Campus newspaper: SJP plans Columbia-like disruptions at the University of Chicago

April 25, 2024 • 9:00 am

Yay! It’s the University of Chicago’s turn to experience pro-Palestinian pandemonium! Tents on the quad! Occupation of buildings!  I was feeling left out since the kiffeyeh-clad and Hamas-loving members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hadn’t shown up here for a couple of weeks, but I did predict that they were up to something big. At first I thought it would be a demonstration during convocation, which is on June 1, but it turns out I was a month too late: the demonstrations are apparently planned for May 1 (May Day!).

This information, which of course could be erroneous but looks real, was obtained by someone who infiltrated an SJP chatgroup here, and dug up a lot of information about their plans. The details are given in an article in the conservative student paper here, The Chicago Thinker, I’ll give the text and some revealing screenshots:

Startling group chat messages exposed by the Chicago Thinker reveal that on Wednesday, May 1, Students for Justice in Palestine at The University of Chicago (SJP UChicago) plans to emulate recent protests at Columbia University. It becomes the latest development in a wave of protests at colleges across the country, including Yale and New York University, as tensions around the Israel-Hamas war rise.

At UChicago, SJP protestors are aiming to take over the university’s Main Quad and camp out for an extended period. A Telegram group chat details their plans to occupy campus buildings and get arrested for trespassing in order to draw attention to their cause. The demonstrations will last “at least for… two nights.”

The texts also reveal that National Students for Justice in Palestine is playing a crucial role in organizing the protest. Members of the group are offering media support and are sharing experiences from their involvement in the events at Columbia.

Below are some mediocre-quality screenshots of chat messages from the Thinker as well as an “onboarding form” for prospective protestors.  The first entry comes from a National Students for Justice in Palestine member, showing what we already knew: the protests across the U.S. (SJP has 200 campus branches) is coordinated by the National SJP organization.  I always wonder who’s funding this group.

“PYM” in the second note is the Palestinian Youth Movement, apparently also involved. Since many of them are not students, there will clearly be some trespassing if this takes place. Note to campus cops: be sure to check IDs.


If you want to camp out, or help in other ways, SJP asks you to fill out this “onboarding form”:

More:

SJP UChicago’s strategy takes further inspiration from similar events at California State Polytechnic University, where students barricaded themselves in a university building on Monday evening. Police have been unable to remove them and the occupation has forced administrators to temporarily close the university, meaning students are to enter school buildings for classes or work. Students occupying the building published advice for other protestors. Leaders in the SJP UChicago group chat summarized these points and are encouraging people to replicate them.

“1. Occupying buildings is more effective

2. Being in buildings gives us lots of materials (tables, unhinged doors, chairs) to use as barriers

3. We’d be a lot more defenseless and easy to scatter if we occupy the quad

4. Being inside frays the police across the building and its entrances 

5. Could also be more comfortable for campers bc shelter, bathrooms, water, etc 

6. Come prepared with goggles, gas masks, etc.”

But of course occupying buildings is about the worst thing that students can do in terms of future punishment, and classes will be in full swing on May 1.

Here are more screenshots from the chat. It looks like the paper’s leak will deprive them of the discretion they desire, and someone’s going to be banging their head on the fifth-floor cubicle. (Of course, this all may be an elaborate ruse, but I suspect that SJP is going to do this some time.  After all, the Chicago branch doesn’t want to be left out!

And the final bit:

According to a statement from UChicago published on December 21, 2023, in the wake of the Rosenwald Hall SJP sit-in, “University policies protect the right to protest while making it clear that demonstrations cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”

Multi-day building occupations violate this policy and present a significant threat to all students on campus.

SJP UChicago has organized multiple “orientations” and “trainings” to equip members for the protest. Among themselves, they demand “DISCRETION” regarding members’ identities and plans.

Here’s another “scoop,” this time from an upcoming demonstration at Princeton, the subject of an article in the National Review. The instructions bear some similarity to the ones in the chat above, no doubt because SJP National is spreading advice and information.

An excerpt from the National Review story on Princeton:

Princeton University students are preparing to establish an anti-Israel protest encampment, according to documents obtained by National Review. The students claim to have pro bono legal support and trained security. 

A draft of a press release titled “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Demands” states that the “goal” is to “put pressure on the Princeton University administration to divest and disassociate from Israel, and to call attention to the University’s active contribution to ongoing genocide and human rights catastrophe.”

The group is demanding that 1) Princeton call for an immediate cease-fire and “condemn Israel’s genocidal campaign,” 2) commit to full transparency in its investments 3) dissociate and divest its endowment from direct and indirect holdings in companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, occupation, and apartheid policies,” 4) divest from private fossil-fuel companies 5) disclose and end research funded by the Department of Defense 6) “refrain from any form of academic or cultural association with Israeli institutions and businesses 7) “cultivate affiliations with Palestinian academic and cultural institutions” and 8) stop sponsoring and facilitating programs like Birthright Israel trips and Tiger-Trek Israel, and relations with the Tikvah Fund.

. . .National Review obtained a message sent by an organizer affirming the plan to continue with the demonstration. 

“Many of you have probably seen the email from VP Calhoun. We want to begin by affirming that this action is still on, and we will not be deterred,” the organizer wrote in a group chat. “This is a partial bluff. No university that has arrested or suspended students have done so without multiple warnings. These would be incredibly bad optics for Princeton and the email is a strategic move to weaken us.”

“We have multiple criminal defense attorneys on call ready to support us and work through any arrests that may ‘occur.’ We have people committed to jail support as well,” the organizer wrote, adding that “‘arrest’ is not the same as ‘pressing charges.’” 

Multiple criminal defense attorneys on call! These are clearly not public defenders, who are not “on call.” So who is paying for all this?  The President of Princeton issued a statement about the planned disruptive demontrations, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to tolerate them if they’re disruptive.

At any rate, as I want to highlight two things I wrote. First, in a recent post called “J’Accuse”, I recounted four instances in which SJP and its confrère organization, UChicago United for Palestine, held four illegal demonstrations on our campus. In only one of them (a sit-in in the admissions office) were students punished, but the “punishment” was risible (they were arrested for trespassing, but then for some murky reason the city dropped the charges, and then the University simply asked the arrestees to write a “my demonstration experience” essay, which turned out to show the students doubling down on their protest). In the other incident, SJP deplatformed a group of Jewish students who were having a demonstration in the Quad, and the Jewish students levied a formal complaint against SJP. In response, the University did virtually nothing, just putting it on record that the SJP organization had transgressed and gave the group an “official warning” that would be considered if SJP transgressed again. Big whoop!

In the two other demonstrations, a “die-in” in a campus eatery and the blocking of the administration building, the university did nothing. There were cops and administrators there, but, as I was once told by one of them, the University is loath to “lay hands” on demonstrators.

What this all adds up to, of course, is that illegal protestors face no real deterrent to continued actions here. Indeed, SJP has said that are NOT deterred, and will continue their activities, legal or not.

Apropos of that, let me emphasize again that I’m all in favor of SJP, or any other student group, conducting legal protests on campus. We are, after all, the premier “free speech university,” though our national ranking on free speech by FIRE dropped in a year from #1 to #13. But freedom of speech demands, at least on campus, that speech be conducted in the proper “time, place, and manner,” and that here you cannot deplatform other speakers or interfere with the normal functions of a university.

A camp-in and sit-in on May 1 violates many of these structures. I would suggest that the administration, which apparently already knows about these plans, gird its loins and for once get ready to levy meaningful punishments on those who endanger free speech and academic access. There is no other way to deter future disruptions.

In a January 24 letter to the main student newpaper, the Chicago Maroon, I asked, “Should Students for Justice in Palestine be a Recognized Student Organization?” If they proceed with this planned demonstration, the answer would clearly be “no.”  The proper punishment for illegal “camp-ins” or sit-ins is expulsion of SJP as an RSO from our University, plus the arrest and suspension of demonstrators.

Will this happen? My guess is “no.”  Our administration has shown little taste for cracking down on illegal demonstrations, perhaps because they don’t want national attention. (In addition, if we suspend foreign students, they lose their visas and have to leave the U.S., depriving the University of the large tuitions that such students pay.)  Still, I suspect that donors are paying attention, too.

But the main point is that if we are to retain any reputation as a free-speech school, we cannot allow others to disrupt speech and the academic activities of our campus. In the end, it is our reputation for free inquiry, unimpeded by those who shout down others, bang drums, and generally disrupt campus life, that us gain a national reputation.

All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be in the President’s shoes now, because he’s got some hard decisions to make. For the entire academic community of America will be watching.

Oh, and if the campers think that their charade will persuade the University of Chicago to divest from Israel, they’re dead wrong. Our investments are kept secret from all but the trustees, and they’ve never bowed to protests. The demonstration will be, as nearly all of them are, performative.

40 thoughts on “Campus newspaper: SJP plans Columbia-like disruptions at the University of Chicago”

  1. Drag Queens Assemble!

    ^^^ this is from this video:

    x.com/efischberger/status/1783173768359072109?s=46

    Seriously though, see if the string ritual dance makes an appearance – it’ll be red. This is the dance for Earth Day – but with unusual headwear:

    x.com/olilondontv/status/1782933216120209840?s=46

    “Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda [..]”

    Parr, et. al.
    “Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
    2022
    UNESCO
    doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653

      1. Some videos showed up on X – I added them. I guess they have to be seen, but I could note a drag queen was leading a “Free Palestine!” song of some sort.

      1. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be possible to archive stuff from an iPhone, which is all I’ve got.

      1. No it doesn’t, if it’s conceived as a personal decision by those men. We’re talking about funding from an organization (Education for Just Peace in the Middle East) that credibly presented itself, most recently two years ago, as peaceable in an application they made, which was adjudicated by people who worked at foundations set up by Soros and Rockefeller. It’s questionable whether the founders, individually, are even aware of this organization’s existence; if they are, they almost certainly had no idea of its day-to-day activities — until, once can hope, now. I suspect applications for more funding might not be so successful …

          1. Soros is “out of control wokeness” personified.

            Multiple people have — post Oct 7 — pointed out that Soros, the ADL, and other similar organisation have long funded and promoted ideas like CRT that are not actually in the interests of Jews.

            I guess that they had always considered Jews to be on the “oppressed” side of the oppressor/oppressed binary (and understandably so, given history), and so promoted CRT, and have now had a rather rude awakening to the fact that their comrades consider them to be on the “oppressor” side.

  3. Ugh, May Day. Expect a lot more performativity. If I were a professor, I’d be having a lot of pop quizzes that make up about 50% of the course grade. And what time do the sprinklers go off again? I don’t see any reason to make it easy on them.

  4. The princeton action was a bust. This is an update from the National Review:

    “This morning, fewer than 100 people gathered on campus, and a small number began erecting about a half-dozen tents, which is a violation of University policy,” a university spokesperson said in a statement provided to National Review. “After repeated warnings from the Department of Public Safety to cease the activity and leave the area, two graduate students were arrested for trespassing. All tents were then voluntarily taken down by protestors. The two graduate students have been immediately barred from campus, pending a disciplinary process.”

    They fold like cards when a university is seen to actually enforce its rules.

    2. Text from Dad, likely: “You get yourself expelled and you are on your own, Kiddo.”

  5. At some point someone’s going to need to seriously beef up security, give police free rein to operate on campus — enough to physically prevent these mobs from assembling, taking over buildings and occupying public space — and show some gumption in expelling those responsible for breaking rules, including foreign students who will then get deported. As long as their behaviour goes unchallenged, it will continue to escalate.

    1. The municipal police have other things to attend to in the city that employs them besides acting as tax-paid bouncers doing the bidding of an exclusive private club.* If the social construct that is the university can’t maintain an environment where scholarship can be conducted, that is not a problem for a beleaguered city to rescue it from. The university can, if it wishes, expel miscreant students, which will get them in a world of trouble with their parents and the banks they borrowed tuition money from.

      If the university calls the city cops to complain about trespassers, the police have the power to arrest them. The police are not obligated to arrest them, and prosecutors are not obligated to proceed with hundreds of minor prosecutions if doing so is not regarded as a wise use of scarce public resources or if there is no reasonable prospect of conviction.

      The collapse of the Princeton protest shows that these people may be evil but they are not serious. Be thankful for that.
      ———————-
      * What salary does the police lieutenant who commands the riot squad earn, compared to, say, the Vice-Provost for DEI?

      1. Indeed, hence my comment about beefing up security — something that Columbia is belatedly doing by hiring 35 more private security staff (probably not nearly enough). There needs to be enough of them to take the *preventative* action needed to stop the protests gaining the critical mass of bodies in one place so that it doesn’t become something that needs to be addressed by police. But if that fails, and disorder breaks out, the police need to be given free rein by college authorities, however fully they choose to use it. Once a space is cleared, it’s again up to the private security to make sure they don’t lose control of it again.

        How seriously do the Ivy Leagues with big endowments really *need* to worry about short-term pushback from parents? The richest of them could afford to charge $0 for tuition and still not make a dent in their capital.

      2. Yes, Leslie.
        In NYC we have a problem with the prosecutors not pursuing all sorts of malfeasance: from idiots in the quad, the bonkers shoplifting we suffer, to violence.
        What good is it to arrest people who’ll be out that afternoon? Cops know this.

        I’m not moving – this is my home – but boy am I pissed off.

        NY has always been liberal – I was a low-rent defense attorney myself even – but lately the rule of law has suffered tremendously. The “rule of law”, like currency, isn’t a “thing” – it is a state of mind of the people. And subject to devaluation if not enough people join in.
        So we have a collective action problem here.
        And an idiot judge problem.

        D.A.
        NYC

    2. Perhaps some of the students at Columbia, and other universities that have been seriously disrupted, that would like to actually get an education should sue the universities for failing to provide the services they paid for. Hit them in the pocket book and perhaps the boards will become motivated to replace presidents and other faculty that failed to enforce the rules.

  6. $100,000 a year for tuition to come out stupid, gullible and unable to analyze national or global politics and geopolitics. The woke have reaped their harvest.

  7. So I’m apparently slower than usual this morning. What is the problem with students occupying a place on campus designated for free speech or demonstrations if the students are occupying the space to stage a prolonged demonstration? Campus time limits for an event? Camping bans? Ousting other students from the space? Denying others a chance to use the space for their own free speech? I understand why barring occupation of campus facilities and transportation routes makes sense. But space designated for free speech? That one is a bit of a head scratcher.

    1. There is no space completely designated for free speech regardless of time, place or manner. Surely you see that banging drums at 2 a.m., shouting down speakers, or obstructing academics is problematic. Surely you know that Columbia has made all classes hybrid because some students are afraid to come to campus.

      The answer to your questions are, “Look what’s happened to Columbia University.”

      1. Thank you. You are absolutely right about the behavior. I’m trying to separate my disgust for peacefully expressed but hateful messages with the kind of behavior my generation engaged in over civil rights and the Vietnam war. There is still a dissonance for me. Not over tents. Those should be banned. Not over intimidation or occupying buildings. Those are an easy no. But sitting or standing on a lawn dedicated to student messaging is harder. If the institution has no time limits on student use of the space that’s one thing. If it does, that’s something else. Maybe. Haven’t totally thought it through, obviously.

      2. And John McWhorter gave an example yesterday where in his music class, he could not have students engage in four minutes of silence to listen in a demonstration of John Cages work of silence, because all they would hear would be loud drumbeat and foul, anti-Israel attacks and pro Hamas slogans. Not at 2 a.m. even but in the midst of the teaching day. Though in some way I do accept that those sounds are indeed the sounds of the day.

        1. I fear John McWhorter has completely missed the point of 4′ 33″
          “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
          – John Cage.

      1. Ty Brooke, very clear and elegantly stated explanation of the rules by Princeton’s president. Wish his approach was a template for the leadership of all or most of our colleges and universities. In today’s Atlantic, George Packer has an essay on why the issue of protests over the Israel-Hamas war is posing such a conundrum for higher ed leaders. It too is worth reading.
        https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-left-university-columbia-1968/678176/

    3. All these elite universities are private property, Suzi. The Corporation of Columbia U can make whatever rules it pleases about the behaviour of students it contracts with to provide and receive education, just as a private golf club can enforce a dress code on members and guests by escorting violators off the property. If it says in its rules that someone pitching a tent in a “public” (but really a piece of the private property allowed to be used by all) assembly space must take it down when instructed to by a university official, the would-be camper must obey or suffer the penalty the university prescribes for trespassing and breach of contract. It could even ban demonstrations entirely, which some have by locking the grounds and going to on-line learning.

      The time place and manner restrictions that Jerry cites apply to public universities which, in the United States, are legally subject to the First Amendment. The private universities do pledge to adhere voluntarily to 1A, and to academic freedom in addition, a separate concept. But there is no redress available, as I understand it, to a student or staff who believes the university’s actions — giving him and his tent the boot — violated his concept of free speech, as long as they don’t violate civil rights or employment law or contract law.

  8. I sincerely hope that universities across the country are preparing responses to these kinds of takeovers. If protestors take over buildings, turn off the water, electricity, and (wireless and wired) networking in the buildings, wait for the perpetrators to emerge, and arrest them. If they damage the building in the process, more charges need to follow. Unless there are lawyers standing by to defend them pro bono—and there may very well be—these kinds of actions should be made to be expensive.

    1. If you want to make it expensive: record the events. Video the students and release the videos upon request. Interested parties might identify the students chanting for death, the organizers and students behaving badly and out them. Future employers might have access to that info. Now that type of deterrent might be expensive and might not give wannabes the cache of being temporarily detained for a trendy cause.

  9. In the beginning of all this – 7 months ago – I was outraged by the support of terrorism. I’ve lived here 25+ years and worked in the World Trade Center 6 months before its Islam-assisted demolition. So I’m not cool with terrorism overall.

    Now, however, I say bring it on:

    Young fools and fellow travelers: Do your darndest, be as OBSTRUCTIVE as you can, as disruptive as much as you can manage – attack civilians, cause violence, do your best “for Palestine”. Go to vocalizing lessons to shout “Gas the Jews!” even louder.

    Every clash, every dancing idiot in the Quad looses support for their cause. Normal people look at their antics, their uniforms*, their illogic and ignorance and recoil.
    I couldn’t imagine a worse public relations campaign for Palestine even though it no doubt plays well in the West Bank. But…. nobody cares what they think in the West Bank.
    I see it all as a win for Israel.

    D.A.
    NYC
    American Zionist
    *those campus swastika keffiyehs are actually Iraqi. The PLO imported and then modeled them in the 1970s in terrorist operations to avoid their ID being detected. More “time immemorial” lies from the Pal crowd.

Comments are closed.