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.
I want to begin these reflections with an episode I experienced as part of the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) negotiating team. Sitting across the table from President Paul Alivisatos, our team was asked what the university administration could do to build trust with student protestors and move toward a negotiated ending of the quad encampment. As a step in this direction, we proposed that Alivisatos issue a university statement opposing Israel’s campaign of scholasticide in Gaza – that is, its systematic destruction of Gazan universities and targeted assassination of Gazan academics. Given the university’s professed commitment to defending free expression “throughout the world” and to “supporting the global academic community in times of great need,” we thought this a fairly uncontroversial proposal. There could scarcely be a greater threat to free expression and academic freedom, after all, than the wholesale destruction of a people’s higher education system.
Alivisatos disagreed. Not only, in fact, did he dismiss the idea of making a public statement about Israel’s scholasticide; he refused to concede as a factual matter that Gazan universities had been bombed at all. The problem was not that Alivisatos disbelieved or did not know that such bombings had occurred. (When offered videographic proof, he dismissed it as irrelevant.) Rather, the problem was Alivisatos’s insistence that for him to acknowledge the mere existence of these bombings – even privately, even with evidence, even off the record – would be to take a “political position” and thereby compromise the university’s policy of “institutional neutrality.” After all, Alivisatos explained, there are “people who would disagree” with the facts in question.
At one level, Alivisatos’s position is self-evidently absurd. While the University’s Kalven Report does urge administrators to refrain from “expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day,” it nowhere prevents them from acknowledging basic factsabout the world. (There are “people who would disagree” with the reality of anthropogenic climate change, for example, but that does not prevent the university from recognizing it.) In certain “extraordinary instances,” moreover, the Kalven Report not only permits but explicitly urges the university to oppose sociopolitical measures that threaten its “values of free inquiry.” This has been the operative logic behind statements the university has readily issued about the invasion of Ukraine, affirmative action, Trump’s immigration policies, and a range of other politically charged issues. Consistency would demand that the same logic be applied to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza.
Compelling as it may be to highlight the university’s double standards, however, there is something potentially short-sighted about this approach. For while it is true in the abstract thatfacts about Palestine are no more “political” than, say, facts about Ukraine, it is crucial to stress that the University does not exist in the abstract. The “supposedly hermetic world of higher education,” as Steven Salaita reminds us, is “in fact symbiotic with the real world.” Situated among existing concentrations of corporate and political power and predominantly governed by ruling-class trustees, corporate universities process and reproduce the same “prejudices,” “market conditions,” and “geopolitical common sense” at play in other US industries. This context is crucial for understanding what forms of speech these universities do and do not treat as political. For the University of Chicago, as for those in power generally, speech is most political when it threatens to disrupt existing power structures and ideological truisms, least political when it reinforces them. Expressions of sympathy for Ukrainians suffering a “devastating humanitarian crisis” as a result of Russia’s “ongoing invasion,” for example, threaten neither the material interests nor the geopolitical ambitions of the US ruling class. The university therefore classifies such statements not as political speech but as displays of student care and basic human decency. Nor does the university consider hosting the Obama Presidential Center to be a political act – a position that many Libyans, Yemenis, and others would no doubt find bizarre and infuriating. Glorifying the Obama presidency is, at this point in time, a politically safe act, one wholly unthreatening to the status quo. It is therefore – from the university’s perspective – not a political act at all.
Speech about Palestine, however, is a different story. If there is one thing Palestine is not, it is “politically safe.” Indeed, merely mentioning Palestine by name is enough to ruffle certain ruling class feathers – which is presumably why Alivisatos has refused to do so publicly. This situation has little to do with the Palestinians themselves and everything to do with the central place Israel occupies in the ecosystem of US power. There is nothing mysterious or particularly surprising about the fact that it occupies this position. Since the 1970s, Israel has functioned as a strategic outpost for both domestic and imperial US interests, ranging from weapons manufacturing to energy production to the maintenance of regional US hegemony. This being the case, Israel’s centrality to US interests owes neither to lobbyists nor primarily to a deep ideological commitment to Zionism on the part of US elites but to the fact that Israel has been effectively annexed into the corporate and political power structure upon which the ruling class (and the university) depends. To voice support for Palestinian liberation – or even to acknowledge basic facts about Palestinians’ oppression at Israel’s hands – is therefore to threaten not only Israeli colonialism but also the US status quo in which both Israel and the University participate.
It is against this backdrop, I would like to suggest, that we can best understand the hostility with which the University of Chicago and other US universities have responded to the ongoing student intifada in support of Gaza. The fundamental problem is not that these universities operate with double standards, refusing to support Palestinians while being happy to support Ukrainians. More fundamentally, the problem is that US universities operate all too consistently by a single standard: fidelity to the status quo dictated by US power, no matter what form it takes.
For the past 230 days, this status quo has taken the form of genocide in Gaza.[1] Contrary to public perceptions, the US has not merely been complicit in this genocide but has actively presided over it. Since the start of Israel’s onslaught, the US government has sent it more than a hundred distinct arms shipments, gifted it more than eighteen billion dollars in unconditional military aid, bombed multiple countries in its support, slashed funding for UNRWA, and vetoed no less than four UN Security Council resolutions demanding humanitarian pauses and ceasefires. Israeli officials, for their part, have candidly admitted that their Gaza onslaught could not continue without US support. What we are witnessing, then, is not simply an Israeli genocide, but a US-Israeli genocide. Whether most of us realize it or not, the blood of Gaza’s children is on the hands of US citizens and institutions no less than it is on the hands of Israeli society.
In such a situation – what Hannah Arendt called the “intrusion of criminality into the public realm” – there can be no neutral option: “whoever participates in public life at all, regardless of party membership or membership in the elite formations of the regime, is implicated in one way or another in the deeds of the regime as a whole.” It is this basic truth that student protestors have been insisting upon for months, despite their administrators’ cynical attempts to evade it. In calling for divestment from Israel’s genocide, they have in effect been calling on their administrators to cease operating as cogs in the machinery of US power and instead to act, finally and for once, as moral and institutional stops to it. Hiding behind the rhetoric of “institutional neutrality” will not deliver administrators from the burden of this decision. On the contrary, as Jasbir Puar points out, it will only deepen their culpability: “It is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations toward others, that one is outside them, that violence can be perpetuated.”[2]
Even now, 230 days into this genocide, a clear call is emanating from the Gaza ghetto: never again. There can be no neutral option in the face of this call – least of all on the part of academic institutions already invested in Israel’s arms suppliers and implicated in Gaza’s suffering. For administrators like Alivisatos to justify their ongoing silence and inaction in the name of “institutional neutrality” is merely to confess their abiding allegiance to the status quo, that is, to US-Israeli genocide. This in itself is a political decision, albeit an ugly and cowardly one. Ultimately, the question facing Alivisatos and administrators around the country is not whether they will act politically in response to Gaza’s call, but how they will do so: as functionaries of ruling-class power or as principled human beings. Granted, the latter choice may involve a degree of personal sacrifice and career risk – but has that stopped students from making it?
[1] Within this timeframe, Israel has killed or wounded more than 116,300 Palestinians, destroyed over 70 percent of Gaza’s homes, targeted hundreds of humanitarian sites and aid convoys, displaced more than 85 percent of Gaza’s population, and driven 1.1 million civilians to the brink of famine.
Christopher Iacovetti is a PhD student in religion and literature at the University of Chicago, where he organizes with Students for Justice in Palestine. The views expressed here are his own.
In the wake of the razing of the encampment on our quad, many of us are asking ourselves about our relationship to the University of Chicago and the university’s relationship to the wider world. The encampment and what it stood for was not a phenomenon unique to our campus, and thus these questions might mirror those asked by other university communities.
Given that the university is a place where truth and knowledge are pursued and scientific inquiry is central to these pursuits, there is a need for risk-taking within the institution. After all, can one create and test hypotheses or address complex questions about meaning if one is unable to risk failure in the pursuit of a breakthrough? The university must prioritize conditions that foster risk-taking. Here is where I enter the discussion. As a professor of social work, it is my job to teach students about the power and purpose of protest and to demonstrate what it means to enact the values of social work, which include a commitment to equity and countering oppression in all its forms. My pedagogy is centrally focused on creating conditions that permit students to take intellectual risks and face serious discomfort as they are unsettled in their pursuit of truth and knowledge. I want students to feel respected, valued, and assured that when they take a risk in their academic exploration they will be supported. To describe these conditions, I use a word that the university abhors; safety. I understand my role within the university to be that of a professor who creates safety and encourages risk-taking. I support our students’ right to protest, and I believe it is our job to ensure they are safe to engage in this form of free expression.
From this grounding, I am trying to understand the university’s role in creating conditions of safety, for whom does it do so, and at whose expense?
The University falsely denies its status as a political actor and claims that silence is neutral. The administration, citing the Kalven Report and the Chicago Principles, did not issue a public statement after the attacks by Hamas in Israel on 7 October. Nor did the university make any public statement in November, condemning Israel for threats of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, despite the UN’s call to the international community to do so. And the university has remained silent in the face of evidence that the grounds for determining genocide have been met. Finally, the administration refuses to acknowledge the fact of “scholasticide” in Gaza. I disagree with the university’s assertion that silence in the face of genocide is a neutral stance.
It is in this context that the UChicago Popular University for Gaza was created as part of our students’ ongoing campaign to hold UChicago accountable as a political entity. The student protest amplifies the reality of genocide in Gaza and demands that UChicago “Disclose, Divest, and Repair.” Meanwhile, students created a community of care, creativity, and commitment within their protest movement. Here I offer a brief ethnographic description of select events at the encampment that have led me to insights about the university’s role in creating conditions of safety, for whom does it do so, and at what expense.
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They came marching toward the encampment flying American and Israeli flags, chanting “USA!” White Nationalists and Zionists, an unlikely brotherhood. My Faculty for Justice in Palestine colleagues and I have been meeting since November to plan and enact support for our students who stand in solidarity with Gaza. Our goal has been to send the message that students do not face this university alone. On that day our plan was face the White Nationalists directly so that students could maintain their calls for justice without drawing in police action. Our role was to help avoid physical conflict. As the protesters and counterprotesters met face to face with only the faculty between them the student protest line pushed ahead. When a student was knocked to the ground, we faculty stepped forward to de-escalate the now heated confrontation. Whereas the members of the Popular University for Gaza had spent a week developing community, teaching and learning, eating together and making art, the counterprotesters were made up of a rapidly deployed coalition with little cohesion. They were disorganized, chaotic, and unpredictable. It was clear that the situation was likely to combust, and so, with arms locked, the protest retreated as one removing ourselves from the center of the quad. “Disclose, Divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” the protesters chanted. The line receded to the camp. The Chicago Police and University of Chicago Police (UCPD) stepped into the now empty central quad.
The University did not have a role in creating safety in this altercation. In fact, the violence that could have erupted had dissipated by the time UCPD arrived. It was student protesters and FJP allies who de-escalated this interaction. Students in the encampment had been clear all along with their “No Cop Zone” signs; the encampment did not want a police presence. “We keep us safe,” they kept repeating.
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On Sunday the administration said they were done talking: negotiations were suspended. What the students are asking for is outside the bounds, they argued. What they want is not possible, they said. Who decides what is possible? we are left to wonder.
The university said they would come, and we were ready. Members of our faculty coalition went to the camp to wait. We were there to get arrested with our students if that is what we needed to do to defend their right to protest. But no raid came. Exhausted and exhilarated, they all tried to sleep.
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Monday: at midnight the camp will be cleared, we heard. FJP came out in numbers for a second night in a row. Midnight came and went—no raid. 3 a.m. came and went. The students sang and it was festive. The encampment had survived another night. I talked to a UCPD officer on shift. “We are tired,” he said. “Sixteen-hour shift,” he said. “When are they going to sleep so we can have some quiet?” he said. “I know,” I said. “You must be tired,” I said. “I hope we can all go home and sleep in the morning,” I said. My faculty colleagues went home to sleep. The students crawled into the tents. It was quiet. It was peaceful. I walked around the quad. There was a breeze, but it was not cold. It was dark. It was calm. I talked with the student marshal. We stood in the quad, and we wondered aloud about the day.
It was then that the lights swept onto the pavement at the end of the quad. “What is that?” I asked.
“Maintenance crew,” the marshal said as he glanced over his shoulder. And then UCPD were everywhere, yelling. The lights flooded over us. The shouting, the floodlights in my eyes, students running and trying to get out of the way of the boots stomping on their tents and get out from the nylon material as the tents they had been asleep in were ripped out from under them, the stakes coming out of the ground. Students tried to avoid the metal folding chairs that UCPD picked up and threw. As officers ripped the wooden pallets off the barricade that had been meant to protect the camp, and threw them violently across the pavement, the students stepped back. Why was no one hurt? Because students kept enough distance. UCPD did not keep us safe.
It was a violent, brutal, surprise attack that was meant to scare us and destroy the space students had created. The administration quickly took credit for the “safe” destruction of the camp. They deserve none. I phoned and texted my colleagues, asking them to join my efforts to de-escalate, but they could not get to us, they were not allowed onto the quad and we were barricaded in. No one was arrested, Paul Alivisatos has said. UCPD shouted over the megaphone, “you will be arrested.”
It was orderly, there was plenty of time, he has said. It was chaotic and loud, and terrifying. There was no time.
We were bullied. We were terrorized by UCPD in riot gear. That is, black helmets with face shields, black batons and body shields, men screaming at us and threatening us with arrest. They used the fear of harm to make us move. They had guns on their belts, zip ties in hand. This is what the University of Chicago did to our students, to the free expression of ideas they do not like, in a format they find unacceptable. The university values free expression. But only in the forum. Only on their terms.
Even as I take seriously my role in creating a context of safety for the purpose of intellectual risk-taking (and sometimes protest), it is clear to me that the university does not share my commitment. When faced with student protest and demands that UChicago end political engagements related to the genocide of Palestinians, the administration deploys UCPD, upending safety.
Some of us were surprised that the university would call its private police force on students, staff, and faculty—after all, aren’t we the ones UCPD is there to protect? Then we must ask, protect from whom? The presumption that our campus needs police protection is racist and elitist and comes at the expense of the safety of our community neighbors. What we need is for our university to create a context of intellectual safety for the purpose of risk-taking in pursuit of knowledge, acknowledge its role as a political actor and divest from genocidal institutions, be good neighbors in the wider Southside community, and disband UCPD.
Jessica H. Darrow is an associate instructional professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago
In the days leading to the shutting down of the encampment, in discussions and debates among faculty, some colleagues expressed the view that the encampment should be shut down, offering the familiar narrative of disruption. They argued that the encampment made it difficult to work, teach, and learn on campus. Among the many things said in that debate, one stood out to me. The view was expressed (I’m paraphrasing, somewhat, as the comments were not made in a public forum) that the encampment made it insufferable for those of us with family in Israel and those who love Israel with its complexities and flaws.
In a discourse that, for various problematic reasons, has been largely framed around Jews, this angle was different. It did not mobilize Jewishness, an abstract category of personal and collective identity, but rather a concrete category of real, living human relationality, of care. People who have people they care about in Israel, this view implied, find the encampment particularly insufferable. As I am a person who has people I care about in Israel, this implication overwhelmed my aversion to public discourse, and I felt compelled to respond to it. This is an expanded version of the response I shared with my colleagues.
I am Israeli. I grew up there and lived there until my mid-twenties. I “served”—that is, was forcefully conscripted—into the Israeli military when I was eighteen. My entire family lives there as do some of my life-long friends, academic mentors, and intellectual interlocutors. There are many things about that place—not the state but the place and the people living in it—that I love very dearly and miss very intensely (Who can love a state? What does that even mean?).
It is as an Israeli who cares deeply about that place, and not so much as a Jew, that I had found the encampment, and the activism that preceded it, a much-needed source of solace in the aftermath of the awful October 7th attacks. With all the unbearable noise that surrounds this unbearable war, from Hamas-supporting hipsters on Instagram to Israel-supporting antisemites, it was on campus and at the encampment that I could come together with other people in the UChicago community whose lives are deeply and painfully intertwined with this violence, who have people they care about and things that they love and miss intensely that are destroyed by it, and who urgently, achingly want and need it to stop.
When the public discourse in the US and in Israel is framed around “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli”, it is important to remember the fallacy of the presupposition of this framing. Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinians living, for generations, under brutal Israeli military occupation and apartheid, are all in this together. It is us and our families who have been meeting and inflicting violent death, in indiscriminate massive bombing, terrorist raids by Messianic settlers and Islamist militants, suicide bombings, rocket fire, gruesome lynching, kidnapping, and now also starvation and disease, all consequences of the ethnonationalism, religious zealotry, racism, greed, and corrupt governance that both fuel and grow out of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And it is us who desperately need and want to talk to each other, mourn together, worry together, and insist that we can, must, and want to live together differently. That is what the UChicago encampment has been about for some of us Israelis.
There is nothing about being Israeli, being a person who has people they care about living there, that entails finding an encampment protesting the occupation and the barbaric war on Gaza “insufferable.” It is the burning of families in their homes and the burying of thousands of children under rubble, not anti-Israeli demonstrations, that are insufferable for many of us. Israelis, Jews and Palestinians, have been insisting for decades on protesting together the myriad forms of collective punishment, the criminal reign of terror by contemptuous, Jewish-supremacist settlers, the land theft, the constant attacks on all forms of civil society, the dehumanization and total disregard for human dignity and life that are the reality of occupation and which breed these outbursts of atrocious, illegitimate violence.
“Loving Israel” is not and has never been the monopoly of Zionists and nationalists. In the sense of having a real, and hence nuanced, complicated, ambivalent relation to the space between the river and the sea with its variety of inhabitants, in the sense of caring about them, about their rich, painful personal histories and the cultures they have created, loving Israel is simply our lot, the natural state of being of those of us who happen to live there or to be in exile from there, some by privileged choice, like me, others because of the total devastation of Palestinian society in the 1948 Nakba.
There are Israeli Palestinians, Israeli Jews, and Palestinians living under military occupation who have been fighting for decades together to create spaces where the kinds of association that were possible at the encampment would be possible in Palestine/Israel and to try to create an alternative to the racist, violent, and increasingly fascist state that Israel has become. One of the suffocating ironies of indiscriminate violence is that a disproportionate number of those brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7th were activists of the already vulnerable Israeli peace camp.
I was not an organizer or even a particularly active participant of the encampment. I tried to have my lunches there during the week, I went to some of the teach-ins and rallies, sent photos of the Yiddish signs to my family in Israel who, like everyone, are fed radically distorted narratives about what is going on at American campuses. Mostly I talked to colleagues and students who, like me, wanted a space where Arabs and Jews can find solidarity—not just human empathy but a political solidarity for which human empathy is the basis. Was I always comfortable in that space? Of course not. The encampment was big, it had all sorts of people and voices, all sorts of slogans. Some I found silly, some I found callous, shaped by abstract, broad frameworks that too easily romanticize or gloss over illegitimate forms of violence, rather than by the nuances that make up the lived realities of people who have been, unequally, living together and killing each other for more than a century, carrying different collective and personal traumas of racial violence, displacement, the destruction of families and entire communities. I didn’t like or agree with every single slogan I saw and heard, but that’s fine, such are slogans and such is the public sphere.
These kinds of spaces are hard won in Israel, a state which never liked them and has for a long time been doing whatever it can to deter and prevent their creation. These are not spaces where we say, “people are people, can’t we all just get along”. That is not what a state like Israel, or a school like the University of Chicago, cares to shut down. These are spaces for protest, for rejection of the status quo, for imagining institutions and pushing ideologies that prioritize people over institutions and ideologies. They are spaces for asking, to quote my Palestinian Israeli colleague Khaled Furani: “Is it our lives – the lives of its citizens – that matter to the state, or its own?” I came to the encampment for the people who, like me and like him, know that the answer must be, but isn’t, “our lives.” Shutting down (or rather, trampling and trashing) the encampment was also shutting down one more space for us.
Rima Jawabra Khatib and Guy Elhanan hosting the 2024 joint memorial day ceremony, organized by Combatants for Peace
Itamar Francez is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.
In the Muslim tradition, jinn (think genie) are beings made of fire who live in a parallel universe to our own. The jinn are shape shifters, who can appear to humans or retreat into their own dimension. Like us, they fall along a moral spectrum and are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Being shape shifters, they have us at a disadvantage. They can see us, but we cannot see them. The evil among them can use this advantage to wreak havoc on human lives, and so the Jinn are the objects of both intense curiosity and fear.
Having grown up Muslim and Arab in the American Midwest, I think I know how the jinn must feel. I was nine when I put on the hijab in my hometown in mid-Missouri, and I was about twelve when 9/11 happened. I spent my entire life explaining Islam to people. Falafel is a food, not a religious belief. No, I do not speak Islamic; the language is Arabic. I was born here, not in “Arabia.” Thank you for asking; I do not expect I will have to marry Osama when I grow up. At school, I did every school project on Palestinian history, filling PowerPoint after PowerPoint with UN Statistics and elaborate maps. Please see me, I asked of my bewildered suburban classmates.
Life had gotten better though. I live in a large city that is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. I work at an academic institution where staff, faculty and students boast a certain degree of cosmopolitanism. Still, I have kept—out of necessity—my immigrant skill of compartmentalizing my life, of only doling out bits of information about my background in manageable bites. I learned quickly which colleagues never to say the word Palestine around. I kept my life as an activist after hours and tucked away from my place of employment. I emphasized my Muslimness just enough to convey my unique access to the community I study while carefully presenting a neutral front. My workplace has long been a symbol, in my mind, of my success at managing visible invisibility.
In October that all changed. My phone screen started to fill with devastation: parents screaming over the bodies of their dead children, entire neighborhoods razed to the ground, human flesh ground into pulp. But my window screen was telling a different story—my home was warm and safe. No bombs threatened to fall from the sky. I walked around my neighborhood and my grocery store surrounded by the blissfully unaware and the strangely unperturbed. Can they see me? Between the phone and the window, which of the screens should I believe? I could not function as the polished version of myself that has been honed for polite, secular, white, upper middle-class society. I wept when asked a casual “How are you?” by the water cooler. It was becoming impossible to be a jinn in the land of the humans.
Between 29 April and 7 May, 2024, a few feet from my office, at the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, I did not have to compartmentalize. I did not have to pretend to be okay, to pretend I was not always thinking of Gaza and counting the dead. I did not have to pretend these extraordinary times were ordinary or attempt to separate Gaza from the rest of my life.
While the rest of the world has been hell bent on Palestinian erasure, the Popular University insisted on Palestinian recognition. Since October, those of us with public profiles have been fighting the war of narrative about Palestine. After every atrocity committed against Palestinians—troops of Israeli propogandists cast doubt on every dimension of the events we were witnessing with our own eyes. Recall, for example, that after Israel first bombed Al-Shifa hospital in November, killing hundreds of patients and people seeking refuge, it successfully convinced Western media to parrot the plain lie that Palestinians might have bombed themselves. Months later, Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is indisputable fact. It has been maddening to scream into the void about atrocities, to provide links and videos and images, only to be told that they were all figments of our imaginations.
Gaslighting is not a new tactic. Read the replies to any pro-Palestinian X/Twitter account on any given day, and you will find people questioning the very existence of Palestine and Palestinians. “What is Palestine?” a troll recently asked in a reply to a X/Twitter thread I posted. “There has never been any such thing.” Unfortunately, erasing Palestine has not been limited to trolls on the internet. President Biden and his administration have regularly repeated Israeli propaganda, including outright lies.
Here at UChicago, the administration has doggedly refused to acknowledge the existence of Palestinian life, much less the enormous pain and suffering Palestinians are facing. President Paul Alivisatos attended a vigil for victims of the 7 October attack held by Zionist organizations on campus, but he did not attend a single vigil or commemoration of Palestinian death, even the many events that were registered and approved by the university.
After months of claiming political neutrality, he met with the Israeli Consul general and Hillel to discuss the safety of Jewish students on campus. We reside thirty miles away from where a six-year-old Palestinian child, Wadea Al Fayoume, was stabbed to death. Three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont, another was run over in California. Visibly Muslim or Arab students have felt unsafe across the country including at UChicago. Nary a word about their safety. Anti-Zionist Jewish students have faced anti-Semitic harassment and profiling as well as repression for their activism. Nary a word about their safety.
Negotiations between UChicago administration and the Popular University fell apart, in large part, over the question of recognition. I was in the room during the final session of negotiations on Sunday, 5 May. Students continued to demand that the scholarships and programs the university was offering go to Palestinians; administrators suspended negotiations instead. In the final deal on offer, the word Palestine does not appear once.
“Existence is resistance,” is a popular refrain in the Palestine liberation movement. At the Popular University, I learned that recognition is solidarity. In sharp contrast to the administration’s stance, students had built a minisociety on the premise of recognizing Palestinian life, and the impact of that work was enormous. I teared up every time I approached the encampment. Palestinian flags were everywhere and handmade art across the quad told the stories of my people. Songs from my childhood filled the speakers. It was not just that I was surrounded by my people, it was that I was surrounded by my people openly and unapologetically being ourselves among everyone else.
Forget compartmentalization, friends, colleagues and comrades from every nook and cranny of my life found their way to the quad. One evening it took me an hour to cross from one end of the camp to another, because I kept colliding with folks I knew: colleagues from UIC and Northwestern, acquaintances from my mosque, Hyde Park neighbors unaffiliated with the university, Chicagoans from all ends of the city. Everyone was part of the camp. “We’re on your turf,” one longtime friend joked when I ran into her. “My worlds are colliding,” I retorted!
Miraculously, there was nothing for me to explain to any of them. I did not have to be the Palestinian voice in the room. There were so many of us. I did not have to have the long debates about history, terms, or definitions with the many Zionists who approached the camp. Anti-Zionist Jewish organizers took that work on. I did not have to scurry to my office to pray. A few times a day, a student would call the adhaan on the quad and Muslims would gather to pray unproblematically. Islam was neither normative nor abnormal, it just was.
I have argued elsewhere that the encampments were glimpses into a different kind of life, one organized around care rather than profit. But for me—and I suspect for many Arabs and/or Muslims there—the encampment was also a glimpse into a different kind of self. My research on Muslim life in the United States shows the complexity and toll of living the compartmentalized lives that a hostile world necessitates. In bringing our worlds together, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza gifted many of us a new experience of wholeness. It helped heal some of the wounds of the past seven months and reenergized us for the fight ahead.
Eman Abdelhadi is an assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.
Over the past month, students on college campuses around the country have launched encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza. On 29 April, a student-led encampment organized by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) went up on the quad outside Levi Hall, the University of Chicago’s central-administration building. Following failed negotiations over demands for divestment, disclosure, and repair, the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) raided and cleared the encampment shortly after 4:30 a.m. on 7 May.
During the eight days the encampment was present on campus, it was a site of education, protest, debate, and community, what organizers called the Popular University for Gaza. University and community residents mingled, talked, and ate together; faculty and students held both teach-ins and regular classes amidst the tents; singers performed; kids played and made art; speeches, rallies, and religious services (both Jewish and Muslim) were held.
The encampment resonated far beyond the UChicago campus. Student reporters at the Chicago Maroon provided live updates and in-depth coverage. And in the national media—in the NYTimes, the WSJ, and elsewhere—the encampment became for many an especially contested site for different takes on the state of the academy, not least because of UChicago’s self-promoted “Chicago Principles.”[1] Indeed, over those eight days, the administration issued several statements (to the campus community and then, on 7 May in the WSJ) that framed its response to the encampment, and eventually its decision to clear it, in terms of UChicago’s “core animating value” of free expression and its “foundational value” of institutional neutrality.[2]
The editors of Critical Inquiry deplore the use of police to clear nonviolent student protesters. We reject the administration’s stated reasons for doing so, whether in the name of campus safety or on the principle of institutional neutrality. With many of our colleagues (quoting from a 13 May open letter to President Alivisatos), we believe that “in choosing this course of action, the administration has elected to abandon its own principles of neutrality and the protection of free speech.” We also believe that the demands the students raised are vital, both to the current situation in Gaza and to broader principles and practices of a democratic university.
We have invited faculty and students from different backgrounds and levels of involvement to reflect on the encampment and its aftermath. By publishing a small cluster of posts, we hope to convey something of the particular tenor of the encampment at Chicago, as well as the particular controversies it provoked (and continues to provoke). Even as the Popular University for Gaza has been dispersed, it is important to record the complexities (affective, social, political) of this experiment in collective action and to insist on its ongoing relevance within and beyond the university.
In the Moment 