Final spring, after 93 protesters of conscience have been arrested on the College of Southern California’s campus, and college students and college have been threatened with civil and educational sanctions, USC President Carol Folt appeared to be looking for a approach out.
“What we’re actually attempting to do now’s de-escalate,” Folt instructed the USC Tutorial Senate in Could, as school pressed her on why she referred to as in a closely armed Los Angeles police drive to quell peaceable scholar protests and dismantle their encampment.
She additionally claimed she would have “gone on the market” herself earlier than the police raid. The encampment was a two-minute stroll from her workplace. Had she made the brief stroll, she might have realized firsthand concerning the nature of the encampment: a peaceable, interfaith gathering of scholars and college to bear witness to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Common encampment actions included yoga, meditation, teach-ins, Black-Palestinian solidarity classes, and common Seders throughout Passover. However our president didn’t make that stroll. “I don’t know why I didn’t,” she instructed the Tutorial Senate. “I remorse that.”
USC’s actions since then bely Folt’s phrases. Like many different universities nationwide within the period of Gaza solidarity, our directors are doubling down on repressive measures.
After the protests final spring, USC safety, generally accompanied by off-duty law enforcement officials educated in “crowd administration operations”, maintained a decent ring round campus. This fall, they’ve “welcomed” new college students with steel bars, safety checkpoints, bag checks and necessary ID scans.
The college administration has additionally raised the strain on college students and college dealing with sanctions, sending threatening letters and calling them in for disciplinary hearings. College students have been made to jot down “reflection papers” expressing their regret and an announcement of “what you’ve realized” earlier than any sanctions might be dropped.
“How did your actions have an effect on different college neighborhood members and their scheduled actions within the affected areas?” requested one redacted letter from the Orwellian-sounding USC’s Workplace of Neighborhood Expectations. “Please share the way you would possibly make totally different selections sooner or later and broaden in your rationale.”
In a typical sunny USC vogue, the draconian restrictions – “quick lanes”, “welcome service tents” and extra open gates – have been offered as conveniences. However make no mistake: our campus is on lockdown, “for the foreseeable future”, based on a campus-wide e mail. In different phrases: don’t anticipate a return to a extra open campus any time quickly – if ever. The rationale? “Safety on campus stays our high precedence.”
A lot for the olive department.
USC is hardly the one campus confronted with roiling selections on learn how to deal with protest encampments and the passions of conflicting narratives on Israel-Palestine. A number of, like San Francisco State College, have listened to their protesters and determined to divest from firms that revenue from weapons manufacturing. Others, like Wesleyan, have facilitated conversations between scholar protesters and the college’s board of trustees. Most have cracked down.
George Washington College has suspended two scholar teams, College students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Indiana College and the College of South Florida have banned tents on campus with out prior approval. The College of Pennsylvania has banned encampments. Columbia College now makes use of a colour-coded system to limit campus entry.
Some 100 US school campuses have carried out extra restrictive guidelines governing protests on campus. And the ambiance totally free expression is worse than ever, particularly at high universities, based on a latest survey by the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression. Of 251 universities surveyed, USC was 245th, with a “very poor” ranking. Even worse, incomes an “abysmal” label, have been New York College, Columbia, and, useless final, Harvard.
USC might not have “beat” Harvard in suppressing free speech, nevertheless it has surpassed all its “rivals” in turning the campus right into a fortress. Nothing may very well be extra antithetical to a school campus and its tradition of openness and inquiry.
Now, daily we stroll onto campus, we’re pressured to deal with a disturbing securitised surroundings. “Quick lanes” and “welcome tents” don’t assist. They solely improve the sense that we’re below surveillance; that each time we go to campus, it’s like we’re on the airport, below the watchful eye of the Transportation Safety Administration.
Simply as disturbing is the message USC is sending to the encircling neighborhood of South LA. “In comparison with the lengthy historical past of USC, the place we positioned pleasure in our integration with the encircling neighborhood, entry is severely constricted by the strains on the ‘welcome tents’, by the hesitation of company to come back and go to, by the seemingly arbitrary secondary safety screenings that these whom the ‘welcomers’ have profiled are then subjected to,” the USC chapter of the American Affiliation of College Professors wrote to President Folt in August.
That is to say nothing of the impact the militarised presence has on college students of color, who might already really feel marginalised in a predominantly white college. “They haven’t come to grasp why we have been there within the first place,” scholar León Prieto instructed Annenberg Media final month. “I don’t actually see USC the identical. I simply don’t really feel like I belong right here.”
Through the years, the scandals which have plagued USC – a medical college dean doing medicine in resort rooms with younger companions, certainly one of whom overdosed; a gynaecologist accused of sexual misconduct towards tons of of USC ladies; the “Varsity Blues” fraud and money-laundering debacle; the college’s opaque, bunkered response to those scandals – have typically made it onerous to be a proud Trojan.
However for me, nothing exceeds the disgrace and revulsion I really feel concerning the occasions of the final 5 months: the violent arrest of our personal college students, subsequent prices towards them for trespassing on their very own campus, harsh educational sanctions, and the apparently everlasting lockdown of our campus.
It’s onerous to flee the sensation that USC’s security-led directors – and different school presidents, for that matter – have been ready for a disaster to be able to administer their harsh tonic to our neighborhood. In her transformative e book, The Shock Doctrine, social critic Naomi Klein wrote that “as soon as a disaster has struck”, disaster brokers discover it “essential to behave swiftly, to impose fast and irreversible change”.
The transformation of USC’s campus is a microcosm of Klein’s sweeping doctrine: a sort of a laboratory for what a privatised, hardened perimeter, fortified by exterior safety companies, can appear to be.
You’ll be able to wager that different college presidents are maintaining an in depth watch on USC’s experiment, to see if this type of repression can stand.
On the centre of USC’s security-first ethos is Erroll Southers, vice chairman for security and danger assurance, a former FBI agent and president of the Los Angeles Police Fee. The Fee oversees the LAPD, the very riot-ready drive educated by Israel that stormed our peaceable scholar encampments final spring.
Southers can be the writer of the e book Homegrown Violent Extremism. In a report for USC’s Homelands Safety Heart, he warned that extremist indicators embrace sturdy identification “with Muslims perceived as being victimized (Palestinians, Iraqis…)” and harbouring “a grievance (corresponding to perceived injustice or victimization) and related anger directed at the US”.
This excellent storm exhibits how excessive the deck is stacked towards college students attempting to lift consciousness towards Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza. Merely put, our college’s safety equipment is pre-disposed to seeing them as a risk.
If that weren’t dangerous sufficient, anticipate no strain for reform from USC’s rich Board of Trustees. The board consists of developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, the billionaire host of Los Angeles-based pro-Israel galas, who backed USC’s actions final spring, and far-right billionaire Miriam Adelson, an Israeli American who desires Israel to annex the West Financial institution.
Within the face of universities’ institutional wealth and energy, it has fallen to school school to defend susceptible college students, to remind the USC management of the values of openness and inquiry it claims to characterize, and to ask: How does USC sq. its shuttered, airtight, security-driven tradition with its proclamations of educational freedom and “unifying values” to “rise up for what is true, no matter standing or energy”?
There’s nonetheless time for President Folt – for faculty presidents throughout the US – to stroll all this again. Drop all sanctions towards our college students, defend free expression, and open our campuses once more. It’s not too late to see the big harm being completed and reverse course. Not doing so would solidify the function of universities as repressive areas the place freedom of expression and inquiry are unwelcome.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
