In light of the April 9 letter from faculty and staff about the threat to students’ freedom of expression posed by Swarthmore’s recent disciplinary action against students for distributing a pro-Palestine zine, we write to offer a broader picture of the college’s escalating efforts to quell community members’ speech.
Over the past two years, the college’s publicly stated commitments to social justice have melted in the face of pro-Palestine activism. The number of students charged for pro-Palestine speech and protest has been far higher than those charged for campus activism in previous years — including O4S, #BLM, Mountain Justice, and Solidarity at Swat. The punishments have been far more severe, including the suspension and arrest of students. In the process, the college has selectively enforced its own rules; it has disproportionately targeted students of color (who make up the overwhelming majority of those referred to disciplinary action for pro-Palestine speech and protest); it has undermined due process in the disciplinary hearings — including by shifting/withholding evidentiary records and denying relevant witnesses; it has invested in an extensive surveillance system that monitors students; and it has outsourced student conduct proceedings to external law firms to draw up charges while preventing students from having counsel in their own hearings.
The college has also altered some of its central tenets, including how we understand free expression, with little input from faculty or students. Since 2024, college administrators have rewritten the Student Code of Conduct, making extensive changes that restrict students’ expression. These include subjecting the time, place, and messaging of student protest to administrative review; banning excessive sound (including “shouting” and “musical instruments”) at protests; stripping away directives to protect free expression; and adding new sanctions to the disciplinary process. As a private institution, the college is not bound by the First Amendment; any limitations to free speech in the Code of Conduct substantively change students’ contractual right to expression on campus.
The result has been a swift and alarming erosion of freedoms on campus. Changes to the Code that should ideally be undertaken to reflect the stated values of our institution have instead been made to retroactively prohibit methods of dissent, like encampments, that were used by pro-Palestine activists. Protest activities like banner drops that the administration charged as minor misconduct in 2024 — and for which CJC panels and external administrators subsequently found students not responsible — have recently prompted administrators to call the police.
As it stands, Swarthmore College is one of the only higher education institutions in the country in which students who have protested on campus have an active criminal case against them, scheduled to go to trial this summer. In short, the college has taken extreme and disproportionate measures against students for engaging in forms of activism that were historically considered to be acceptable.
As faculty, we are concerned that the college’s repressive approach to speech has far-reaching consequences for all of our students’ abilities to live and learn at Swarthmore.
At its most basic level, the zine disciplinary case points to the fact that two very different forms of knowledge production now exist on campus. Even as faculty and staff teach students to do research and evaluate their sources’ credibility, the college issues students warning letters for reprinting (and properly citing) a news article published in “The Guardian,” a UK-based newspaper of record. Even as we hold workshops on zine-making and teach examples of political zines in our classes, the college issues charges to students for zine printing and distribution. Even as we teach students to think critically, read for context, use evidence responsibly, and stay alive to alternative readings and opposing perspectives, the college constructs those charges by cherry-picking single words from the texts.
These methods of argumentation lead to tendentious, uninformed claims, like that invoking abolition — a concept that emerged in anti-slavery movements and commonly appears in social justice work around policing and ICE today — constitutes a call to physical violence. We are witnessing the emergence of a shadow curriculum, one that teaches students that they will be held to one set of intellectual and ethical standards in the classroom but disciplined according to another. What long-term effects will this have on our ability to deliver the kind of intellectually rigorous education for which Swarthmore has long been known?
Already, we see changes taking place in the classroom. In one class this semester, students were asked to create their own manifestos modelled on the punchy, formally innovative works of twentieth-century writers. The final products were surprising: the majority were small and oblique, with tiny handwriting and generalized statements. During class discussion, students reflected on the fact that they deliberately used vague language to avoid voicing pointed critique. In another class, a student asked nervously if they were allowed to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Other students have lamented the fact that the restrictive environment on campus has narrowed the space for public discussions about matters of global concern, like the U.S./Israeli war on Iran.
For students who have been subjected to disciplinary proceedings, the toll has been more acute: as faculty who supported students during the months in which they prepared for and underwent the hearings, we witnessed them develop insomnia, panic attacks, depression, disordered eating, and anxiety. Some students withdrew from classes or took incompletes in order to mount defenses against evidence files that ran to hundreds of pages, in some cases prepared by attorneys.
Repression of speech has also chilled a long-standing campus culture of social justice activism. Students fear that protests of any kind will lead to discipline. They express anxiety about being watched throughout the day, knowing that surveillance camera footage of their peers drinking water from fountains or walking on College Avenue days or even weeks before the events in question has been used as evidence of violating the Student Code of Conduct.
Last fall, when the college obeyed a Trump directive to fly the American flag at half mast to mark the death of Turning Point USA’s CEO Charlie Kirk, queer students contemplated holding a rally to convey their sense of betrayal, but they were sure they would be punished for objecting to the college’s policy. So they stayed silent. As protests against ICE’s violent and often unlawful actions galvanized much of the country this spring, the response of Swarthmore’s student body has been uncharacteristically muted.
None of the infringements on freedom of expression recounted above are unique to Swarthmore College. They have occurred amidst a nationwide campaign to repress pro-Palestine voices on campuses. Across the country, students and faculty have faced investigation, job termination, detention, and deportation proceedings for pro-Palestine speech and activism. The repressive climate has drawn widespread concern and censure. In October 2023, the AAUP warned college and university officials to “resist demands from politicians, trustees, donors, students and their parents, alumni, or other parties to punish faculty members for exercising [their academic] freedom.” In July 2024, human rights experts from the United Nations expressed grave concern at the “massive crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests” across the country. Swarthmore’s capitulation to this trend marks a stark departure from its history of celebrating student activism as part of the college’s commitment to an education that advances the greater common good.
Many have feared that whatever university and college administrations could get away with in their repression of pro-Palestine activism would open the door for broader attacks on higher education. That is indeed what has happened. The crackdown has since extended to the revocation or elimination of grants awarded by the National Institutes for Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities for research that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) flagged as being “woke science” or “DEI” for including language about race, gender, ability, or vaccination; forced compacts between higher education institutions and the Trump administration that allow the federal government to dictate acceptable fields of study and to enforce “viewpoint diversity” among faculty, students, and staff; lawsuits brought by the Trump administration to halt programs supporting Black, Latino, and other minority students; institutions banning dissertations and theses on LGBTQ+ topics; and surveillance of curricula by legislators, administrators, and right-wing organizations.
Many faculty have reported changing the content of their courses and abandoning research projects to avoid becoming targets. According to the Academic Freedom Index, American higher educational institutions have “experienced a remarkably sharp drop in institutional autonomy compared to other countries in Western Europe and North America.” Attacking higher education has long been a major component of a conservative agenda in the United States. The execution of this agenda has been made easier by administrators and boards who, for years, have prioritized financial returns and corporate-style management over ethical commitments, shared governance, and quality education and research.
In the midst of what journalists and lawyers have called a “new McCarthyism,” college administrations across the country have demonstrated that they are willing to undermine longstanding educational principles, especially under outside pressure. But stifling our own community will not save us. Swarthmore faces a choice about what kind of institution it wants to be. Will it stand for the values of free speech, open inquiry, and the right to protest? Or will it continue to betray both its founding tenets and its reputation for intellectual rigor and social engagement? If we don’t defend our principles here, we have little hope of teaching our students to uphold them beyond campus.
Signed,
1. Jonathan Washington, Associate Professor of Linguistics
2. Megan Brown, Associate Professor of History
3. Lara Cohen, Professor of English Literature
4. Paloma Checa-Gismero, Associate Professor of Art History
5. Linda Huber, Aydelotte Foundation Technology and Social Justice Postdoctoral Fellow
6. Nina Johnson, Department Chair of Sociology and Anthropology
7. Edwin Mayorga, Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies
8. Sangina Patnaik, Associate Professor of English Literature
9. Christy Schuetze, Associate Professor of Anthropology
10. Ahmad Shokr, Associate Professor of History
11. Farha Ghannam, Professor of Anthropology
I am in full support of this statement and the faculty.
Swarthmore is steadily exposing itself as antithetical to its supposed values.
It’s a disgrace. It’s shameful. It’s embarrassing.
When students are afraid to speak, write, or protest, the entire educational mission of an institution is compromised. A college that punishes dissent while claiming to value critical thinking and social justice is not living up to its own stated principles. The chilling effect of disciplinary overreach extends far beyond those directly targeted, teaching an entire community that self-censorship is the price of safety. A college rooted in the Quaker tradition, which has long honored the individual conscience, the obligation to speak truth to power, and the courage to dissent against unjust authority, betrays its deepest foundations when it silences the very voices it was founded to nurture.
The problem was not that the protests were pro-Palestine. It is that they were anti-Semitic — notably the graffiti of “Let’s go bomb Tel Aviv” and “<3 Hamas" sprayed on the Big Chair. If similar sentiments had been directed against another group on campus, would this letter's authors be similarly moved to defend the protesters' right to free speech?
since when is tel aviv synonymous with judaism?
Well it’s the most prominent city of the world’s only Jewish state… so there’s that
You also conveniently left out the “<3 Hamas" graffiti – Hamas famously… not so pro Jew
Recently (mid April) the protesters were singing "Iran, Iran you make us proud take another soldier out" and "Hezbollah you make us proud take another soldier out" – all conveniently captured on video, feel free to Google it
This is not dissent, it is pathetic simping for terrorist groups, and professors and alums supporting this should be ashamed of themselves
Israel was founded through terrorism. Those terrorists were not punished. Instead, they became Israel’s leaders.
Israel was formed in the same way , at the same time , by the same treaties, bodies , and agreements as all states throughout the Middle East. Jews always lived in the land now Israel, were majority in Jerusalem by 1850 and before, lived throughout the MENA for thousands of years. Look up Sykes Picot treaty , San Remo accords , Faisal Weitzman agreement , League of Nations, British and French mandates , Ottoman Empire.
Hamas Hezbollah and Houthis are terror proxies of the Iranian regime , funded and planned by Iran. Hamas is a genocidal religious fanatic cult. The Iranian regime are a genocidal fanatic religious cult . Both slaughter their own people in large numbers.
Israel was not founded through terrorists. It was founded through hard work , land purchase from legal owners , international bodies, treaties , agreements in the land Jews had lived in all along for thousands of years. Self defense against the British army was not terrorism. The superficiality ignorance and know nothing hate mongering of such comments is what a Swarthmore education should prevent. But it hasn’t in recent years because the faculty have been poorly chosen : activist professors who don’t care about scholarship or truth , only pushing their agenda.
Israel was, in fact, founded through terrorism. You know this. Jews owned less than 7% of the land by 1946, so they used terrorism to pressure the British into withdrawing and handing over the Palestine land to immigrant Jews. The Zionists bombed the King David Hotel, kidnapped and murdered British military personnel, assassinated Folke Bernadotte, sent letter bombs to British officials and the US White House, targeted infrastructure, and violently displaced 750,000 indigenous Palestinians. They even attacked moderate Jews who objected to their tactics. The three main Zionist terrorist groups—Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang—united to form the IDF. Terrorism is baked into the Israeli military culture.
Support for terrorist groups is a federal crime. Support for a group at war with USA is a federal crime. Since Hamas killed and kidnapped USA citizens on Oct 7 2023, and Iran was behind it and Hezbollah joined in , support for Hamas , Hezbollah and Iran are federal crimes two ways.
May I have a word?
Tel Aviv is a city, not a people not a religion.
I love and cherish my Jewish community members, friends and the kindness and light they bring to our world. I condem and detest what the State of Isreal is doing. Do not conflate or intertwine the two. To do so is antithetical to the intellectual and community values of Swarthmore. D.Martinez ‘ 98.
The thing is, people aren’t being punished for graffiti on the Big Chair. They are being punished for protesting at all. The rules don’t allow protests.
Suppressing the protests has not prevented someone from spraying graffiti all over campus. It is not an approach that works.
I appreciate this piece and thank the faculty who signed it. I agree wholeheartedly. I hope the faculty can come together and offer concrete steps Swarthmore can take to reset and realign itself with its stated values.
These signatories here have rightly pointed to the actions and attitude of the Board of Managers as significant contributors to the problems we see at Swarthmore. These problems are, of course, not unique to Swarthmore, but the board should push back against broader social erosion in this moment of rising fascism in the United States, not capitulate to it. I believe one concrete measure Swarthmore must take is overhauling the selection process for board members and opening it up to a democratic election process. This would not be a panacea for all that plagues the college, but it would be a move in the right direction.
It really is disgraceful for a college that is claiming protection from violence as a rationale for its overlarge surveillance push lowered its flag to half mast to honor Charlie Krkk, who was not only an unapologetic bigot on virtually every issue, but who had also previously given a national publicly tour to Kyle Rittenhouse, whose only claim to fame was enacting violence.
Moral courage means NOT doing that type of thing and accepting whatever consequences may follow. If Swarthmore cannot even do that much, how can it be trusted to protect students from even worse directives it receives from a corrupt and fascist regime? All this ‘sanctuary campus’ talk is just empty words when actions demonstrate very clearly that the first thing the administration will do when ICE comes knocking is surrender the copious surveillance footage it has amassed on vulnerable students, staff, and faculty.
It’s sick, really, and a better Board of Managers, one that is accountable to the community it is supposed to steward, would not let this happen.
Will these tenured professors come out of their bubble and help the EVS staff members clean all the vandalism their students did?
don’t you think valerie smith and other administrators and members of the board who i) make more money than most professors, ii) are responsible for working conditions for EVS, and iii) make decisions regarding investment and disciplinary action should be called on to help?
I have read that faculty and students did help clean up the recent graffiti.
And I would note that suspending and even arresting students for protests did not prevent someone from spraying graffiti all over campus. It is not an effective strategy for building community and a place for intellectual discussion.
It is shameful that these faculty members support SJP”s “Happy October 7th” and pro-Hamas, hateful incitement to violence.
Prosecuting students who are protesting a genocide is a betrayal of Swarthmore’s espoused values of social justice.
Demand that the college drop the charges:
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/demand-swarthmore-drop-all-charges-for-student-protestors
Swarthmore needs to fire around half the faculty : the bigoted unscholarly activist faculty who were recruited in recent years. They are leading students astray and filling them with hate propaganda instead of scholarly skills. The school also needs to admit sane students interested in scholarship , not angry activist kids who are abusive to others and don’t care to find out what is true or how to evaluate ideologies and facts. The school’s roots are in scholarship and vigorous respectful debate based on facts and reason. Protest is an anti intellectual violence adjacent distraction.
You must be kidding? Protest is anti intellectual? The same protest that freed south Africa and India and tlbrought down the Berlin wall? Protest couldn’t be more Quaker. And what is going on now couldn’t be less Swattie.
Shame on you swarthmore. Shame shame shame.
There’s something off about this commenter, Dan, from their talking points lifted word-for-word from various reactionary sites, to the strange punctuation and spacing. I don’t think they’re familiar with what a Quaker is or what Quaker values are.
It is not lost upon us that Professors Nina Johnson and Sangina Patnaik are not publishing scholarship and are instead wreaking havoc on the Swarthmore community.
It is not lost upon us that your comment is giving “box of saltines at a Mississippi plantation on the National Register of Historic Places” energy.
Bravo, Swarthmore. Admittedly I am not familiar with many of the details, but am confident that criminal charges are not issued whimsically. And, as this article states, this is an action no other indoctrinated institution has had the courage to pursue.
Today, I am proud to be an alumnus.
This is a powerful letter. Thank you to the faculty who wrote it. A collective, national failure to productively disagree about the hard things is one of our biggest problems as a country. Some of the comments here reflect that in a way I find discouraging.
As an alum (2008) and a Jew, I could not be more proud of the faculty and the students of Swarthmore speaking out on Palestine and the ongoing genocide by Israel, in the face of so many pressures. Please know that we see you and we stand with you.
On a personal note, I am also so proud and happy to see my old professor Farha Ghannam signing this letter. Thank you Farha for continuing to open and nurture the minds of young students, the way you opened mine.
This is an excellent and important letter. I commend the faculty for writing it and wish more had signed.
When I was looking at colleges and weighing my options, I ended up choosing Swarthmore because there was a large encampment protesting, the college’s investments in businesses that were working in apartheid South Africa. I didn’t know very much about politics or protest then, but the encampment signified for me that Swarthmore was a place where students took ideas seriously and acted on them. When I was at Swarthmore, I also got involved in the divestment fight, as well as in other efforts to protest injustice both on and off campus. It is hard to imagine a campus like Swarthmore’s, which was so open to free expression, becoming as plainly repressive as it has become today. I teach in another university now, and we are not immune to the same tendencies that the faculty rightly show to be endemic in higher education today. Nevertheless, at my university, which is public, the kinds of preapproval of speech the faculty describedhappily do not exist.
I’m fairly certain that half of the things that I got up to at Swarthmore, which were, in retrospect, not very mischievous, would be grounds for suspension today. But amid all this, we also debated ideas and strategies. I had friends with whom I vehemently disagreed about divestment from apartheid South Africa. I disagreed with others about appropriate actions to protest the first Gulf War. It is nice to think that everyone in the late 80s and early 90s supported a figure such as Nelson Mandela and his calls for solidarity. But Mandela and the armed wing of the ANC were designated as terrorists by our allies in the apartheid government and by our own state department (during those years as well, and earlier, the apartheid regime developed close, economic, and military ties with Israel). Had Swarthmore had the rules then that they have now, students would doubtless have had a much harder time speaking with each other about their disagreements.
Swarthmore had a transformative and profound impact on my life: my family, my career, my friendships were all forged in the experience of solidarity and the learning of criticism that so marked my time there. I’m friends still with people with whom I protested and organized, and with people who thought I was wrong, and probably often insufferably self-righteous. I still think I was right, and I would do it all again, but the fact that we could still form friendships without the extreme pressure of institutional threats, is a lasting and beautiful legacy of the college I knew.
John Krinsky ‘91
Swarthmore College, a notable conservative and anti academic institution known for its intolerance and shutting down those who are moved to speak, was criticized by those calling for the dismantling of a nation state and calls for removal of a religious minority from their land for stifling their speech. “Why can’t we harass and disrupt the academic activities of other students to prove our point?” said one student who declined to be named in this article. It is my first amendment right to destroy property and obstruct the function of a private institution with no international influence in policy” shouted a second year student on a megaphone standing on the steps of Parish Hall.
While some faculty felt that students should be able to get course credit for their guided study “propaganda and messaging in practice,” the academic review board decided that the course did not have sufficient feedback on writing to meet the requirements of a writing course. Ultimately, the course was not approved and the students did not receive academic credit. “We thought the second semester was fail too” one student was heard to say.
While some faculty and students thought that Mosad had personally paid off the other 237 faculty to not care, other students did note “I think we are all exhausted by this, not only is there nothing the school can do about this conflict but the students complaining don’t seem to care about anything that does not fit their narrative.” One professor, on condition of anonymity explained, “we have a whole department dedicated to history, another to political science, and even more faculty who were willing to sit down and explain things to students and host dialogs. All such efforts were rejected by protestors who decided to host a sit-in instead.
“They are more annoying than worthstock” a senior noted. “Plus, there is a lot less fun and less to be gained from this kind of sit-in.” Another student, overhearing, said, “well, at least I’m doing something with my education” before chanting “Free free Palestine.” “what would a free Palestine even mean?” the senior asked. “From the river to the sea.” was the response. “OMG, you are calling for ethnic cleansing.” Explained the senior. “Am not.” said the other student. “Then what are you calling for?” asked the senior. “You are just a white nationalist.” “Bruh, look at me.” said the senior. I’m a queer POC with an honors major in bio and a minor in psych… Can you please stop?”
One faculty member reportedly asked Professor Nackenoff to return to teach the whole student body some basic Con. law. “She laughed and told me ‘good luck'” said the professor.
We shall keep reporting in the Fall term when some students are expected to start the term with a protest.
Satire
From an alum
A poster , er poseur, calling itself “hi Rosey” managed to post without a reply option. Their comment pretended to vote history but was bluntly untrue. I guess that’s what passes for scholarship with the “activist professors “ now at Swarthmore: lies .
The prospective Jewish state owned 11% of the land , having purchased it from the legal owners. The local Arabs owned 3% of the land and houses they lived in and farmed. The local Arabs were tenant farmers , renters and recent work migrants from all over the Arab world. They owned hardly any land or houses. There are detailed ottoman and mandate land records and were detailed ottoman land laws. During ottoman rule there had been periods of high taxation, high inflation, and debt. Most of those local Arabs who had owned property lost it. Local Arabs also failed to register deeds because they sought to avoid taxation and military draft during the ottoman rule which lasted 400 years. The land had also been depleted and poor for agriculture for hundreds of years, so by 1850 there were total 400,000 people living there maximum. There were wealthy Arab and ottoman absentee landlords and local elites who sold large tracts of land to the prospective Jewish state. Local individual Arab landowners also prolifically sold to the prospective Jewish state. Most land was public land privately owned by no one , passed from the ottomans to the League of Nations in the Sykes picot treaty which ended WWI. The LON formed mandates to create separate states for self determination of various peoples. The British mandate for the Palestinian region divided the land 78% for a state for the local Arabs , Jordan , and 22% for the Jewish state , Israel. The Arabs within Israel’s 22% protested against a Jewish state. The LON and British mandate tried to accommodate them by offering them a state of their own out of the 22% of the mandate reserved for the Jewish state. They tried this in the peele commission offer and twice in the partition plan , all three of which local Arab leadership refused. Certainly the Brit’s were staying too long , and instead of fulfilling their mandate , were acting colonially , and killing a lot of Jews. So the groups you mentioned formed to get the Brit’s out and defend Jews. But they were not terror groups. They were guerilla forces, targeting abusive British colonial forces. Eventually the League of Nations determined that the local Arabs in Israel’s 22% of the land did not need a separate state for self determination, as they had refused three generous offers, had never been intended to have a separate state , and had ample opportunity for self determination in Jordan , Syria or Lebanon , all formed from the same former greater Syria region, with the same clans families religion cuisine language, culture. They also had opportunities for self determination in the Arab lands half of them had recently migrated to Israel from for work in the Jewish made economy : Egypt , and other Arab countries newly formed when Israel was formed and by the same treaties agreements and international bodies and processes. The public lands for the 22% of the British mandate were transferred to the Israeli state. Israel came by its land legally. The local Arabs did not own hardly any land . It is a matter of record.
“ Palestine land “ ? There has never in history been a polity or state of “ Palestine “. The region was ruled by the ottomans for 400 years. When the ottomans left after WWI the entire Middle East was divided into states for self determination of various peoples. The land now Israel had been a remote sleepy ottoman backwater. There were clusters of people living dispersed with loyalties to various distant leaders.
Israel by no means violently displaced 750,000 people. In fact 5 Arab armies invaded Israel upon Israel’s recognition by the UN. Those five Arab armies urged the local Arabs to leave and come back in a few weeks after the Arab armies had killed the Jews. The local Arabs fled, some at direction of Arab countries , some to avoid the brutal invading Arab armies , some left out of fear of what Jewish army might do, but Jewish army did not do those things . Some had left when their Arab landlords sold properties to Jews. They didn’t want Jewish landlords. So they left. And , again , half were recent work migrants so not rooted in the place. Israeli armies compelled only those Arabs in the direct path of military supply lines to leave. The Arabs who stayed became Israeli citizens. Those who left could not return. But they didn’t own houses or land anyway. Again there are detailed ottoman land records.
Perhaps you should read about the massacres the local Arabs perpetrated against local Jews in the 1920s.
It is disgraceful that any Swarthmore student alum or teacher would spew the misrepresentation that some do. The activist professors have lied to you and deprived you of an education.
I appreciate the perspective of the faculty on this. And greatly regret the constraints students may feel on their speech. At the same time, these complexities in fact mirror exactly what many of us graduates experience day to day in the so called “real world”. We speak one language with family and community, and another at work, and yet another in our public writings. I have learned much from colleagues in other oppressive regimes/contexts and appreciate the pragmatic tradeoffs each person must calculate daily. While it’s regrettable that students have to navigate these waters, the experience might just be another element that prepares them to be effective agents for social justice beyond their swat days.
Disagree with the letter here and agree with those pushing back against this small group of faculty. The Swarthmore community needs to know that physically blocking access to buildings for Jewish students and faculty, belittling and abusing those wearing traditional Jewish head coverings or Jewish stars, and chanting support for internationally recognized terrorist groups is not okay. Not all speech is protected under the constitution and even if it were, we hold ourselves to a standard of respectful discourse. As I understand it, the number of Jews applying to Swarthmore is dropping and many current Jewish students feel unsafe. The obligation to create a safe space for intellectual and personal growth for all students including the Jewish ones is at the heart of the campus mission. This situation is one of competing claims to land, each of which can be justified. Most people on both sides want peace. We need to encourage actual dialog, not name calling. You don’t get anywhere by screaming at your fellow students that they are genocidal murderers. Students who can’t respect their campus community don’t belong there.
> physically blocking access to buildings for Jewish students and faculty, belittling and abusing those wearing traditional Jewish head coverings or Jewish stars
Did this happen at Swarthmore? Could you cite your sources?
Over a quarter of the faculty signatories of this letter are Jewish. You’d be hard pressed to find that sort of Jewish representation in most goings on at the College.
This did happen at Swarthmore. Other things that happened at Swarthmore: a student was punched in the face by another student for speaking Hebrew. Sjp- hole students surrounded students who tried to film their hate rally and blocked them from filming or leaving. Sjp- hole students grabbed a students phone and deleted photos of their hate speech signs at a “ teach in”. Sjp hole students have a teach in claiming Israelis eating or making hummus was cultural appropriation, and then shared hummus with attendees at their hate – in. But Jews eating it according to them is cultural appropriation, despite over half of Israelis from the start being from families that never left the Middle East and grew up with hummus. Sjp- hole students surrounded a building trapping admin members inside. Sjp/ hole students surrounded and harrassed board members obstructing their paths walking in campus. Sjp- hole students chased a speaker off stage snd forced security to escort him off campus for his safety. Sjp- hole students chased a band off stage snd prevented the concert. Sjp- hole students disrespected a United States ambassador to Egypt and wouldn’t listen to his talk or discuss with him peacefully. He wrote an article for the Phoenix about it. Sjp hope students posted on social media on buildings genocidal slogans towards Jews. Incitements to violence against Jews. They chant things that are not true and are violent and damaging and have no interest in learning anything. The school should expell them , not admit more like them and fire around half the faculty who have failed the standards of scholarship and decency. It makes no difference at all what religion or ethnicity professors spewing such nonsense are. People of any religion are drawn into political cults.