Last week, at a teach-in about the history of Palestine at the University of Chicago, an exhausted Professor Eman Abdelhadi told a crowd of faculty members and students, “I don’t know what there is left to say.”
For a year, Abdelhadi has spoken out against Israel’s attacks on Gaza that have killed more than 41,000 of her fellow Palestinians. She is tired and grieving but continues to organize protests. That activism has become even more fraught as the University of Chicago begins its new school year. Abdelhadi’s university, like many others across the country, has placed new restrictions on where, when and how she and other students and faculty can exercise free speech on campus.
University officials across campuses say the changes are meant to protect students and prevent disruption to campus operations and teaching. A UChicago dean said in an email to students the policies will “foster a diversity of voices across our student body.” But many students, faculty members and civil liberties advocates say the new demonstration rules are intended to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.
“There is this sort of, ‘You can have free speech as long as you run it by us in exactly this way,’” Abdelhadi said. “And it’s absurd, because that’s not how speech works, and that’s not how freedom works.”
The crackdowns come after Palestinian students and their allies set up encampments on campuses last spring that drew criticism from pro-Israel groups and conservative members of Congress — but also raised the public’s awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“After every wave of movement, we see a wave of reaction,” said Abdelhadi. “We see a wave of repression. I think this is, though, hitting new levels.”
New rules at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Chicago include bans on overnight encampments and restrictions on when students can use amplified sound. Loyola University is restricting demonstrations to a designated “free speech zone” that students say is on a less visible part of campus.
“A lot of these students are also Palestinian, so when these schools are putting more policies in place to silence these students, it’s also silencing many of their identities,” said Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow with Palestine Legal, adding that public universities like UIC are opening themselves up to lawsuits because they are legally bound by the first amendment.
‘Conduct that intimidates, discriminates or harasses’
Just this week, local universities used the new policies to shut down Oct. 7 demonstrations marking a year of violence in Gaza.
At DePaul University, officials called the police on students gathered to read the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. A spokesperson said the students had not reserved the space. At Northwestern University, students who attended a walkout to honor Palestinian resilience and resistance were hit with disciplinary warnings for violating a new ban on amplified sound before 5 p.m.
“Censoring someone because they’re using a microphone seems extremely arbitrary,” said Jacqueline Stevens, president of Northwestern’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “I have a colleague who was in an adjacent building and didn’t hear anything … during the demonstration, so clearly it wasn’t disrupting any teaching.”
Stevens believes the new rules are meant not to protect the free exchange of ideas, as Northwestern officials have claimed, but to protect the university’s financial interests.
“There’s a group at Northwestern of powerful donors who strongly support Israel,” Stevens said. “Some of them have a military contract that is directly implicated in the support of Israel on the part of the United States. These people have been accustomed to a lot of deference to their preferences in U.S. foreign policy, and that is now being questioned.”
Pro-Palestinian students at Northwestern and UChicago have criticized their universities for accepting donations from the Crown family, which Forbes reports holds a 10% share in General Dynamics, a weapons manufacturer that has been supplying Israel’s military.
Northwestern President Michael Schill declined an interview request for this story.
“The changes to our policies ensure that there can be dialogue, respectful disagreements and robust exchanges of ideas that are free from conduct that intimidates, discriminates or harasses,” said Jon Yates, a university spokesperson. “That type of conduct by its very nature impedes the learning environment.”
Maggie Slavin, operations manager for the Council on American Islamic Relations, said the new protest rules draw on a longstanding practice that scholars call “The Palestine Exception”: People, in effect, are free to exercise their first amendment rights, unless they are speaking in support of Palestinian human rights.
“The American public has such a dehumanizing image of Muslims and particularly of Palestinians,” Slavin said.
That is starting to change, she said, in large part because of the students and professors putting their education and jobs on the line to protest and draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Shutting down this speech is not a sustainable strategy for universities, said Abdelhadi, the UChicago professor.
“Unless you want to have a university that’s a quad and some donors, what’s your plan?” she said. “It’s not going away. The cat’s not going back in the bag. Israel’s image is not going to suddenly be reconstructed. There’s an entire generation that now sees this as a problem.”