, and erecting a sukkah, a temporary shelter in which we dwell for eight days, is an essential part of celebrating this holiday.

University Of California Community Members Launch People’s Tribunal

November 8, 2024 The UC People's Tribunal for Palestine. Popular Resistance. , , , ,
Faculty, staff, and students of the University of California and concerned community members launched the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine to hold their leadership–UC President Michael Drake, the UC Regents, and Governor Gavin Newsom–accountable for complicity in the devastation and destruction of the Palestinian people. Beginning on November 11, 2024, members of the UC community will assemble to charge UC leaders with direct and indirect complicity in genocide and Nakba, the ongoing process of dislocation, fragmentation, and mass killing that seeks to complete the work of erasing the existence of the Palestinian people that began in 1948.

University Of Pennsylvania Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home

October 27, 2024 Penn Students Against the Occupation of Palestine, Popular Resistance. , , , , , , ,
On Friday, October 18 at 6 am, 12 Penn Police officers and one Philadelphia Police officer raided the home of pro-Palestine Penn students organizers. After threatening to break down the door with a battering ram and pointing a gun at their neighbor, they stormed the house in full tactical gear. The police banged on each door as students were sleeping, pointing rifles and handguns at their heads as they exited their rooms with their hands raised. Officers refused to show a warrant to residents of the house, and refused to provide their names and badge numbers. While the students were corralled by police in a room, one student was separated and taken in for questioning.

University Of Minnesota SDS Statement Of Halimy Hall Occupation

October 27, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , , , , , , , , ,
Shortly after President Cunningham started working at our university, she and the Board of Regents held an emergency meeting, a week before students returned to campus, where they passed a policy of neutrality for the UMN endowment. Regent Jamie Meyron introduced the institutional neutrality policy declaring the University’s endowment funds “politically neutral”, effectively making it impossible for students to campaign for the University to divest from certain companies. In this same meeting, they resurrected restrictive protest policies, including banning unpermitted protests of more than 100 people and the use of more than one sound amplification device, and put size limits on signs and banners.

American Bar Association Mandates Crackdown On Law Student Speech

October 25, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , , , , , ,
Philadelphia, PA – On October 16, over the objections of students, Temple University Beasley School of Law adopted anti-protest policies mandated by the American Bar Association. In the spring of 2024, the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted a mandate forcing all law schools to adopt policies designed to prevent the student protests that have taken place since October 7, 2023. While the student movement has recently surged as a part of the broader pro-Palestine movement, law student protests that have raised concern from the ABA also include the pro-choice and LGBTQ rights activism following judicial attacks on women and LGBTQ people in the courts.

Students And Faculty Encountering Stricter Anti-Protest Rules

October 20, 2024 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
This semester returning university students have encountered stricter anti-protest regulations at their schools, while advocates continue to deal with fallout from last spring’s Gaza solidarity “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” wrote National SJP organizer Carrie Zaremba in September. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this Fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.” Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath told Mondoweiss those changes have included new encampment bans, stricter rules against wearing masks, a weaponization of ‘Time, place, and manner restrictions’, and stricter rules for holding protests.

Lessons From The Tulane And Loyola Encampments For Gaza

October 18, 2024 Lev Deane, Fight Back! News. , , , , , , ,
Baton Rouge, LA – On October 9, Louisiana State University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a panel on the Tulane and Loyola University encampments for Gaza as part of their October 7 Week of Rage. LSU SDS invited members of Tulane and Loyola SDS and a member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) from New Orleans. They highlighted their wins and explored lessons learned from planning and implementing the encampment. Last spring, the National Students for a Democratic Society put out a call for campuses across the country to enact encampments for Gaza on their universities’ lawns to escalate the fight for divestment.
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