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 tutorial sanctions, USC President Carol Folt appeared to be looking for a manner out.
“What we’re actually making an attempt to do now’s de-escalate,” Folt advised the USC Tutorial Senate in Might, as school pressed her on why she referred to as in a closely armed Los Angeles police power to quell peaceable pupil 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 may have realized firsthand in regards to 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 advised 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, typically accompanied by off-duty cops skilled in “crowd administration operations”, maintained a good 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 going through 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 a press release of “what you’ve realized” earlier than any sanctions may be dropped.
“How did your actions have an effect on different college group members and their scheduled actions within the affected areas?” requested one redacted letter from the Orwellian-sounding USC’s Workplace of Group Expectations. “Please share the way you would possibly make completely different selections sooner or later and develop in your rationale.”
In a typical sunny USC vogue, the draconian restrictions – “quick lanes”, “welcome service tents” and extra open gates – have been bought as conveniences. However make no mistake: our campus is on lockdown, “for the foreseeable future”, based on a campus-wide electronic mail. In different phrases: don’t anticipate a return to a extra open campus any time quickly – if ever. The explanation? “Safety on campus stays our high precedence.”
A lot for the olive department.
USC is hardly the one campus confronted with roiling selections on the right way to take care of protest encampments and the passions of conflicting narratives on Israel-Palestine. A couple of, like San Francisco State College, have listened to their protesters and determined to divest from corporations that revenue from weapons manufacturing. Others, like Wesleyan, have facilitated conversations between pupil protesters and the college’s board of trustees. Most have cracked down.
George Washington College has suspended two pupil 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 applied extra restrictive guidelines governing protests on campus. And the ambiance free of charge 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, but it surely has surpassed all its “opponents” in turning the campus right into a fortress. Nothing could possibly be extra antithetical to a school campus and its tradition of openness and inquiry.
Now, daily we stroll onto campus, we’re pressured to take care of a disturbing securitised setting. “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 encompassing group of South LA. “In comparison with the lengthy historical past of USC, the place we positioned delight in our integration with the encompassing group, entry is severely constricted by the traces on the ‘welcome tents’, by the hesitation of company to return 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 know why we have been there within the first place,” pupil León Prieto advised Annenberg Media final month. “I don’t actually see USC the identical. I simply don’t really feel like I belong right here.”
Over time, the scandals which have plagued USC – a medical college dean doing medication in lodge rooms with younger companions, one in all whom overdosed; a gynaecologist accused of sexual misconduct towards a whole bunch of USC ladies; the “Varsity Blues” fraud and money-laundering debacle; the college’s opaque, bunkered response to those scandals – have usually made it laborious to be a proud Trojan.
However for me, nothing exceeds the disgrace and revulsion I really feel in regards to the occasions of the final 5 months: the violent arrest of our personal college students, subsequent costs towards them for trespassing on their very own campus, harsh tutorial sanctions, and the apparently everlasting lockdown of our campus.
It’s laborious to flee the sensation that USC’s security-led directors – and different school presidents, for that matter – have been ready for a disaster as a way to administer their harsh tonic to our group. In her transformative guide, 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 speedy 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 businesses, can appear like.
You’ll be able to guess that different college presidents are protecting 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, vp 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 power skilled by Israel that stormed our peaceable pupil encampments final spring.
Southers can be the writer of the guide Homegrown Violent Extremism. In a report for USC’s Homelands Safety Middle, he warned that extremist indicators embrace robust identification “with Muslims perceived as being victimized (Palestinians, Iraqis…)” and harbouring “a grievance (akin to perceived injustice or victimization) and related anger directed at the US”.
This good storm exhibits how excessive the deck is stacked towards college students making an attempt 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 menace.
If that weren’t unhealthy sufficient, anticipate no strain for reform from USC’s rich Board of Trustees. The board contains 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 needs 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 symbolize, 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 injury being performed 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.
