I present this list of demands, coming from students in one Canadian university, without comment, but readers are welcome to weigh in below.  Click on the screenshot (taken from The Coast Halifax) to go to the article, and I’ll just re-post what the students are demanding at one school.

The list of demands below comes from students at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (usually called NSCAD University), but the text gives shorter lists from two other universities.

Excerpt indented:

On Friday, May 10, student groups from four Halifax universities–NSCAD, Dal, King’s and SMU–formed a shared group online, called Students for the Liberation of Palestine – Kjipuktuk/Halifax. In a post, they call on their universities “to immediately disclose and divest from any investments that sustain settler-colonial projects, including the Zionist state known as Israel.”

As of May 12, three of these schools have issued specific demands of their own university through specific student groups. At NSCAD, the student union–SUNSCAD–and the Student Action Group released a series of 12 demands to their university, as follows:

We demand:

1. Public disclosure of the entirety of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University investment portfolio.
2. Immediate divestment from all weapons manufacturing, military supplying, and companies operating in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories.
3. In response to emails sent from Dr. Shannon regarding the rights and responsibilities for students and faculty to speak truth to power, and exercise their academic freedom: an apology from, and the resignation of, the President of NSCAD University, Dr. Peggy Shannon.
4. Anti-oppression training for ALL faculty and administration at NSCAD, focusing particularly on Queerness, indigeneity, and anticolonialism.
5. Free tuition for all students.
6. Free housing for all students.
7. The implementation of a Palestinian Art History course.
8. A scholarship offering free tuition and housing for one student currently living in Palestine.
9. That the NSCAD Board of Governors be made up entirely of students, faculty, and staff, with at least 50% +1 seat on the Board being held by students.
10. That NSCAD university moves all its banking to a credit union.
11. The immediate breaking of the lease of NSCAD with the Port Authority, regarding NSCAD’s Port campus, and a commitment of no financial dealings with the Port Authority going forward.
12. That all funds divested through the process of realizing the above demands be reinvested in the rebuilding of universities from the Gaza Strip that have been destroyed.

h/t: Luana

Here’s the most egregious example yet of a college or university giving up institutional neutrality to capitulate to pro-Palestinian protesters and get them to dismantle their encampment.  The school is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, (UWM), and a member of the campus community sent me the “agreement” the school made with its protesters. (Note that the system’s flagship campus is not in Milwaukee but Madison.)

The agreement is announced in the first letter below, from the Chancellor. The second document, the capitulation, is below that.

As usual, I have no way of assuring you that these are genuine, but the agreement itself appears on a UWM.edu website.  Given that and the local source, I’m about 99.99% satisfied that this craven capitulation is genuine. You can click on the first link of the Chancellor’s letter below or on the yellow bar at the bottom that says “read the full agreement” to see the capitulation. Read and weep.

Note how Chancellor Mone pats himself on the back for “prioritizing the safety of everyone involved,” but many schools have resolved such violations  in other ways (e.g. the campus or local cops) without anybody’s safety being compromised. In fact, I’m not aware of anybody in the U.S. being hurt during the takedown of an encampment by force. That was also the case in Chicago; it just takes careful planning.

Note too Mone’s claim that dismantling the encampment in no way infringes upon free speech. That’s true, but dismantling the encampment via cops or threat of expulsion doesn’t infringe on free speech, either, for speech that violates the “time, place, and manner” regulations of colleges isn’t protected free speech as well, or so the courts have ruled.

The protesters are always free to make their chants in ways permitted by UWM, but chose to protest to force the college to capitulate to their demands, not to persuade by rational argument. And the protesters won this one.

But let us look at UMW’s odious “compromise.” The letter is indented and I’ve made a few remarks (flush left).

May 12, 2024

Dear UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition,

Thank you for meeting with us on May 6th, 8th, and 10th, in addition to our many discussions over the last weeks and months. Together, we have made meaningful progress toward a peaceful resolution of the encampment. We have summarized UWM’s final responses to your demands from your correspondence and our meetings below. If these responses and actions are acceptable, we ask that you communicate your agreement by replying all to this message by 4 p.m. Sunday, May 12, and meeting the remaining terms noted in the Conduct Process section at the end of this letter. We stress that meeting this final deadline and ensuring the encampment comes down by the deadline are essential to ensuring we can continue working together on the action items included in this letter.

Call for a Ceasefire and Condemn Genocide

We join the countless calls by national and international leaders for a ceasefire in Gaza. As of this letter, the UN had reported more than 34,000 innocent Palestinians, approximately 60% of whom were women, children and the elderly, had been killed, and nearly 80,000 more had been injured in the war on Gaza. The ongoing humanitarian crisis has led to dangerous water scarcity and starvation of thousands of civilians. A United Nations (UN) expert and the International Criminal Court have now called this war a “plausible genocide.”

Before we point out the many other mistakes in the first part of the letter, note first that the International Criminal Court did not call this a “plausible genocide”. That’s the wrong court, for one thing. Mone is referring to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which, unlike the ICC, judges nations, not individuals. And what the ICJ ruled is not that this is a “plausible genocide,” but that, as Joan Donogue, the former head of the ICJ, notes in this video,

“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media – it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

Note too that even before this letter was written, the UN itself reduced the death toll of women and children to 13,000, or 34% (not 60%) of total deaths.   (See also here.) The proportion of women and children killed given by UWM are based on Hamas’s estimates, which everybody but Hamas admits are inflated.  One thing for sure, though, is that the “34,000 innocent Palestinians” are not all apparently “innocent”, as that figure includes many fighters for Hamas. And that moiety is not “innocent civilians,” but terrorist combatants.

But even the total figures can’t be trusted. First, the total figure given (34,000) is based on Hamas’s Ministry of Health (MOH), which has not disclosed how it estimates death tolls. Whether the true toll is close to 34,000 can’t be known yet.

Further, the ratio of civilians/combatants killed probably varies between 1.2 to 1.5, a figure that is an unprecedented low for modern urban warfare because of IDF’s policy of trying to avoid civilian deaths using a number of methods, including warning civilians in future fire zones. (Note: Netanyahu just claimed that ““Fourteen thousand have been killed, combatants, and, probably around sixteen thousand civilians have been killed,” he tells Dan Senor on the Call Me Back podcast.” But given world opinion, people won’t buy that, though it might be accurate. Again, wait and see—if we ever get an answer.)

The death of any truly innocent civilians, of course, is greatly to be mourned, as each is a noncombatant human being with friends and family. But remember that Hamas increases the number of true civilians killed by using them as human shields.  Still, taking the higher ratio of civilian/combatant deaths, we can estimate that about 40% of those killed were combatants. This figure will, of course, be revised later, but to imply that everyone killed was an “innocent civilian”, as Mone does, is hugely misleading. What was he thinking? He surely can’t think that Hamas fighters are “innocent civilians”!

The letter continues:

We also condemn the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, resulting in the killing of 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, military personnel and police.

Innocent civilians, especially children, must not be the targets of war. This is why we also call for the release of the remaining Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas and the release of Palestinian men, women and children held as hostages in military detention in Israel. We condemn all violence and call for it to end.

Note that Palestinians held in military detention are NOT hostages, or equivalent to them. They were arrested because they were suspected of terrorist activities. They are subject to court decisions—with regular court sessions to decide whether the detention should be prolonged or not. Both Palestinians and Jews are subject to detention (of course there are many more Palestinians than Jews because they engage in terrorist activities much more often, but some Jews are also detained). Many countries in the world (democratic nations as well) use detention when the threat of criminal/terrorist activity is high upon release but the authorities do not have enough evidence to put the suspect on trial. That is known as being held without bail.

Further, Palestinians in detention are NOT kept in underground bunkers, are adequately fed, have access to health care, and their families know where they are and the suspects and their lawyers can act on their own behalf. This is a huge a difference between Palestinians in detentions and Israelis held as hostages.

Denounce Scholasticide

We condemn the destruction of universities in Gaza, including the last remaining one during the military assault as reported by the United Nations in April 2024.

A press release from the United Nations in April 2024 states,

“After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 percent of educational facilities, including 2 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history.”

The same press release cites an expert stating that 80% of all schools in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged.

As educators and education administrators, we believe protecting our schools is fundamental to society. We condemn the destruction of the education system and the killing of its students, teachers, faculty and staff.

Disclosure and Divestment

The UWM Foundation leadership has agreed to meet with up to four students identified by UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition after the encampment comes down on Tuesday, May 14, to discuss your concerns and requests. UWM administrators will attend and ensure that students will be given the opportunity to express their requests for disclosure and divestment. This offer is in addition to the UWM Foundation financial statements provided to you, as well as our information about UWM’s request to the Foundation Board to review its investments in funds that include weapons manufacturers.

Whether this discussion is of any effect on divestment at all is questionable given the following statement:

Cut Ties with Private Companies

As noted in our previous conversations, UWM is prohibited by law from cutting ties with private companies and organizations that do business in Israel, which includes all the businesses you cite in your demands and most recent letter (Wis. Stat. sec. 20.931). UWM supports the civic engagement of students and encourages protestors to make their concerns heard with lawmakers, as it does with all student advocacy issues.

Cease Collaboration with Institutions & Organizations

1. Study Abroad: As we shared during our last meeting, UWM will review its study abroad policies and programs to ensure compliance with our Discriminatory Conduct Policy. Separate from the lack of recent activity in these programs, a current State Department travel advisory for Israel advises against travel for safety reasons. Over the next academic year, a working group will be formed to review all study abroad programs to ensure compliance with our Discriminatory Conduct Policy and develop a process for students to report discrimination experienced in these programs. Members of the working group include members of the International Committee (the IC will self-determine which of its members will participate), the Office of Equity/Diversity Services and the Office of the Dean of Students. We invite you to recommend three to five faculty or instructional academic staff members to be considered for participation in this working group.

Note that they are using the State Department’s travel advisory as a possible reason to avoid having a “study abroad in Israel” program. And they ask the protesters to nominate faculty to judge the study abroad programs. What are the chances that these faculty wouldn’t be pro-Palestinian? I’d say about zero, though they really should have no allegiance.

2. Third-Party Offerings: Hillel, which sponsors certain trips to Israel, is separate from UWM. These trips are not advertised on UWM.edu.

3. Water Council: As we confirmed while discussing your concerns in our May 8 meeting, it has been determined that the Water Council had relationships with two Israeli-government-owned water companies, Mekorot and Israel Innovation 3 Authority. These companies are accused by international aid organizations, including Amnesty International, of cutting off access to drinking water for thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, exacerbating water scarcity. These are serious concerns that Chancellor Mone addressed with the Water Council president. At the Chancellor’s urging, the Water Council no longer has relationships with these entities, and they have been removed from the global listing on the Water Council’s website.

Note that at best 10% of Gaza’s water comes from Israel, the rest being groundwater or desalination plants. As for Israel “cutting off drinking water to Gaza,” I’m pretty sure that water delivery has been largely restored, but can’t be certain as I can’t ascertain it at this moment.  But at most the loss of all Israel-supplied water would cut Gaza’s water supply only by 10%.

Conduct Processes

UWM has repeatedly noted that camping on university grounds is a violation of state law and the student code of conduct. Given that the encampment is a public demonstration in opposition to what the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia calls the “War on Gaza,” the Chancellor and the Provost have agreed to forgo relevant citations or conduct violations for the Coalition and the student groups copied on this message, if all conditions outlined below are met. This exemption only applies to camping activity and does not apply to activities such as, but not limited to, vandalism or property damage, and only applies if the following conditions are met:

1. The encampment must begin to come down on Sunday, May 12, and must be completely deconstructed no later than 8 a.m. Tuesday, May 14. If there is no meaningful progress, which should include the removal of tents and personal property, towards deconstructing the encampment by 11:59 p.m., Sunday, May 12, UWM will begin student conduct processes immediately. UWM staff will assist on Monday with the removal of larger items, such as pallets and plywood, and clean graffiti from Mitchell Hall (which is a historic building that facilities staff prefer to clean).

2. There must be no disruptions at either of UWM’s commencement ceremonies.

3. The coalition and all student groups copied on this message must agree to meet the terms of this agreement.

Here the University agrees not to punish any students (save those determined to be guilty of vandalism) for encamping, despite that they have violated both state law and the student code of conduct.

The agreement finishes with further some osculation of protesters:

We agree with you that removing the encampment should not be the end of our work together. After the encampment is removed, we propose a series of campus conversations and educational opportunities. We also agree to collaboratively schedule and hold meetings to discuss progress on that. A working group that will include representatives at your suggestion in these educational planning efforts will also be formed.

We join you in thanking the UWM Police Department for their respect for students, while still maintaining their concern for security. Because of the long-term relationships, bridge-building and communication between UWM administration and students, this encampment can end peacefully.

Sincerely,

Mark A. Mone, PhD
Chancellor

Andrew Daire, PhD
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

Chia Vang, PhD
Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Adam Jussel
Dean of Students

CC: UWM Students for a Democratic Society
UWM Muslim Student Association
UWM Students for Justice in Palestine
UN-PAC (Political Action Committee) at UWM
Young Democratic Socialists of America at UWM

So you can add UWM to the three-school list of Craven, Compromising Colleges (along with Brown and Northwestern).

Although the agreement could have been worse, it couldn’t have been much worse. I suspect the only reason they didn’t allow the protesters to make divestment decisions is that the law prevented that from happening.

This “resolution” is bad in several ways. First of all, it shows the school as historically ignorant. While it does decry the October 7 attack on Israel, it doesn’t mention the ongoing firing of rockets at Israel from Gaza, which are rockets deliberately aimed at civilians, a war crime that Israel doesn’t commit (the same is happening from Lebanon). The “genocide” is clearly the genocide of Israel on Gaza, which is not a genocide at all. As anybody with neurons to spare knows, the real genocide—a stated determination to wipe out a people—is the philosophy held by Hamas, which in its very charter says its goal is to kill Jews.

The statement also seriously distorts what’s happening in Gaza, not only with respect to the genocide and efforts of the IDF to avoid killing civilians, but also in its use of casualty figures which even the UN doesn’t accept.

Worse, this is an arrant example of a university taking sides in a political conflict: the Palestinian side. It’s thus a violation of institutional neutrality, big time.

Finally, and I want to bring this long post to an end, by giving in to the encampers, merely so the protesters don’t mess up graduation and allow the situation to be resolved “peacefully”—and caving isn’t the only way to resolve this peacefully; there is also non-injurious force and, best of all, the threat of suspension and expulsion—UWM heartens the protesters to continue their disruption. With three schools having capitulated this way, in fact, protesters are heartened everywhere, as who knows if they’ll hit the divestment jackpot if they try?

I’ll close with a statement from the UWM community member who sent me the Chancellor’s letter and compromise statement, quoted with permission:

Our UW-Milwaukee administrators have, in their panic about tents and signs, become willing conduits of Hamas propaganda.

Amen.

I’m hoping that the era of campus unrest is coming to an end, and with it the  bogus claim that the protestors are engaged in civil disobedience because of an “unjust act” (Israel’s war in Gaza). Today I have two readings for you before I’m off to Amsterdam on Saturday.

In the article below in The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin (an author and professor of law at George Mason University), the author argues that there’s no parallel between pro-Palestinian protestors, on or off campus, and the civil rights protestors of the Sixties, who were breaking unjust laws—and taking the punishment.  Click below the read. I’ll post a few highlights, which are indented:

Illegal actions can indeed be justified in some situations. But the tactics used by many anti-Israel protestors fail any plausible criteria for such. The laws they are violating are not unjust. The victims of the violations are almost entirely innocent people. The violations are highly unlikely to lead to improvements in government policy. And, finally, the protestors’ objectives are themselves unjust.

Martin Luther King and many others have argued (correctly) that people have a right to disobey unjust laws. Thus, those who violated the Fugitive Slave Acts or various laws mandating racial segregation had excellent justifications for their actions. Elsewhere, I have argued that many undocumented immigrants are justified in violating immigration restrictions.

Moreover, people who violate unjust laws don’t necessarily have a duty to accept punishment for doing so. For example, members of the Underground Railroad who helped escaped slaves evade the Fugitive Slave Act had no moral obligation to turn themselves in to the authorities. Ditto for dissidents resisting oppressive dictatorships.

I suppose the difference between letting yourself get arrested (as in the Civil Rights Movement), and being morally ok with avoiding arrest is that in the latter case, as above, you can effect more moral change if you remain out there and keep violating an unjust law. At any rate, Somin says none of this applies to the anti-Israel protesters:

This argument obviously doesn’t help lawbreaking anti-Israel protestors. Laws banning campus building takeovers and encampments, and protecting the freedom of movement of students are not unjust. Even most supporters of the protestors readily recognize this in other contexts. For example, they would likely agree that pro-life activists are not justified in occupying buildings in order to try to force the university to divest from businesses that profit from abortion, or that Trump backers cannot do so to force the university to endorse claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.

One can argue that violating otherwise just laws is permissible in order to target people who are themselves perpetrators of injustice. For example, perhaps anti-slavery activists would have been justified in occupying the property of slaveowners in order to pressure them to free their slaves. But the main victims of campus building takeovers, encampments, and coercive restrictions on movement, are students, faculty, and others who have no meaningful responsibility for any injustices occurring in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Merely investing in firms with a presence in Israel is nowhere near enough to justify targeting people. The protestors themselves implicitly recognize that, since they do not use such tactics to demand divestment from businesses that operate in China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with far worse human rights records than Israel. And, to repeat, the main victims of illegal protest activities are not university officials who control investments but students and faculty (who generally have little or no such control).

Perhaps harming innocent people could still be defended if doing so were the only way to achieve some greater good. But that argument doesn’t help the anti-Israel protestors either. It is highly unlikely their actions will lead to any improvement in either US or Israel policy. Even if some universities divest from Israel as a result (which itself is highly questionable), that isn’t going to lead to any beneficial changes in Israeli or US policy. Moreover, the protestors’ behavior is likely to damage their cause more than it aids it. Polls indicate most of the public condemns these types of actions. One survey found that 71% support calling in the police to arrest protestors who occupy buildings or block other people from using parts of the campus.

It goes on, but the point is that the people targeted by the protests, or at least those who are inconvenienced, are not those perpetrating the war. They are simply the inconvenienced and harangued students. “Well,” you could respond, “maybe the protests will change their minds, just as seeing black protestors attacked with dogs and fire hoses in Alabama brought on the Civil Rights Acts.” But that won’t fly, either, for as the article notes, most Americans not only don’t respond to the protests, but also condemn them, and favor as well calling in cops when the protests are illegal (as whey were at my school).  Finally, you could argue that the protests are meant to affect Israel by getting universities to divest from that country. But while that may have worked during the apartheid era, when I too engaged in civil disobedience, it won’t work in America. I don’t know of a single school that’s divested, and there was never a chance that the University of Chicago would divest. It never has and it never will, for our policy is to keep our investing separated from politics.

So what can the protesters do to reach their goals? They won’t like Somin’s answer:

There are many demands the protestors could make that would help Palestinians without endorsing the evil agenda of Hamas and other similar groups. Most obviously, they could demand that Hamas release its hostages and surrender. That would immediately end the war, stop the suffering of the hostages, and free Gaza Palestinians from a brutal dictatorship. In addition, it would help forestall further conflict, which would otherwise be virtually inevitable so long as Hamas remains in power (since they have promised to “repeat October 7 again and again” if given the opportunity to do so).

Short of that, they could at least demand that Hamas fighters wear uniforms (as required by the laws of war) and stop their ubiquitous tactic of using civilians as human shields.

But of course these things won’t fly, either.  Those actions would indeed help Palestinians (setting aside the fact that most Palestinians like Hamas, favoring it over the Palestinian Authority, even in the West Bank), and, further, they wouldn’t result in what the protesters really want: the end of Israel.

The second article, below, is from Tablet (click headline to read), and argues that not are most of the college protests not independent, but rely on central organizations whose funding is nearly impossible to unravel.

It’s a long piece, but centers the organization of protests on three groups; I’ve put them in bold below:

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

To see the tangled web that is the funding of these organizations, I’ll show the text for just one: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is one of the main pro-Palestinian organizations on our campus, and is largely responsible for the illegal and disruptive protests we’ve had—including the one over the last week. You can see how convoluted the financial setup is, and of course that’s done on purpose to hide where the money comes from. Here’s the bit on SJP, which may have some tangential connections to antisemitism and terrorism.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

I know that people are trying to untangle this financial skein right now, and good luck to them.  But it’s clear from the similarities of strategy (given in the article) and even of equipment, that these protests are more than just copycat demonstrations or individual decisions of college groups: they appear to be coordinated by large and well-funded agencies.

Click screenshot below to read the short piece or find it archived here.

A few quotes first:

Some universities have chosen to block encampments from forming at all or ended them within an hour or so. We had the means to do so. Immediate intervention is consistent with enforcing reasonable regulations on the time, place and manner of speech, and it has the advantage of minimizing disruption. Yet strict adherence to every policy—the suppression of discord to promote harmony—comes at a cost. Discord is almost required for the truth-seeking function of a university to be genuine.

Protest is a strongly protected form of speech in the University of Chicago culture, enshrined in the Chicago Principles for a reason. In times of discord, protest serves as a mechanism for democratic societies, and places of reason like universities, to find a way back toward dialogue and compromise. This has value even if protests result in disruption or violate the rules—up to a point. When a protest substantially interferes with the learning, research and operations of the university, when it meaningfully diminishes the free-expression rights of others—as happened with this encampment—then it must come to an end, through dialogue or intervention.

Therefore, it was a crucial decision whether to seek a dialogue to resolve a disruptive protest. Some will argue that the moral hazard of even holding such discussions is so severe that they should never be undertaken at all—that no agreement could possibly be legitimate if it originated from these circumstances. Others will say such dialogue should always be sought. I believe dialogue may be appropriate under certain circumstances, provided that protesters come to it openly with an understanding that the consequences of their policy violations will be reviewed evenhandedly. The same applies to discipline now that the encampment has ended.

The principle that decided the final action:

Why then didn’t we reach a resolution? Because at the core of the demands was what I believe is a deep disagreement about a principle, one that can’t be papered over with carefully crafted words, creative adjustments to programming, or any other negotiable remedy.

The disagreement revolves around institutional neutrality—a foundational value to the University of Chicago. It is a principle animated by the idea that authority can’t establish truth for an entire institution dedicated to truth-seeking; rather, it is the imperative of individuals to seek truth without being limited by authority. Institutional neutrality vests freedom of inquiry and speech directly in faculty and students, where it belongs.

Underpinning the demands was a call for the university to diminish ties with Israel and increase ties with the Palestinians in Gaza. In short, the protesters were determined that the university should take sides in the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Other demands would have led to having political goals guide core aspects of the university’s institutional approaches, from how we invest our endowment to when and how I make statements. Faculty members and students are more than free to engage in advocacy on one side or the other. But if the university did so as an institution, it would no longer be much of a university.

That sounds good, and is meant to uphold our free speech principles, but I’m not completely satisfied with this response for several reasons.

a.)  I don’t think the President should have tried to bargain with the protestors. That never works, and winds up heartening them to erect encampments elsewhere to achieve their aims.

b.) We were never told that the administration was secretly trying to bargain with encampers. That distressed many of us, who, though we didn’t need to know what items were on the table, believe that you should never bargain with such a group of zealots. And believe me, the encampers were zealots.

c.) The President should simply have had the encampment removed the moment the first tent was hammered into the ground. Why? Because, as Alivisatos admitted in his first letter to the University, the encampment violated University “time, place, and manner” regulations in multiple ways. From the outset it was a big violation, not a minor one. And it only got bigger over time, exacerbating the problem.

d.) Bargaining with UCUP and SJP is a futile effort, because the University has had to deal with their disruptions repeatedly (this is the fifth time), they have never really punished the students, and the protesters are determined to continue their disruptions until they get everything they want. That includes the University divesting from Israel, something that will never happen here. Thus negotiations were doomed at the outset.

e.) Alivisatos implies that he let the encampment stand as a sign of our university’s tolerance of free speech, but, as I said, it was never a sign of free speech, but rather an illegal violation of principles that themselves were designed to promote free speech. Yes, let the protesters act legally, holding permitted demonstrations, giving speeches, and so on. But it’s not tolerating free speech to let people block access to parts of the university, harass their opponents, and disrupt University life by constant loud and illegal shouting and chanting on megaphones. One of my colleagues criticized the letter for implying that ending the protest too early would have been a violation of free speech, but allowing it to go on longer would have been caving in to pressure. That is, pulling the switch after a week was, to the President, the perfect solution. I disagree. Letting the encampment stay up from the outset is caving in to pressure, and other schools, like Dartmouth, have ended encampments very early without suffering any damage. On the other hand, Northwestern, which did strike a deal with protestors to give student scholarships and jobs to Palestinians, has suffered a loss in reputation for what is very possibly an illegal compromise.

The silver lining in this egregious encampment, and in the administration having allowed it to remain for a long time, is that the protesters, including University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have shown themselves for who they are: a pack of  hateful bullies unwilling to even discuss their aim, which is to push for the elimination of Israel and make the University of Chicago a refuge for Palestinian protest. Protest is fine, but the way the Jewish students have been treated here, by both the administration (which won’t answer their letters and only lightly punishes SJP for deplatforming them) and by the encampers (who tear down the Jewish banners every day and won’t permit “Zionists” in their encampment) has created a climate of anti-Semitism that justifies a Title VI lawsuit, as is happening at Northwestern.  If the administration is to enforce institutional neutrality, it cannot allow it to go on so visibly for a week without any strong pushback. We must at all costs maintain our neutrality, and our time, place and manner regulations of speech, even in the face of hateful bullying.

Oh, and do you think any of the protesters will be punished? The University mentions internal sanctions, but that’s meant only for students and so far hasn’t even been applied to those who sat in in a building last October. Were students’ names taken? They won’t let us know.  And as for the many non-students who joined the encampment—probably a majority of the protesters— they’ll face no punishment at all, as no arrests were made.

This lack of punishment means that our free-speech policies are toothless, for we have no meaningful deterrence for violating them.

The Encampment is gone and the Quad is once again beautiful, lacking tents, litter, and posters of hatred.  The only remaining ideological item is a legal sign calling for release of hostages, put up by the U. Chicago Maroons for Israel.

Six or seven security people were roaming the quad, even at 5 a.m., and there were cop cars parked on the streets nearby. The American flag is not yet back up (the protestors hoisted the Palestinian flag and then taped down the ropes to prevent its removal, but the University cops took down that flag).

I have a feeling that this period of peace will not last long, but of course I am always pessimistic.