College Administrators Are Attempting to Quash Gaza Solidarity Actions — Again

As the fall term gets underway for students across the United States, we speak with journalist and academic Natasha Lennard about how college administrators are attempting to quash Gaza solidarity actions following mass protests at campuses across the country in the spring. One example is New York University, which recently updated its student policy to make criticisms of Zionism potentially punishable under its anti-discrimination rules. “It’s extremely dangerous,” says Lennard, who teaches at The New School. “It performs de facto apologia for Israel, and to have that put into writing by a university so clearly is just open for further abuses.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this conversation another professor, Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept, associate director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program at The New School, not far from Columbia University. Her most recent piece, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” Can you put Professor Thrasher and Professor Franke’s experience in a broader context of the universities from here in New York, NYU, to other universities around the country?

NATASHA LENNARD: Absolutely. And thank you. It’s lovely to be back. And I firstly want to say thank you to Professor Franke and Professor Thrasher for being among the professors who refuse to be silenced in this moment of what is widely being called a “new McCarthyism.” And I think that’s an accurate description.

Their cases are not unusual, and it is indeed sad, and it is indeed disappointing, indeed no less than ghoulish. We are having, both de facto and through policy, both in terms of new regulations and student conduct guides coming through for this semester, as well as punitive actions against students and professors, a real reification of the claim that Israel critical speech and pro-Palestinian speech should count under violations of Title VI nondiscrimination law and regulations and policy in universities. What that does is align university policy with the right-wing agenda of Congress and right-wing lawmakers who follow in the footsteps of a right-wing Israeli-U.S. consensus.

And I think if a university is not a place where that can be critically challenged, especially at a time of genocide, when there are no universities left standing in Gaza — which we cannot forget — and the concerns of our academy is the speech of professors speaking out for academic freedom and speaking out for the liberation of an occupied people, we’re in very dark times indeed.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, you write in your piece in The Intercept that, quote, “Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU” — New York University — “guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include ‘Zionists’ and ’Zionism’”?

NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, this is a very exemplary, in the worst of ways, document that was just released by the administration at NYU. It is a new updated guide of student conduct about nondiscrimination and harassment. It goes further than any document I have seen in asserting that Zionism, when used critically, should or at least readily can be understood as — and I quote the document — a “code word.” It doesn’t say that occasionally by antisemites that Zionism is used as a code word. It takes that as a given.

So, that is — to clarify, that is a student conduct guide, very poorly written, very open to misuse, that is asserting that the political ideology founded in the 19th century of the ethnostate of Israel being a Zionist project, that that should be considered part of the protected class of Jewish identity, religion and ethnic and shared ancestry. That is what we’re seeing in attempts of statehouses nationwide to attach Zionism, the political ideology, to the protected class of Jewish identity. It’s extremely dangerous. It performs de facto apologia for Israel. And to have that put into writing by a university so clearly is just open for further abuses and an escalation of the sort of repression we’ve already seen.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Franke?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, I teach a class on citizenship and nationality in Israel and Palestine. And we begin with a critical look at the concept of Zionism. Of course, it was advanced as a place, as an idea, about the safety of the Jewish people being located in Mandate Palestine, but there were plenty of Jewish people at the time who said, “This is actually a horrible idea from the perspective of the safety of Jewish people, because what it says is the Jews all belong in Israel and nowhere else, not in Europe, not in the United States, nowhere else. And so this will lead to more violence, more expulsions, more antisemitic pogroms, if we lean in too much to the idea that Jews belong primarily and especially in Israel.” And those were critiques coming from Jews, again, themselves.

So, if we are not allowed to talk about that anymore in universities, what we’ve done is surrendered the very idea of the university itself. And that is so much what troubled us about Minouche Shafik, our president — former president of Columbia’s testimony in Congress, and some of those other presidents who came, who were called before Congress, is they not only did not put up a robust defense of the idea of a university where we teach students how to be critical thinkers in such a critical time, but they actually joined in to the criticism of the university. My president did not stand up for any one of us, nor did Professor Thrasher’s at Northwestern.

And this is part of what concerns me, is that our universities are places now where we could not have a protest and say things that are now being said in Tel Aviv by Israelis. The protests that are happening there this week, if they took place on Columbia’s campus, our students would be expelled or charged with very serious disciplinary violations. This is where we’ve come. It’s impossible to talk about the kinds of things that, Amy, in your setup, of the just horrible things that are happening right this week in Jenin, in Gaza — we can’t talk about that at Columbia. That’s part of what concerns me is, is that we don’t know our history, and these new policies are keeping us from learning it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, we just have about 30 seconds, but you’ve noted that universities are not only facing attacks from Congress, they’re also being subjected to lawsuits all around the country. Could you talk about that briefly?

NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, we’ve seen a series of litigation, including at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, brought by often unnamed students and faculty, often very frivolous suits that universities are forced to answer to nonetheless, and then, through settlements and often nonpublic agreements, are then forced to change policy, often leading to the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue this discussion over time. We’ll link your piece, Natasha Lennard, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” She’s at The New School. Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke, Kathleen Peratis, civil rights lawyer, and Steven Thrasher. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.