Final spring, after 93 conscience protesters have been arrested on the College of Southern California campus and college students and school have been threatened with civil and educational sanctions, USC President Carol Folt seemed to be in search of a method out.
“What we’re actually making an attempt to do now’s de-escalate,” Folt advised the USC Educational Senate in Could, as professors 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 that she herself would have “gone outdoors” earlier than the police raid. The camp was a two-minute stroll from her workplace. Had she made the quick stroll, she might have skilled firsthand the character of the camp: a peaceable, interfaith gathering of scholars and school to bear witness to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Common camp actions included yoga, meditation, talks, 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 do it,” she advised the Educational Senate. “I remorse it.”
USC’s actions since then contradict Folt’s phrases. Like many different universities within the nation within the period of solidarity with Gaza, our directors are doubling down on repressive measures.
Following protests final spring, USC safety, typically accompanied by off-duty cops educated in “crowd management operations,” maintained a decent cordon across the campus. This fall, they’ve “welcomed” new college students with steel bars, safety checks, bag searches and necessary ID scanning.
The college administration has additionally elevated strain on college students and school going through sanctions, sending them threatening letters and summoning them to disciplinary hearings. College students have been required to jot down “reflection papers” expressing remorse and a press release of “what they’ve discovered” earlier than any sanctions are lifted.
“How did your actions influence different members of the college group and their deliberate actions within the affected areas?” requested an Orwellian-sounding letter from USC’s Workplace of Group Expectations. “Please clarify the way you may make totally different choices sooner or later and develop in your reasoning.”
In typical sunny USC trend, draconian restrictions — “specific lanes,” “welcome service tents,” and extra open doorways — have been offered as conveniences. However make no mistake: Our campus is closed, “for the foreseeable future,” in accordance with a campus-wide e mail. In different phrases: Don’t count on to return to a extra open campus anytime quickly, if ever. The explanation? “Security on campus stays our prime precedence.”
That is the place the olive department ended.
USC just isn’t the one campus grappling with controversial choices about the way to cope with protest camps and the passions of conflicting narratives about Israel and Palestine. Just a few, 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 taken robust motion.
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 authorization. The College of Pennsylvania has banned tenting. Columbia College now makes use of a color-coded system to limit entry to campus.
In the USA, about 100 faculty campuses have applied extra restrictive guidelines on campus protests, and the local weather without cost speech is worse than ever, particularly on the prime universities, in accordance with a latest survey by the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression. Of the 251 universities surveyed, USC ranked 245th, with a ranking of “very poor.” Worse nonetheless, with the label “horrible,” have been New York College, Columbia College and, lastly, Harvard.
USC could not have “outdone” Harvard in suppressing free speech, however it has outdone all of its “rivals” 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.
As we speak, day by day we enter campus, we’re compelled to confront a disturbing safety setting. “Quick lanes” and “welcome tents” don’t assist. They solely enhance the sensation that we’re below surveillance; that each time we go to campus, it’s as if we’re on the airport, below the watchful eye of the Transportation Safety Administration.
Equally disturbing is the message USC is sending to the encircling South Los Angeles group. “In comparison with USC’s lengthy historical past, the place we prided ourselves on our integration with the encircling group, entry is severely restricted by traces at ‘welcome tents,’ by the hesitation of visitors to return go to, by the seemingly arbitrary secondary safety checks to which these whom the ‘greeters’ have profiled are then subjected,” the USC chapter of the American Affiliation of College Professors wrote to President Folt in August.
That’s to not point out the impact the militarized presence has on college students of coloration, who could already really feel marginalized at a predominantly white college. “They haven’t gotten to grasp why we have been there within the first place,” scholar Leon Prieto advised Annenberg Media final month. “I don’t actually see USC the identical method. I simply don’t really feel like I belong right here.”
Through the years, the scandals which have plagued USC — a medical college dean who used medicine in lodge rooms with younger feminine companions, one in all whom overdosed; a gynecologist accused of sexual misconduct towards a whole lot of USC girls; the “Varsity Blues” fraud and cash laundering scheme; the college’s opaque and entrenched response to those scandals — have typically made it tough to be a proud Trojan.
However for me, nothing surpasses the disgrace and revulsion I really feel over the occasions of the previous 5 months: the violent arrest of our personal college students, the next expenses towards them for trespassing on their very own campus, the cruel educational sanctions, and the seemingly everlasting closure of our campus.
It’s laborious to flee the sensation that USC directors who cope with safety points (and different college presidents, for that matter) have been ready for a disaster to manage their harsh tonic to our group. In her transformative e-book The Shock Doctrine, social critic Naomi Klein wrote that “as soon as a disaster happens,” disaster brokers discover it “essential to behave rapidly, to impose speedy and irreversible change.”
The transformation of the USC campus is a microcosm of Klein’s broader doctrine: a type of laboratory for what a privatized, hardened perimeter, fortified by outdoors safety businesses, may appear to be.
You’ll be able to wager different faculty presidents are watching the USC experiment carefully, to see if this sort of repression can endure.
On the heart of USC’s “security first” philosophy is Erroll Southers, vp for safety and danger administration, a former FBI agent, and chairman of the Los Angeles Police Fee. The Fee oversees the Los Angeles Police Division, the Israeli-trained riot-ready drive that stormed our peaceable scholar camps final spring.
Southers can be the creator of the e-book Homegrown Violent Extremism. In a report for the USC Middle for Nationwide Safety, he warned that extremist indicators embody robust identification “with perceived Muslim victims (Palestinians, Iraqis…)” and harboring “a grievance (reminiscent of perceived injustice or victimization) and related anger directed towards the USA.”
This excellent storm reveals the extent to which college students are unwilling to take motion to boost consciousness about Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza. Merely put, our college’s safety equipment is predisposed to view them as a risk.
If that weren’t dangerous sufficient, don’t count on any strain for reform from USC’s rich Board of Trustees. The board consists of actual property developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, the billionaire host of pro-Israel galas in Los Angeles 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 the wealth and institutional energy of universities, it has fallen to school college to face up for susceptible college students, remind USC leaders of the values of openness and inquiry it claims to face for, and ask: How does USC reconcile its closed, secretive, security-driven tradition with its proclamations of educational freedom and “unifying values” to “get up for what is correct, no matter standing or energy”?
There may be nonetheless time for President Folt and college presidents throughout America to reverse this. Carry all sanctions towards our college students, defend free speech, and reopen our campuses. It isn’t too late to see the large injury being executed and switch again. Failure to take action would cement universities’ position as repressive areas the place free speech and inquiry are usually not welcome.
The views expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially replicate the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
