A photo from a colleague. Note that most of the tents are similar, so they likely reflect purchase by one agent.
And this demonstration is clearly illegal. Now is the true test of our administration. Do they have the spine to remove these protestors?
Blocking access to campus and buildings, chanting and disturbing classes, tresspassing (for non-students, and I suspect there are many), and camping illegally on the quad: these are violations. So far the deans on call are on the site but are doing nothing. I suspect the administration is sweating bullets, not knowing what to do and therefore doing nothing.
More photos from my colleague Peggy Mason. The signs are clearly blocking the sidewalk:
Two demonstrators:
Tolerating and appeasing these pro-terrorism protesters clearly just eggs them on to more egregious behavior. The University would be well-advised to get ahead of this issue and make it clear that violating reasonable place and time restrictions on protest will not be tolerated. The administration should immediately let students, and I think just importantly letting their parents, know that they do face suspension and expulsion. All alumni, faculty, and students who believe that the University should be the home of rigorous, open, civil debate should urge the administration to take these actions.
I assume like Columbia they will warn and then expel these pro-Hamas protestors.
Keeping them from returning is the hard part. Taking names and applying academic sanction to anyone arrested and compelled to identify themselves, or whom the university can identify by other means, is within the university’s power. (By power, I mean actual power, not just legal authority which means nothing if not backed up by actual power.)
The Chicago Police, if they come at all, will only come once.
They may come back and I acknowledge it’s hard to keep them off campus but they won’t come back as students or faculty.
Oooo, camping!
Will there be canoeing, smores, balloons and cotton candy too?
… and dysentery, the bane of campers unschooled in primitive sanitation everywhere.
Not to mention litter everywhere. Wanna bet some of these protesters promote recycling all their Red Bull cans and Mountain Dew plastic bottles?
These children will not clean up after themselves. I’ve seen it time and time again – after the protests are over, trash is left behind. They do not respect anything, and are a bunch of entitled brats spewing hatred while taking on the mantle of the “oppressed”.
They are blocking that main path across the quad. Are they blocking them all? If I was heading across the quad, I’d get a little feisty.
Cloward-Piven Strategy
Yeah, one of many reasons it’s good I didn’t choose campus life.
Pretty much. That’s the main path from the quad to the campus and streets to the East and to the West, where the administration building lies. You can of course circle around the edge of campus, but access to buildings is certainly being impeded.
Does the Chicago Fire Department not have something to say about barricades that impede escape in an emergency, or first responders getting in? Besides, people walking around the barricades to avoid the fat girl standing in the narrow aperture are going to trample the plants.
The signs are constructed with braces on both sides. If heavily built, they will not be able to pushed over or aside by slightly built co-eds, and once eventually knocked over in a crush they will pose a risk of injury to people falling on the feet sticking up vertically. The university needs to confiscate and destroy these barriers before someone gets hurt and sues it.
Has your president put out a preemptive letter to the campus…knowing that this advertised event is coming? Laying out the rules in advance, so that enforcing them does not require a “warning” once the miscreants are in place.
Nope; no warning or preemptive letters.
Jeebus!
Honestly I would just walk by and move anything that got in my way. I did this once entering a McDonald’s that was being blocked by protestors…just brushed aside. Got some dirty looks, insults and a bit of shoving but as soon as I did it, others started and the protestors stood aside.
I highly doubt that these folks are going to get violent if people firmly step up in this way…
I’m seeing a big disparity between the words from UofChi in support of the Kalven principles and the actions of the University administration. Is there any consequence for not following known University guidelines?
I hate these protesters but I love the right to protest. For example, I supported right of Nazis to march in Skokie. Perhaps I am missing some legal distinction but I would think these protests are legal at public universities. Some protesters have probably crossed a legal line of intimidation but most have not.
Private universities like Columbia and Chicago get to make whatever rules they desire but I think students (despicable or not) should be allowed to speak non-violently.
I agree that they should be allowed to speak but they should not be allowed to violate university rules, like blocking the sidewalk, bringing in non-students (I hear now there are quite a few) and camping overnight on the quad. That is not speech. If they want to march in accordance with university policy, that’s fine. Or do yuou consider blocking sidewalks and sitting in buildings to be “speech”?
What if they decided to camp on your front lawn to speak non-violently but refused to leave when you got tired of their presence because your children now have no place to play? Would you let them in to use the bathroom? You may well subscribe to free-speech absolutism, as I do, but I still want to use and enjoy my own property for my lawful purposes.
I agree with the right to free speech, even for disgusting speech. I also think that universities and other organizations have to be consistent in the application of discipline if their guidelines restrict speech. If despicable speech against one group of people is allowed, then it must be allowed against other groups, and vice versa. In my opinion at least.
In these cases, since it seems to not be OK to say something negative about almost any other group or to even wear triggering halloween costumes, then the only obvious conclusion is that these administrations hate Jews so much that they are willing to relax their campus speech guidelines so that students can direct their hatred toward their “Zionist” classmates. In fact, in some cases this type of action is even rewarded, such as when the UCLA professor told students that they would get good grades and didn’t even have to do the final project.
Sorry to see U of C president not carrying on the college’s legacy of a free speech institution. I guess he wants to be liked by the students…?
Activists at Sciences Po—the Paris Institute of Political Studies—attempted a manifestation à l’Américaine but it apparently fizzled, according to this report: (https://unherd.com/newsroom/sciences-po-palestine-protests-fail-to-capture-spirit-of-1968/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&utm_source=UnHerd+Today&utm_campaign=88963ce535-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_04_29_08_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_79fd0df946-88963ce535-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D ) . Of course, outfits like Hamas, which US student twits romanticize, have less cachet in a country where jihadists have killed hundreds in “actions” like the Bataclan massacre of 2015 and the occasional murder of a school teacher.
There is a strong emphasis on defense of free speech, and readers here understand this at length upside-down and sideways.
However – a review of operating philosophies outside of the above train of thought is imperative in this scenario (bold added):
“There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”
[…]
“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well […] denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.”
-Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
1968 (Spanish, Original)
…(back to me)…
To a casual observer, “speech” is not what it means for critical consciousness – “speech” is praxis, and it is on institutions of education for a reason – they are the means of production of knowledge. “Speech” is exoteric, “praxis” is esoteric. Used this way, “speech” sets up a Motte and Bailey strategy (N. Shackel, 2005) where praxis is the esoteric meaning – defended with the worldly “speech” definition.
That formulation also explains what “critical theory” means – critical makes things into verbs – it is practiced. That practice is dialectically woven together with our conventional conception of “speech”. Free speech to the critically conscious is action – e.g. setting up tents on the quad. It is a higher level of speech, sublated (Marcuse) speech.
BTW yes, Friere’s books can be scraped for glimpses of rationality but it only serves as gnostic temptation into critical consciousness (see also The Politics of Education.)
Thanks TP. I’ve come to appreciate your deeper analysis of the philosophy behind these actions.
Thanks, but I think it isn’t much deeper than, essentially :
“You keep using that word ; I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Ingo Montoya
… to the off my lawn-ers here, that’s a “meme” from The Princess Bride movie (1987… s’got Billy Crystal in it…).
Is this organized by an officially recognized campus group, like SJP (Student for Justice in Palestine; or, as Shai Davidai of Columbia says, Students for Jihad in Palestine)?
Never mind–I found the answer on the Maroon web site with updates: “UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) launched an encampment on the quad….”
It is a mixture of recognized groups, like SJP, and other unrecognized groups, all mixed together under the moniker United of Chicago United for Palestine. But the protest itself was not given an official okay by the administration, so even if was organized by SJP itself it’s still in violation of campus rules.
So far the deans on call are on the site but are doing nothing. I suspect the administration is sweating bullets, not knowing what to do and therefore doing nothing.
They must have seen this coming for days – I’m astonished that they didn’t have a plan!
Jerry, You were enthusiastically cheering similar protests in India in 2016. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2016/03/18/i-have-landed-2-trouble-at-jnu/
That was true civil disobedience in opposition to an immoral law, and the students were willing to take the consequences. And they were not masked! Indeed, some were expelled.
And I myself have demonstrated illegally by posting a protest note on the door of the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., which was considered trespassing. I knew I’d be arrested, and I was (the Embassy later agreed to drop the charges).
I don’t think you quite get what I’m objecting to: lack of our University’s punishment for violating campus rules of protest, a lack that simply spurs on protests. You are so eager to accuse me of hypocrisy that you haven’t thought about what you’re saying.
Do be careful out there: they are a nasty bunch of spikey turds.
D.A.
NYC