From Jerry: I spent about 45 minutes walking through the pro-Palestinian encampment this afternoon, listening and taking pictures. I did not engage anybody save campus cops and deans and call.
The demonstration clearly violates both campus regulations and the law in several ways (I’ll show photos tomorrow, but see the Dean of Student’s email below.)
It blocks university sidewalks and thus impedes access to buildings
It is likely loaded with outsiders not from the University. I can’t tell this for certain, but I’ve been to a lot of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and don’t recognize most of the people. Any outsiders are therefore trespassing by camping out on University property.
The demonstration itself is almost certainly illegal, as it is taking up large amounts of space on the quad, depriving other students of using it. (This is an area where students like to sit, chat, or lie in the sun.) Further, one is not allowed to set up tents in the quad and sleep there overnight (see below).
There is chilling of speech. I heard one of the leaders announce, through a megaphone, something like “Do not talk to the press. Do not talk to deans on call, as they are no different from the police. And do not talk to Zionists.” I recorded some of this and will put up a movie tomorrow. The anti-Zionist trope is, of course, not only a form of anti-semitism, but a chilling of speech of any Jewish or pro-Israeli person who walks through the encampment. (I have never seen that protest leader before; I suspect he was sent in by some organization like SJP National.)
And yes, most of the tents look alike, implying that some organization funded their purchase or rental, or supplied them. There is a medical tent and lots of food and supplies, implying not only that this demonstration was well planned and funded, but that the protestors plan to be here for a long time.
I finally received a response from my email this morning to the Dean of Students asking what parts of this demonstration violate university regulations. It was a response not to me personally, but to the entire University community. Among the paeans to free expression, which I agree with, is this:
As part of our free expression principles, the University is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express a wide range of views. At the same time, University policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the University’s operations, or involve the destruction of property.
Setting up tents on the Quad or erecting other structures and obstructions without prior approval, as happened in this case, is a violation of University policy and will result in disciplinary action. We are monitoring the situation closely. The individuals involved are on notice that the University is prepared to take further action in the event of continued violations of our time, place, and manner policies governing protests, threats to public safety, disruption of operations or academic activities, or destruction of property.
This is heartening, though I am not sure that these individuals really were put on notice. I’ll take the Dean’s word for it. What this means is that the participants, at least those who are U of C members, might be punished. We shall see.
The President of the University has sent out an incredibly ambiguous and waffling email implying that the demonstrators really are violating university policy but he’s not going to do anything about it right now, though he may in the future. I will reproduce that tomorrow morning. The Jewish students are incredibly upset with this statement, as am I. The Dean of Students has far more guts than our President.
In sum, our University won’t even follow its own regulations–regulations put in place to promote free speech–by preventing obstructive and illegal demonstrations. Nor will they even attempt to ascertain which participants belong in the University of Chicago community and which don’t.
Were I President, the first thing I would do is to send university police through the encampment, asking to see their U of Chicago IDs. If they have them, fine; leave them alone for the moment. But do take their names for purposes of University punishment (see above). For those without University IDs, make them leave campus, escorted by the police. This is a relatively peaceful and nonviolent way to initially deal with the demonstration. .
Speaking of the cops, I asked the University police (only a few were there) why they didn’t do anything. They said they couldn’t without orders from “above” (meaning the administration). I then grilled three “Deans on Call”, who are supposed to monitor the demonstration. I asked them what they were doing about the illegal bits of the demonstration. They said they could not do anything, not without “orders from above.” Again, that means the administration. Deans on Call are useless in these situations.
So far, then, we have an ambiguous email from the President and a harder-hitting one from the Dean of Students. Whether the University will really act to remove the encampment remains to be seen. After all, Columbia University was supposed to take down its encampment at 2 pm New York time yesterday. It is still there as of this evening. And I am not at all confident, based on previous episodes, that the illegally protesting students will be punished.
Stay tuned. Photos and video tomorrow. But this is incredibly time-consuming!
Thank you Jerry for the updates. I know this must be a tough time for you so take care mate. All the best
Well, at UCLA this happened:
” Jewish student trying to attend class is forcibly prevented entry by 6 masked Pro-Hamas students while UCLA guard stands by and DOES NOTHING.
“I am a UCLA student…my class is over there. I want to use THAT entrance. Let me go in.” ”
https://twitter.com/persianjewess/status/1785021873555902744
That’s wild. I can’t fathom why no one is doing anything about this. Mind boggling.
Tuition paying students are being blocked from walking to class on campus? What will turn the tide here? Can one sue based on this? (I’m not a litigious person nor do I know the law very well…but it seems to me like something has to give at some point)
I am so bothered by that encounter that I cannot get to sleep tonight …it is almost 1 am. The young man showed much more patience than I at his age. While just a husk of my former self today, when I was his age I was still competing in statelevel powerlift meets as a 181 lb. I think that I would have asked for help from the police style person standing there and if he would not help, I would have simply powered my way through the line of obnoxious little shits. I can pretty much guarantee that they wiuld have given way.
The security minion seems to be guarding the barrier on behalf of UCLA. Why has UCLA placed a barrier there in the first place, which allows the Borg goons to obstruct the aperture more easily? (Reminiscent of the signs blocking the UChicago pathways but at least UCPD isn’t guarding them.)
The student should have called 911, especially when the big male goon came over to “assist”. But the university seems to be taking sides here.
Everyone who thinks this is part of peaceful protest needs to look at this closely, then look at their own assumptions. I realize there is a lot of nostalgia in this age cohort about their own Vietnam-era protests but you are going to lose your universities if you don’t figure this out.
That’s messed up. What a bunch of hypicritical, bullying chumps.
Anna Krylov & Jay Tomzman in their newsletter for April 27 had a cartoon about the sameness of the tents. The cartoon is not attributed and I don’t know whether it comes from anywhere or was created by AK & JT via AI.
Here is the caption: Nothing says ‘spontaneous grassroots movement” like identical matching tents.
The two of them also did a wonderful piece on the protest course of studies at USC a little earlier.
From his opening speech at the Chicago Forum kickoff event last year through every action and inaction since, President Alivisatos has shown himself to be a spineless empty suit. He is of the new genre of professional college presidents whose only purpose is to be vanilla and raise money from a large common denominator of alums and friends of the college. No academic, scholarly, or moral leadership required. It is particularly disheartening to see such a choice following the tenure of the excellent and late Bob Zimmer. But we should all remember that blame for this situation lies just to the north of the president on the org chart: the board of trustees who selected and evaluates his behavior. I’m very sorry Jerry and the rest of the UChicago family on this website.
Thanks for the update.
Lawsuits may help to correct this awful situation. “An anonymous Jewish student alleged in a lawsuit filed Monday that Columbia University is failing to provide a safe learning environment for students during the ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations.” From CNN Business https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/university-protests-palestine-04-29-24/h_dffc28a0d9a20e4c66a17c91c6704d64
Praying to Mother Nature for a good storm, with high winds and hail. But sorry it’s come to this.
A shame they won’t talk to “zionists”. Shouldn’t protest be about spreading ideas and understanding others? But this isn’t really a regular protest, is it?
No, it’s about intimidation.
But come to think of it, what protest has ever been comfortable with spreading ideas and understanding others? Would any campus protest during the Vietnam war have been willing to listen to Robert McNamara or General Westmoreland or anti-communist hawk Congressmen? Or even conservative students who had served in Vietnam and supported a vigorous response to communism? Do climate protests allow energy company executives to address them? Or even people who buy fossil fuels?
Protest, even lawful protest, takes over when attempts to draw people to your cause and change their minds through debate have failed. So you have to make life difficult for them in some way, hoping they will submit even if not convinced. The noise of thousands (or a dozen or so) protesters is intended to make others at least just a little bit nervous about what they might do if they don’t get what they want, but no one else wants to give it to them.
There is no reason why large demonstrations have to be legal. The right in the First Amendment is freedom of the press and freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances. Canada guarantees (weakly) freedom of expression with “reasonable” limits. The courts in both countries over the years have come to accept that disruptive demonstrations that allow only one point of view to be expressed –that’s sort of the point of both a protest and a newspaper editorial — are legal under those protections. But they need not be, especially if governments have become inured to protests over the years and know they don’t really have to change their policies in response to them. In that case, the protests have to be about intimidation, not persuasion, if they are to have any hope of success. Hence obstructing bridges, railways and entrances to buildings, not just standing on the sidewalk waving a placard. And those protests do work. We know that from experience.
The First Amendment also protects to right to freedom of assembly and petition, with the presumption that the assembly is peaceable.
TL;DR:
“You keep using that word* ; I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Ingo Montoya
The Princess Bride
1987
*[peaceably, assemble, speech… river, sea, free…]
“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, […] denunciation is impossible […] and there is no transformation without action.”
-Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
1968 (Spanish, Original)
An assembly is a meeting called for a lawful purpose, say, to nominate a candidate to stand in an election, or conduct business such as electing directors or reviewing the activities of a volunteer organization to keep the members informed. The assembly to be lawful must have the consent of the owner of the land where the meeting takes place. If the owner withdraws his consent under the terms of the agreement, it becomes trespassing and therefore an unlawful assembly. If the assembled trespassers refuse to leave then they have become unpeaceable. (Because the owner has the right to use reasonable force against them.)
A bunch of homeless people camped in a public park or in the streets so as to interfere with the reasonable right of members of the public to use the space is not a lawful assembly. Nor is congregating on private property without the owner’s consent a lawful assembly. These agglomerations do not become assemblies protected from state actions to enforce the law just because someone has a sign saying “Victory to the NLF!” or “Fuck Trudeau!” and just because they are not overly violent.
There is an unfortunate tendency to regard such unlawful assemblies as “peaceable” (and therefore protected) as long as they block only someone else’s property and not one’s own, some other bridge and not the one I need to get home from work, and as long as one agrees with the goals and aims of this particular assembly, of course. Taking to the streets may be tolerated by the authorities for noble or cowardly reasons but when the authorities will not help a landowner remove mobs of trespassers, then private property has ceased to exist. Which is the underlying agenda of all such protests.
There was a time in Australia when there was a lot of debate on the Vietnam war but continuing involvement and increasing body count and the true horrors being shown on TV, and the fact that there was conscription to send us over there to do it, to people we had no quarrel with, finally meant huge demonstrations that did help end our involvement. It was a different time and a different type of issue.
Jerry thanks for being there
Thanks Jerry for your good work.
Your target’s reaction is your real action
I’m not sure this is the reaction the Deep Thinker Scouts read about in their directions.
Is there a university rule requiring students to show student ID on request? If not, presumably they will refuse (or just claim they don’t have their ID with them). Also, protesters with no student ID will presumably resist being “escorted” off campus, requiring the police to use force. The headlines will then be that the police battered the protesters.
Some solutions to consider:
Surround the illegal encampments with barbed wire and starve them out.
Alternatively, water cannon are effective.
Most cruel: Place loudspeakers around the encampments and blast them nonstop with Tiny Tim singing ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, or The Three Stooges theme.
Hmmm. Woody Allen once suggested a closed room with a life insurance salesman.
Hmmm…let’s see, millions of women in America have lost their bodily autonomy, SCOTUS is an arm of the GOP neo-fascist party, Americans are still dying en masse from gun violence and narcotics, Putin is still pounding Ukraine in his criminal war, the Islamic world is barbaric and beyond cruel, we might as well throw the border in there, and a corrupt horror of a human being, a psychotic, addled, sexual fiend for Ceiling Cat’s sake, is running the Republican party and is on the ticket for the Presidency! Yet, for so many young people on campus, an autocratic terrorist death-cult is what they fancy and stirs them to action…cuz Jews protected their survival by retaliating and America et al. are helping them. What pathetic times…
And I’ll add it’s not just an American problem…simply put, Hamas won the propaganda war. Huge sigh…
Bill Ackman posted this on eXtwitter – an excerpt, then the links/site that was posted :
” the exponential rise in antisemitic violence, incitement, intimidation, and harassment on and around campuses in the United States is not the product of spontaneous protests of individuals. Rather, they are tightly coordinated and well-funded by a network of radical and often antisemitic non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Within Our Lifetime, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and Samidoun. ”
Links (pruned a bit):
ngo-monitor.org/reports/ngo-network-orchestrating-antisemitic-incitement-on-american-campuses/
twitter.com/billackman/status/1784755787555836344?s=46
I think these camps intend to take a page from the Bonus Army camp of 1932.
It would also be nice to learn to what degree all of this is fueled from the same sources that fueled the Oct 2018 Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh
“And I am not at all confident, based on previous episodes, that the illegally protesting students will be punished.”
No. The protests are legal. Some of the activities are illegal, and they should be prosecuted.
Neither Gandhi nor MLK Jr. followed the laws while protesting. The whole point of civil disobedience *is* to transgress the laws.
Arrest them. But for god’s sake, do not inflict mass violence on the kids.
I’m not sure what you’re saying? Nobody is calling for mass violence to be inflicted on the kids, though if dragging them out of buildings that they’ve broken into (as at Columbia) is “violence, so be it.
Yes, the point of civil disobedience is to transgress the laws, but then cheerfully accept the punishments for breaking those laws That’s not what these protestors are doing: they are demanding NOT to be punished. If protestors know they’re part of an illegal encampment, they should be given a warning, and then either arrested, suspended, or (if what they did is really bad) expelled.
So I don’t get where you think anybody’s calling for mass violence. I myself decried it this morning when Jewish kids were inflicting it on pro-Palesstinian protestors.