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
