This quarter, I taught my class, The Comparative Politics of the Middle East, which includes extensive discussions on Israel and Palestine. I came away with a bitter taste of the current reality surrounding freedom of speech.
As a UChicago postdoc and an instructor, I am a product of the university’s Core Curriculum and Center for Teaching. There, I was trained to deal with contentious issues by facilitating discussion, engaged intellectual inquiry, and respectful disagreement.
Therefore, as tensions were running high on campus following the encampment in Solidarity for Gaza and its subsequent dismantlement by UCPD police, rather than pretending that nothing was going on around us, I increased our class time devoted to Israel and Palestine, and I sought to engage students in discussions on the encampment, the national protest movements, and the response by administrations and police forces across the country.
However, I discovered at my peril that the teaching methods the university had equipped me with were futile in the context of the comprehensive deprivation of many students’ freedom of speech.
This issue culminated in class in a discussion of the police raid on the encampment, in which only students with seemingly no personal stakes in the encampment or national protest movement, let alone the wider Arab world, made comments. Those who spoke up engaged in class productively and commendably; yet, they were met by a loud silence, and the discussion died down despite my efforts to resuscitate it.
Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
Later, during office hours, multiple students expressed that they had felt a strong desire to vent their feelings and frustrations in class and push back against what they perceived as unfair allegations against the encampment by other students. Yet, they felt either insufficiently safe or that the risks of speaking up in class were not worth it.
As an instructor, I was left with a feeling that by facilitating discussion, I had caused harm to students who had to sit through class while actively suppressing their opinions. My class, I felt, had inadvertently become an arena of speech suppression. Nothing about my training had prepared me to teach a class in which students experienced an unlevel playing field in terms of their liberty to speak.
As Anton Ford, associate professor of philosophy, argued in a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Chicago principles of free speech protects only freedom of discussion (truth-seeking speech), and eschews freedom of deliberation (decision-making speech) and protest (disruptive speech). What I experienced in my class was that without the freedom of deliberation and protest, the freedom of discussion is also meaningless.
Free speech does not depend on so-called safe spaces in which we protect ourselves from divergent opinions. However, it does depend on safe spaces in which students can feel sufficiently protected from online threats, deportations, doxxing, disciplinary actions, arrest, and loss of future job opportunities. Right now, there is a sense among many students connected to the Palestinian cause that not only will their speech be twisted to mean things their speech did not intend (like that Intifada means calling for genocide). What is more, there is a sense that no one will have their backs once they face such allegations.
This sense of unsafety is amplified by a broader asymmetry: a warranted outpouring of concern for some students’ feelings of unsafety (by university administrations, media, and politicians) following events in the Middle East and on US campuses, coupled with a complete disregard for the feelings of unsafety of other groups of students.
This deprivation of some students’ free speech is not only an injustice that afflicts some; as I told my students, this should concern us all because free speech functions a bit like freedom in general; no one has it until we all have it.
Adam Almqvist is a Postdoctoral Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.
As people assembled the Dr. Hammam Alloh Medic Tent, the Refaat Alareer Library, and the beginnings of what would become a legendary twenty-four-hour food tent, administrators arrived and encircled the UChicago Popular University for Gaza. One began directing: “These walls are blocking the egress of this pathway and have to move. Move this tent two feet off from the path to keep an egress. Those tent stakes might puncture a water line, and then you would be responsible for the damage.”With each expression of noncompliance, the frustration of this administrator became increasingly palpable and shifted to brute intimidation: “What is your name? Spell it out slowly. Are you, personally, prepared to take responsibility for this?”
During the camp, I was a liaison between the administration and police, on the one hand, and the Popular University for Gaza, on the other. The experience of this intermediary position helped illuminate, for me, the widespread and ordinary mechanisms of administrative repression that–far from being incidental to the university’s famed Chicago Principles of free expression and political neutrality–are close to their core. UChicago generally does not react with the violent spectacles that Columbia or UCLA did; instead, they most often shroud themselves in the banalities of policy and offer apparently reasoned arguments. Yet, like universities elsewhere, there are, in fact, no reasoned arguments at stake in its repression. There are only tactics: banal tactics, posing as reasoned arguments, that protect, as they disavow, the invested interests and wide-sweeping politics that enable our murderous present in which thousands of people in Gaza have been displaced and killed. Therefore, the following reflections are not counterarguments; rather, I seek to elucidate some of the contours of the concrete mechanisms of disavowal that can, at times, seem to present arguments but, in fact, are not engaged in argumentation at all. The university represses any space for real argument about its functioning as it offers retrofitting and disorienting pseudoarguments to explain away its violent repression.
One night I rushed back to my department building, where students had been using the bathroom. When I arrived, these students were being detained and intimidated by eight UCPD policemen. “You can’t be in here,”the police said. “But I’m a student here, I’m in this building all the time,” one replied. The police then asked us if we’d seen the sign on the door.There was never a sign indicating building hours or prohibitions. Nonetheless, the students were issued trespass warnings, and I was reported for using my access card to let students into the building. Later, administrators used the police report to initiate disciplinary proceedings. I attended one of these proceedings, and I offered what I considered reasoned arguments about my concern for the application of the policy to students solely for using university bathrooms. None of my arguments made the slightest difference. Administrators assured me, however, that this disciplinary matter had nothing to do with anything beyond the specific incident at hand. It was strictly a matter of policy.
It is not only a matter of compliance, we were told, but a matter of student safety. Yet that same evening, for example, a visibly intoxicated student harassed several individuals of the Popular University for Gaza, shouting hateful things and walking over tents while people were sleeping. The UCPD did confront that student, but they neither detained them nor wrote a report about it. Then there was the violent UCPD raid of the Popular University for Gaza encampment with no regard at all for student safety. Days after this raid, I witnessed UCPD detaining a student wearing kuffiyeh for chalking the sidewalk. Was this a thinly veiled attempt by UCPD to collaborate with administration for possible future disciplinary complaints?
This Borgesian maze of administrative policies is not unreasonable or absurd, we are expected to assume as we encounter the multifarious practices of the institution. Yet through experiencing these tactics over time, we glean the ways in which the university disavows its fundamentally anti-Palestinian stance. This is perhaps especially evident at UChicago, an institution where the line between administration and police is constantly blurred. We see it in the ways that UCPD and administrators collaborate to intimidate, gather information, and build disciplinary cases. The ambiguity created through this relationship facilitates the repression of voices in support of Palestinian liberation because the university administration can threaten disciplinary policies by pointing to reports filed by UCPD in ways that involve no arguments at all. The case of the 9 November sit-in also demonstrates this link; police arrested students at the authorization of the dean of students, and then used the list of arrestees they obtained as the basis for disciplinary proceedings.
The “Deans-on-Call” are another example of this blurred relationship. They describe themselves as a “collaborative effort” with UCPD and share the same phone number. Though Deans-on-Call are tasked to facilitate protest at a university famed for free speech, in practice, they arbitrate what constitutes legitimate protest by threatening students with noncompliance. They act simultaneously as policy interpreters and enforcers, and failure to comply with their “authority to direct” is itself grounds for disciplinary action. When protestors disagree, the subsequent engagement by the university to repress or intimidate students need only refer to violation of the policy and never to the substance of what the students are arguing. The UCPD and the Deans-on-Call, in this specific sense, become indistinguishable in practice. And this ambiguity facilitates a profound, prolonged, and ensnaring space of nonargument, of a deferral of any space to make arguments about protest for Palestine.
Through ordinary encounters with administration and police, then, a different kind of contradiction becomes clear: not one between purported political neutrality and its violation, but in the purported temporality of the university administration’s responses. The administration is not actually listening to and engaging with student protests about its complicity in the genocide in Gaza and therein is not responding to the powerful arguments and critiques community members raise through protest. Any official email or statement of policy announced by President Paul Alivisatos or Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen is, in practice, predetermined; when administrative arguments or explanations are offered, they serve as retroactive and supplemental justifications for gears already in motion on the ground.
In one of the Alivisatos’s announcements, for example, he says that the university will intervene when there is a “substantial disruption of the functioning or safety of the University. These are our principles.” He cites a Palestinian flag installation approved by the university as an example of how the administration doesn’t discriminate against “this viewpoint” but only enforces policy violations. He fails to mention, of course, that an administration-approved kite installation honoring Refaat Alareer was immediately removed by the university before they realized that they had violated their own policy—student artwork honoring Palestinian poets thrown into a dumpster in the anxious momentum of repressive practices that regularly function on the ground.
Epitomizing the retrofitting temporality of the nonargument of university tactics were leaflets that suddenly appeared hours after UCPD terrorized sleeping students with no warning—long after all people were cleared from the encampment and their tents demolished. “This is your final warning to leave the encampment,” they read. Later that morning, the president’s email reiterated the retroactive fabrication: “The protesters were given an opportunity to disassemble their structures and depart.” Such statements explaining away the enforcement of the policy seem reasonable but are purely tactical. The temporal unfolding of these encounters reveals pseudoarguments and tactical reason that only ever explain away the violence of such tactics.
It therefore cannot be overemphasized that when the university works to ensure the essential functioning of the university, what that essential function might be, and what might constitute a substantial disruption to it, are simply not up for debate through reasoned argument. There is a profound tactical tautology: the university functions to protect its own functioning, and this in turn is largely at the hands of powerful donors and trustees. What we experience as students engaged in principled protest are only accumulations of variously scrappy or smooth tactics that act in a violent anxiety when the grounds of the university’s functioning actually come into question.
These tactics are not just retrofitting, deferring, and looping; they are profoundly anti-historical. They disavow the foundational violences that UChicago continually enacts in the world, from its ongoing violent displacement of Black residents in the South Side to its material investments in the weapons manufacturing industry that supports, and profits from, the genocide of Palestinians. It is no coincidence that the same university with one of the largest private police forces at hand, and that Amnesty International has scored the absolute lowest for ethics and transparency in its investments, also espouses famous free-speech principles adopted by many other universities. These violent histories, and their perpetuation in the form of investments and property grabs protected by police force and administrative obscurity, are the essential functioning of the university.
So, it becomes abundantly clear that the university offers not arguments but tactics. And this might raise questions as to how we ought to respond to, or refuse to respond to, the administrative-and-police mechanisms of the hedge-fund university. How, then, should we deal with this violently nonargumentative and obfuscatory murk so that we do not facilitate the facade that it makes arguments and therein the atrocities that this procedurally enables? This is no doubt a question that we must continue to confront as we, members of the university who seek to end the genocide in Gaza, are all deeply implicated in these administrative tactics in our lives. It seems urgent that, whichever paths we may follow, we continue to move against the ensnaring pull of these mechanisms that expect us to participate in the antiargumentative disavowals of the university by responding to tactics as if they are arguments. The UChicago Popular University for Gaza was one such space of deep recognition and a place to open imaginative possibilities of what a university that is actually able to respond to urgent arguments about its genocidal foundations could be.
Kim Kolor is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.
On 23 May, members of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza organized a graduation ceremony for students, faculty, staff, family, and community members. After the event, we all gathered over a shared meal to celebrate everything that these students had built and all that they would be. It was a profoundly moving evening that honored the abundance, joy, and resilience of this unstoppable movement for Palestinian liberation.
The following day, a handful of graduating students who had been vocal members of the UChicago Popular University received an ominous email from the Associate Dean of Students indicating that the university was investigating numerous reports of “disruptive conduct” during the encampment in which these students had been “identified” for their involvement. Sidestepping faculty governance protocols and standard procedures, administrators weaponized the Disciplinary System for Disruptive Conduct and informed students that their degrees would not be conferred until the charges were resolved.
In less than twenty-four hours, we were faced with the stark contrast between a punitive university culture of policing dissent and a popular university built on communities of care and a commitment to the freedom of all.
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The UChicago Popular University for Gaza was established on the morning of 29 April by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) as part of a wave of Palestine Solidarity Encampments forming on university campuses to protest the devastation in Gaza that is part of the ongoing Nakba. The students’ demand to “divest, disclose, repair” calls out the financial, military, and ideological support of Israel’s targeted destruction of Palestinian lives, lands, and infrastructure by both the US government and our own universities. The encampment was raided and dismantled by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) at 4:25 a.m. on Monday 7 May using terrorizing tactics that expose the colonial origins of the UChicago police.
Prior to the encampment, the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) coalition staged a peaceful action on 9 November consisting of a sit-in of Rosenwald Hall during which they called for: a public meeting with university administration and President Paul Alivisatos, transparency in university investments, and full divestment from weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli military. The university responded by locking down Rosenwald and adjacent buildings, barring NLG legal observers and press, in addition to authorizing the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) to arrest all participating students and faculty observers who remained in the building. UCPD ultimately arrested twenty-six students and two faculty members on grounds of “criminal trespass to real property,” which is typically a Class B misdemeanor in the state of Illinois, that can carry a punishment of up to six months in jail and a 1,500 dollar fine. Despite significant pressure from the university community, the administration refused to humor any of the students’ demands or drop the charges, which the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office independently declined to pursue. Nearly seven months later, arrested students are only just learning the results of specious disciplinary hearings that they underwent in response to an internal complaint by university administrators for alleged violation of Statute 21 on “disruptive conduct.”
The University of Chicago’s continued silence on the destruction of Palestinian higher education was a major sticking point during the failed negotiations with UCUP representatives. This epistemic violence only grew as university administrators abruptly ended negotiations after a session on 5 May, that I attended, during which student organizers pressed them for greater clarity and accountability measures. By virtue of rhetorical gymnastics, the document outlining proposed university commitments offered in exchange for ending the student encampment managed to avoid mentioning the words Palestine or Palestinian even once. The student demands demonstrated not only principled moral clarity but also a highly knowledgeable understanding of the political intricacies of the current war in Gaza, as well as the internal contradictions of UChicago’s policies on free speech and political neutrality. In so doing, they tapped into the one of the fundamental questions at the heart of the current divestment movement—whether in the context of weapons manufacturing, genocide, or fossil fuels—namely, how can investment be politically neutral but divestment be politically charged? Put otherwise, Is the premise of “profit at all costs” itself not deeply political?
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Students have actively challenged this growing cognitive dissonance between, on the one hand, the unfiltered images of death and detritus emerging from the brave Gazan journalists fearlessly bearing witness to their own existential and material displacement and, on the other, US institutional whitewashing of this unfolding genocide. From daily rallies, vigils, art builds, fundraising, and sit-ins to the recent encampment, they have built a space for collective mourning and mobilization at a moment when Palestinians are being represented as nonhuman in life and ungrievable in death.
UChicago’s Popular University forGaza was comprised of hundreds of tents on the quad that included sleeping quarters, a welcome tent, food tent, medical tent, media tent, and public library named after the Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer—killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza on 6 December—among numerous other resources and events that centered intersectional solidarity, collective organizing, and mutual aid. Daily programming included a diverse range of student, community, and faculty-led teach-ins—on Palestine, Israeli settlers, and Jewish anti-Zionism; on the history of protest movements from the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square to the 1968 student protests, and Occupy movement—as well as workshops, interfaith services, and cultural events.
The encampment invoked powerful sites of revolutionary action staged across the Middle East and North Africa in recent memory—from the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square to the Hirak or 17 October Revolution in Beirut in 2019. Student encampment tents also honored the resilient itineracy of the Palestinian people—with nearly 1.5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps prior to 7 October and roughly half of Palestinians, over seven million people, comprising one of the largest diasporic communities in the world.
The recent fixation on the “disruptive” nature of student protests and encampments fails to account for the fact that war and genocide are profoundly disruptive. By critically engaging with the disturbing realities of our present moment, students and their allies have been moved to change business as usual—as threating as that might seem to the political old guard or the ivory towers of the academy. Our student-led movements and encampments have ignited a revolutionary imaginary that rejects the normalization of the unfolding horrors in Gaza as well as the weaponization of free speech and institutional neutrality policies. This politics of refusal, embodied by the popular protest chant “shut it down” speaks to a growing public awareness about the multiple ways in which Palestinian oppression intersects with broader struggles for social justice—both on and off campus.
As an anti-colonial project, the scholarly, existential, and social movement for Palestinian sovereignty exceeds false binaries of philosophy and praxis as well as the personal and the political. In the words of Sherene Seikaly, “Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present.” It implicates the necropolitics of settler colonialism and genocide, the cryptopolitics of war, extractive economies of capital, the carceral state, workers movements and labor rights, as well as the biopolitical forces that seek to discipline unruly bodies. There is no unseeing these difficult truths nor how profoundly they reverberate on our campuses. As some of my colleagues have recently pointed out, the students are merely reflecting back to us precisely how undemocratic the university really is.
Inspired by our student organizers, a UChicago Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter was formalized on 4 December, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, advocating for Palestinian liberation, and supporting students and others protesting for Palestinian rights. Our chapter of nearly two hundred faculty and staff serves as “a political base from which to fight for the liberation of the Palestinian people as well as for broader, intersecting matters of justice,” which we understand as “aligned with anti-colonial movements and struggles in many parts of the world. These include movements for indigenous land rights, Black liberation, gender and sexual freedom, disability justice, and a liveable and sustainable planet”. Our principles of unity follow urgent calls from Palestinian civil society to join the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli institutions for their material and ideological support of the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine.
By restructuring what education can be, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza bravely charted a path towards another horizon of possibility. Experiencing this student-led movement has renewed my sense of the radical power of imagining the world otherwise. It has also shown that the seemingly impossible—whether an abolitionist university or a liberated Palestine—is a highly moveable target. As Palestinian scholar Samera Esmeir so eloquently urges us:
Hoda El Shakry is a member of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza and Faculty for Justice in Palestine. An assistant professor of comparative literature, she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Her first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (2020) was awarded the 2020 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Her current research explores Arab print cultures, anti-colonial theory, speculative fiction, and Palestinian world-building.
In the Moment 