Newsletter (May 6, 2024)

We have our campus back!

Cartoon from The Far Corner Cafe.

We’ve got our campus back! From USC TrojansAlert:

The University Park Campus is now open to students, faculty, and staff upon presentation of valid identification. As an important reminder: tents and related equipment remain prohibited on campus and will be subject to immediate confiscation; camping and other non-permitted events are also prohibited and will be subject to discipline; and no individuals or groups may obstruct free passage throughout our campuses, commencement setup, or other functions of the university. (Sunday, May 5, 2024, 10:45)

and

The encampment at UPC has been cleared. (Sunday, May 5, 2024, 6:31)

The message from the President (May 5, 2024, 11:51):

Dear Trojan Family,

I am writing to let you know that early this morning DPS, with the assistance of the LAPD, removed the occupiers who had rebuilt their illegal encampment in Alumni Park. The operation was peaceful. Campus is opening, students are returning to prepare for finals, and commencement set-up is in full swing.

Over the last few weeks, the university exercised patience and restraint as we worked to de-escalate a volatile situation. We’ve spoken to the occupiers daily, issued repeated warnings, and offered opportunities and locations for them to protest lawfully. We’ve supported their right to express strong opinions and passions for their cause, as always.

Yet when free speech protests devolve into illegal occupations, violating the rights of others, we must draw a line. The occupiers repeatedly chose to ignore university policies designed to benefit everyone, and to break the law. We needed to act quickly to protect the rights of our 80,000 students, staff, and faculty. We are in the critical period from the end-of-term quiet study week, through finals and our commencement ceremonies.

Despite our efforts to de-escalate, the occupation was spiraling in a dangerous direction over the last several days. Areas of campus were blocked, people walking down Trousdale, our main thoroughfare, were harassed, and iconic Trojan symbols were defaced. In addition, university property was stolen, and commencement structures were dismantled. Residence halls, campus throughfares, and libraries had become places of confrontation. Some finals were disrupted with noise and chanting during mandated quiet periods. Yesterday afternoon, outside agitators jumped the perimeter fencing and assaulted our officers.

This had to stop.

With no resolution in sight, I requested the LAPD to assist DPS in removing the encampment as peacefully and safely as possible. At 4:10 a.m., an order to disperse was issued, providing the trespassers one last opportunity to leave voluntarily. In 64 minutes, the encampment was abandoned and cleared. The operation was peaceful with no arrests. We will not tolerate illegal encampments of any kind at USC.

Over the last week, we methodically and carefully executed on our strategy. My goals were to prioritize safety and return our campus and our surrounding community to normalcy. We were determined to ensure our students could finish their exams without further disruption and that USC could host the commencement celebrations our graduates have worked hard to earn.

As I shared with the Trojan Family last Friday, freedom of speech is central to who we are as a university and is at the core of our democratic society. USC is home to 47,000 students with many different perspectives, and our policies are designed in a manner that allows people to express those opinions.  

In closing, I thank DPS and the LAPD for their swift action, professionalism, and concern for our students. I also thank the Trojan community and our neighbors for your patience as we navigate these challenging times.

According to the news, the encampment was peacefully cleared out by LAPD and no arrests were made.

Our Substack and the Open Letter to the USC Senate were mentioned in an L.A. Times article describing the showdown at the encampment: “Police Remove Tents, Clear USC Pro-Palestinian Encampment; No Arrests Made” (May 5, 2024); archived version is available here. According to the article:

Among the remnants of the camp on Sunday morning, a Times reporter found a crumpled and torn document titled “Ground Tactics for the Student Intifada.”

The four pages of typed papers included guides on how to organize human formations when confronted by police. “The purpose of a mass action is not make it go on for as long as humanly possible,” the document read. “The purpose of a mass action is to maximize disruption at a minimum cost to the organizers.”

We are grateful and relieved that the encampment has been finally cleared out, but what took so long? In the future, the university must act more decisively.

The slow reaction of US universities to the illegal protests and encampments is particularly striking given clear messaging from both the state and federal government. We quoted Governor Newsom here and Rep. Adam Schiff (as well as Steve Garvey) here. The same message was communicated in a Letter from Education Secretary Cardona (May 3, 2024):

This is an extremely challenging moment for many school communities across the country. What we are witnessing every day on college campuses is deeply concerning, as we hear increasing reports of students feeling unsafe. Students should be able to learn, attend class, and go to commencements without fear or disruption of their educational experience. There is no place for violence on campus ever. As President Biden said yesterday, “In America, violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is.”

I am particularly disturbed by the sharp rise in antisemitism targeting Jewish students on some college campuses. In recent days, Jewish students have reported:

• Being physically assaulted or harassed while walking on campus, simply for being Jewish;

• Being subjected to virulently antisemitic statements, such as that Jewish students should "go back to Poland;"

• Being subjected to verbal abuse, such as while praying for the safety of hostages being held by Hamas; and

• Coming back to their dorm rooms to find swastikas on their doors.

These and other such incidents are abhorrent, period. They have no place on our college campuses.

It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to clear out such a disturbance. As one of our Circle members writes:

Consider the aftermath of weeks of “free expression” on campus. The same university that has hassled us for years about “microaggressions” has allowed the campus to be taken over by an angry mob of students—and probably many non-students—and faculty who have made life difficult for Jewish and pro-Israel students on campus. The encampments were against university policy and illegal and should not have been tolerated for a day. “Negotiating” with these law-breakers over divestment from Israel or any of their other “demands,” many of which had nothing to do with the Middle East, should not have been pursued beyond the simple message to disband and get off campus.

Continuing the theme of double standards, Abigail Shrier writes for the Free Press (“There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech”):

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it. …

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either. 

USC fared better than UCLA in terms of violence, but it was a close call given the continuing anti-police sentiment on our campuses. As Atmika Iyer writes in “UC’s President Had a Plan to Deescalate Protests. How Did "We Get a Night of Violence at UCLA?” in CalMatters, the answer seems to be rather obvious—a failure to react with full force to the unlawful demonstrators. How naive is to think that a group of protesters that support terrorist organizations and call for the elimination of an entire nation would somehow peacefully dissolve if you leave them alone?

Before dawn today [May 2, 2024], police demolished a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA—using flash bangs, firing projectiles at protesters and arresting those who refused to leave. It was in stark contrast to the scene overnight Tuesday, when counterprotesters had torn at barricades, thrown fireworks, and beat and pepper sprayed the protesters—and no law enforcement officers intervened or made any arrests.

The lesson for the future: Do not coddle those who violate university rules. Give them a warning and call in the police. Appeasing terrorists just leads to more violence.

Yom HaShoah

“Girls in the Filed” by Nelly Toll, drawn by her as she was locked in her hiding place in Lwow. Nelly Toll and her mother survived because they were hidden by their Christian friends. Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. Image taken from the German exhibit Kunst aus dem Holocaust in. Toll now 81, traveled to Berlin to attend the opening of the exhibit.

Today is Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Times of Israel article “The War Against the Jewish Story” explains how activist anti-Zionist educators turned the history of Zionism and the Holocaust on its head:

How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses?…

This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. 

The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.) 

This happened at USC, as we discussed in our post “Genocide Studies at USC.”

Institutional Neutrality Is Essential for Free Speech on Campus

We are concerned about ongoing violations of USC’s policy prohibiting academic departments from issuing political statements. (See our previous discussion, which includes the USC policy statement and a link to the Kalven report, considered the model for institutional neutrality). The problem is not unique to USC. Consider the op-ed out of Connecticut College “Professor Andrew Pessin Registers Objection to Faculty and Staff Solidarity Statement” (May 4, 2024):

It is a sad day when some 90 Conn College faculty members can publicly sign a statement accusing Jews of “Jewish supremacy”; Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels would be proud to see his trope so widely adopted. What’s next? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all in pursuing the Holocaust?

Never mind that the one sliver of a Jewish state (32 of which would fit inside Texas!) and its 7 million Jews is massively dwarfed by the 460 million Arabs in 20-plus Arab states and the 2 billion Muslims in the 50-plus Muslim states, most of which actively seek to destroy the one tiny Jewish state in the name of Muslim Arab supremacy (read Hamas’s (never renounced) charter!); and that this tiny state is currently under active attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and of course nuclear-approaching Iran. And lest you think that those actors attack Israel in the name of “human rights,” consider that not one of them provides human rights even to its own citizens. As protestors cheered the recent Houthi attacks, the Houthis announced they were crucifying gay men; at least Iran only publicly hangs their gays. Yet somehow the Jews and their little state are the problem.

Pessin then gets to the issue of why such statements are at odds with free expression:

In general I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? For that reason alone I register my objection to it. (I only share my opinion here in response, having failed to persuade my colleagues to desist from their disgraceful action and unable to let it go uncontested.)

More on Free Speech, Campus Unrest, and Faculty Activism

Ryan Quinn, asks in Inside Higher Ed, “Will Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech Survive?”

Keith Whittington, founding chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a Princeton University politics professor, agreed that faculty members who take part in protests “are potentially crossing a line when they want to participate in protecting encampments on campus” that violate university rules, and they’re “just as subject to discipline for that kind of behavior as students.”

We remind readers about Whittington’s illuminating article in The Chronicle, “Protest and Civil Disobedience Are Two Different Things,” which we discussed here.

A Few Reads Worth Your Time

The Wall Street Journal takes a close look at how the protests were organized (“Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests”):

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.

As many have pointed out, the protests were not organic, grass-root movements. They were meticulously organized and orchestrated by outside agents:

Though there isn’t a centralized command overseeing the student movement opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there are connections between longstanding far-left groups and the protesters. 

The National Students for Justice in Palestine, or NSJP, has been around some two decades and has more than 300 chapters across the U.S., many of which have helped organize the college encampments and building occupations.

NSJP has for months called on students to stand strong against colleges until they divest themselves of investments in entities doing business with Israel. Its social-media pages have become a scroll of encouragement to protesting students, with videos showing activity at encampments and around the world. As early as October, NSJP was promoting a “day of resistance” with demonstrations at colleges.

In “Don’t Expand DEI. Dismantle It,” in the Free Press, Chris Rufo and Jenin Younes, coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, argue that the recently enacted Antisemitism Awareness Act expands DEI and is, therefore, antithetical to free speech and detrimental to campus climate.

It’s important to note, despite the hysteria of many online, that the Antisemitism Awareness Act does not, in itself, criminalize such speech. What it does is instruct bureaucrats to apply what could be, in effect, “hate speech” analysis to civil rights complaints. The Department of Education would gain the authority to withhold funding to institutions of higher education that do not punish violators.

This is a move in the wrong direction. 

In Tablet, the op-ed “Not in Our Name” makes a similar argument, as does the article in the National Review “What People Are Getting Wrong about the House Antisemitism Bill.”

Also from Tablet, an unorthodox perspective on fraternities. “Normal Kids Get F*cked” begins with an incident that went viral—fraternity boys who stood up against the protesters and defended the American flag at UNC Chapel Hill—and then takes a deep dive into double standard exemplified by the incessant scrutinizing of parties at frat houses for possible misconduct while letting protest vandalism and harassment to go unabated for days:

But there’s a certain irony in the outpouring of appreciation for the bros. Especially at elite schools where the encampments have been most persistent, fraternities have faced university-driven witch hunts aimed at eliminating their presence on campuses. The anti-frat crusade, which features a questionable judicial process led by antagonistic university bureaucrats hired to promote DEI initiatives, is troubling enough before you consider its glaring hypocrisy in the face of the ongoing protests. Universities that now treat the smallest fraternity infractions as grounds for immediate and sometimes harsh limitation—including accidentally setting off smoke alarms with a candle to turning in party permit applications an hour late—are now, very publicly, allowing disruptive and even aggressive encampments to persist despite their deliberate violations of policy, making the school’s double standards for the application of rules and the distribution of consequences abundantly clear.

USC hounded their fraternities to the point that in 2022 they severed their affiliation with the university.

The Islamization of the Left. In Quillette, Jeffrey Herf’s essay “Springtime for Sinwar” discusses a phenomenon that leave many bewildered—how so many liberals fell in love with Hamas, an organization that is manifestly illiberal, violent, and oppressive.

In unaccented American English, the supporting crowd chants that “Israel will fall! Brick by brick, wall by wall! We want all of it! Settlers, settlers go back home! Palestine is ours alone!” These young Americans at Columbia university and at other demonstrations this spring are openly—and proudly—calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Though they have no claim to use the word “ours alone” regarding any territory in the Middle East, in the name of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, they support the “martyrs” of Hamas who aim to create an ethnically and religiously cleansed “Palestine” free of Jews.

These disgraceful scenes are one result of the emergence, over the last decade or so, of a pro-Hamas Left among the faculty and students in America’s universities. Since the 7 October massacre of over twelve hundred Israelis was orchestrated by Hamas’s military leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, this contingent has burst into full and unapologetic public view. While many in the professoriate would strenuously deny that they are supporters of Hamas, their stubborn refusal to call for the organisation’s surrender and their vehement denunciations of Israel’s military response both lend objective moral support to the terrorist group during the ongoing conflict. 

The enthusiasm of leftist professors and students for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza is unprecedented in the history of modern leftism. Scepticism and even outright rejection of what Marx called “the opiate of the people” has been a salient theme of leftist sensibilities since the French Revolution. Yet Hamas’s punishing fundamentalism has not deterred the secular American Left from embracing what I have called “fascism with a religious face.” Over the past decade, I have drawn attention to the emergence of the pro-Hamas Left, and to the bizarre fact that secular intellectuals and students are now supporting an organisation that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi collaborators. Today, the Islamisation of the Left has become unignorable on college campuses. 

As its foundational Covenant made clear in 1988, Hamas’s reactionary nature lies in a selective reading of Islam’s ancient texts that defines the religion as inherently antisemitic. This interpretation of Islam legitimises Hamas’s religious war to destroy the state of Israel, its rejection of liberal democracy, its use of terror as a political weapon, and its social conservatism that demands the subordination of women and lethal hostility to homosexuality. All of which ought to make Hamas anathema to social progressives on the academic Left. But the enthusiasm with which secular anti-Zionists have rallied to the cause of Hamas’s religious warriors—or at least protected them from criticism—suggests that solidarity in their shared hatred of a common enemy, Israel, supersedes all other political differences. 

On the corruption of press:

Editors at America’s largest media organisations have decided to euphemise the Spring 2024 demonstrations as either “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-war” when they are objectively neither. They are, in fact, demonstrations in support of Hamas and its ongoing war against Israel, neither of which is in the interests of either Palestinian civilians or their quest for self-determination. This reporting also implies that Hamas represents the Palestinians, despite the fact that the organisation has misgoverned Gaza as a dictatorship since 2007. The press seldom criticises protesters’ ubiquitous references to “Palestine”—a state that does not exist—nor their corresponding refusal to mention Israel, which has been a full UN member state for 75 years. This linguistic erasure implicitly seeks to bring the reality of Israel to an end. The chants of “From the river to the sea! Palestine will be free!” explicitly draw upon the language of the 2017 Hamas statement that reasserted Hamas’s intention to destroy Israel by force of arms. 

As an educational materials, they recommend videos:

This spring, in association with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the Institute’s executive director, Jonathan Brent, and I had the pleasure of coordinating a series of webinars on Hamas, the history of Israel, and responses to 7 October. Our purpose was to bring some of this scholarship to a broader audience. The recordings of these videos and their transcripts are now available on the YIVO website. 

Most student protesters are probably unaware of the impact of their actions, but their leaders and faculty allies are not so naïve. The net effect of the current campus protests is to support Hamas in its war against Israel that it began many years ago and waged most viciously on 7 October. I repeat that these protests constitute a historically significant event. They are the first time in the history of American politics that avowedly leftist professors and students have embraced the cause of an organisation that places hatred of the Jews at the core of its beliefs, whose historical origins intersect with Nazism, and whose war to destroy the state of Israel is their logical outcome of those beliefs and that history. By supporting Hamas, these protesters are supporting an organisation—and for 17 years a small dictatorship—that sees no distinction at all between Jew-hatred and its desire to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms. 

And Now for Something Completely Different: Things Go Bananas at UCLA

After counterprotestors saw a sign in the pro-Palestinian camp banning bananas (because a protestor supposedly had a “potentially fatal banana allergy”), they returned the next day with…you guessed it…bananas. In a tweet, a protestor literally compared the banana-waving counterprotestors to Jewish settlers waving machine guns.

Read the article in Israellycool to see more reactions like the one below.

We are pleased to provide our readers with the original training film for defense against attackers armed with fruit.