Northeastern University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine

posted on: Mar 12, 2014

With profound disappointment and righteous indignation Northeastern University Students for Justice in Palestine announces it has been suspended as an organization. SJP is disappointed because Northeastern’s claims of creating a diverse learning environment that encourages the free exchange of ideas and promotes Academic Freedom are impossible to reconcile with the university’s decision to suppress our speech and suspend our political group. As if banning our activities from campus and denying us all use of campus resources wasn’t outrageous enough, the university is pursuing expulsion-level sanctions for two students—all for participation in a mock eviction action. SJP is furious to report the only individuals to face our school’s opaque disciplinary process are two young women of color; none of the white or male participants have faced any charges. This unprecedented ban and appalling prosecutions are the latest attempt by the university to suppress pro-Palestine speech, and continues the university’s disturbing history of enacting injustice.

This chilling suspension is not just about SJP, and it is not just about Palestine. Academic freedom is essential for students to challenge our own university’s complicity with many forms of discrimination, injustice, and violence. We are inspired by and stand in solidarity with communities of color, LGBTQ people, workers, and victims of U.S. and Israeli military aggression. We respect that not all liberation struggles are identical or even comparable. Even so, the university’s decision to suspend SJP and criminalize its most vulnerable members comes in the context of a broad and concerning pattern- and threatens to chill on-campus efforts to support these struggles.

The university claims to value academic freedom while suspending SJP, but its hypocrisy is nothing new. Consider how its actions have impacted others. Was the university fair to Roxbury residents, whose families –particularly families of color—have been displaced by student gentrification? When students from around the world are invited to gather on-campus, can they truly feel “welcomed” in the Raytheon amphitheater, named for a U.S. corporate war profiteer? Can the university claim to value all students’ health, when the student health plan explicitly discriminates against trans students? Is the university committed to just working conditions and wages, while it seeks to thwart the 800 adjunct professors who aspire to unionize? The university often promises fairness and impartiality, but its actions reflect truly disturbing values. Northeastern University consistently supports the interests of the dominant and powerful, at the expense of the marginalized—and rather than extend academic freedom to students who criticize these interests, SJP has been criminalized and censored.

Just as injustice at Northeastern extends beyond SJP, many other SJP chapters have also endured viewpoint discrimination and disparate treatment by school administrations. The organization Palestine Solidarity Legal Support, whose attorneys—along with ones from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG) of Massachusetts—are advising us through this difficult process, documented over 100 instances of campus suppression of pro-Palestine speech across the U.S. in 2013. For example, at Florida Atlantic University, student activists were placed on probation for staging a non-violent walkout at an Israeli military colonel’s lecture, and forced to undergo a “re-education” seminar concocted by an outside pro-Israel organization. At the University of California at Irvine, students faced criminal charges for interrupting the speech of an Israeli state official.

Those throughout the country who, despite threats, suspensions, and arrests, continue to work for justice inspire us. Northeastern SJP has a message for its supporters: WE WILL FIGHT OUR SUSPENSION. WE WILL DEFEND OUR MEMBERS! We call on all our comrades and our allies to join us. We must demonstrate that we will stand up for one another against all forms of injustice – that the university can never isolate or separate us. Our sanctions become victories the moment we band together to fight them!

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