Not just one campus is punishing student protesters harshly, but also the University of Chicago.
At the University of Minnesota, seven students face up to two-and-a-half years of suspension and $5, 000 in alleged damages, months after being arrested during an October protest.
After a 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok personality was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last year, the students had renamed the campus building “Halimy Hall.”
In January, 11 students at New York University were issued one-year suspensions after they staged a nonviolent sit-in at a library last December.
Two tenured faculty members have also been designated “personae non gratae” by the university for joining the sit-in, which prevents them from using certain school buildings.
Following last year’s encampments, universities have rushed to pass stricter regulations for campus protests, including time limits on demonstrations and restrictions on the use of tents.
Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow at Palestine Legal, an advocacy group defending pro-Palestine speech, says the cumulative effect has been a silencing of the protests.
According to Falaneh, “There are so many people who claim the protests have stopped,” but I would say students are reacting to the administration’s policies.
“We’re seeing so many new policies put in place, and so many different limitations on speaking on campuses,” said one researcher.
However, the highest levels of government have been putting pressure on universities to halt campus protests.
In January, President Donald Trump, a Republican, was sworn in for a second term. Less than two weeks later, on January 29, he signed an executive order denouncing an “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence” on US campuses.
In an accompanying fact sheet, Trump pledged to take “immediate action” to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities”, including by cancelling student visas.
“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you”, Trump said, addressing the foreign students involved in the protests. I’ll also immediately revoke all Hamas sympathisers’ student visas on college campuses, which have experienced unprecedented radicalism.
In order to assist students in the confusing mess of university policies and procedures that have recently been implemented, Palestine Legal has begun to train lawyers who volunteer.
Falaneh points out that Trump’s policies have already been muted due to the high stakes and severe punishments, with few campus demonstrations erupting against his immigration crackdown or his attacks on the US educational system.
Source: Aljazeera
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