Monthly Archives: April 2017

Should your university be able to punish you for a Facebook post? Even kick you out?

The U.S. Supreme Court denied requests this week to hear a case that had the potential to set a major legal precedent on students rights to free speech off-campus, including on social media.

This lets a lower courts decision stand and you may not like it.

The case involves a Minnesota nursing student who was kicked out of his program for comments he made on social media, according to the Student Press Law Center.

In 2012, Craig Keefe, a one-time student at Central Lakes Colleges Brainerd nursing school published Facebook posts complaining about group work partners, alcohol and another student who he suspected had made a complaint against him.

In one of the Facebook posts, according to the amicus brief filed by the First Amendment groups, Keefe called the classmate he suspected of having reported him a stupid bitch. Another post contained a joke about whiskey and anger management.

Keefe was just one semester away from graduating from the Brainerd nursing program when he was called into a meeting with school administrators and expelled for his social media posts. Officials claimed Keefe had violated student conduct standards.

In a lawsuit filed in a U.S. District Court following his expulsion, Keefe said that he wanted to be reinstated in the nursing program and sought damages from defendants, including the colleges president and vice president among other university officials.

The U.S. district court dismissed Keefes case against the university. He appealed to the Eighth Circuit court, which upheld the universitys decision to expel Keefe.

Free speech groups werent pleased with the Eighth Circuit Courts decision. But now that decision stands.

Before the Supreme Court decided not to hear Keefe v. Adams case, free speech groups had urged the Supreme Court to restrict colleges from punishing students for off-campus speech and social media posts they deem unprofessional.

Frank LoMonte, director of the Student Press Law Center, said in a statement that the decision limits the freedoms of college students:

Even a middle-school student is entitled to First Amendment protection unless her speech substantially disrupts school operations, and the Eighth Circuits misguided decision has left college students with lesser free-speech protections than 12-year-olds.

Whats more, the SPLC says, the cases outcome could have a chilling effect on student journalism because school administrators could use the case to justify censoring student publications stories that dont reflect well on the school.

Students arent particularly keen on colleges having the right to punish students for their posts on social media.

If I have a free speech zone on campus, why cant I have a free speech zone off campus? asks Kandace Washington, a student at Winthrop University. Washington added that if colleges tried to punish students according to student conduct policies for their social media postings that administrators wouldnt have time to do anything else.

Mary Jordan Miller, a senior at Winthrop, believes universities should take an educational approach to disciplining students depending on the situation. I think if they are going to be punishing them, it doesnt need to be punitive, it needs to be showing them why thats problematic and helping them to grow going forward, Miller told USA TODAY College.

Colleges and students have struggled over social media posts in the past. In 2015, for example, Texas Christian University suspended (but later lifted the suspension) of a student for posts he made on social media about Muslims and protests in Baltimore. And in 2016, a University of Oklahoma student was suspended for social media posts targeting black University of Pennsylvania students.

Ryan Brooks is a Winthrop University student and a USA TODAY College correspondent.

Link:
This court case leaves college students with 'lesser free-speech protections than 12-year-olds' - USA TODAY

Photo of UCLA students at Israeli independence day that accompanied piece in New York Times on BDS. (Photo: Monica Almeida/New York Times)

Theres a lot of writing these days about the Left being oversensitive crybabies that cant handle free speech. Students shutting down racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray at the University of California Berkeley and Middlebury in Vermont made headlines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Fox News.

At the same time, liberals are also quick to (rightly) point their fingers at the Trump administrations authoritarian tendencies from threatening journalists with meritless libel suits to banning them from White House press conferences.

But liberal institutions have hardly been open to those who challenge established orthodoxies. While universities often decry protests by their own students, theyve shown an uncanny openness to certain outside third parties influencing hiring decisions and classroom curricula.

Radhika Sainath

During all the Milo campus riot talk, who remembered UC Berkeleys suspension of a one-unit ethnic studies course on Palestine last semester? The student-instructor, twenty-two-year-old Paul Hadweh, had spent months preparing the course syllabus, going through all the right channels to get the course approved, only to find out from a friend watching Israel Channel 10 that his class was under scrutiny and Israeli government officials had covertly intervened. A few hours later he was informed by his faculty adviser that the course had been summarily suspended. Twenty-six students were left scampering to make up the unit weeks into the semester.

UC Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks declared that the course, Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis, espoused a single political viewpoint and appeared to offer a forum for political organizing. His statement echoed the complaints of pro-Israel advocacy groups, forty-three of which had written to Dirks calling the course partisan and political indoctrination, and even raised McCarthyite alarms, accusing Paul of being an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

A week later, after public outcry, the university reinstated the class.

What happened at Berkeley, though not unique, is particularly ironic given the schools iconic status as the birthplace of the free-speech movement. Californias flagship university prides itself on being a democratic institution, and thus allows students to propose, and teach, as Paul did, one-unit courses on subjects theyre interested in. Such Democratic Action at Cal (DeCal) courses include classes onPokmon,Harry Potter,The Hunger Games, andGame of Thrones as well as more serious topics such as Marxism and its Discontents, Helping the Navajo Rebuild, CopWatch, Film Making for Activists,and Human Trafficking Prevention. As one might imagine, the Marxism courserequires readings by Karl Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci all Marxists with no corresponding readings by Milton Friedman andFriedrich Hayek.Similarly, the Trafficking course contains no pro-trafficking viewpoints, and the Navajo Nation course objective is for students to not only learn about the issues surrounding the Navajo Nationbut actually do something about it!

Paulsreading list, in contrast, includedwritings by Palestinian and Israeli scholars such as Saree Makdisi, Ilan Pappe, the late Edward Said, and Eyal Weizman, as well as selections from the United NationssGoldstone Report (2009) and testimony from Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza. The lecture scheduled for September 13 the day the class was suspended was on Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, Imperialism and Colonialism in the Late Nineteenthand Early TwentiethCentury.

Oddly, Chancellor Dirks is a colonial studies scholar whose seminal work includesThe Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, which many a nineteenth-century Brit might have argued espouses a single political viewpoint and offers a forum for political organizing.His other work includesCastes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, nothing if not putting Indias contemporary caste politics in historical perspective.

Paul and his adviser, UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, were called into the office of Carla Hesse, the executive dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, the week after the summary suspension to discuss the course. Theywere questionedabout a poster used to advertise the class, and asked why it didnt say Israel on it. (It did.) They were alsoaskedwhether the course description and syllabus had a particular political agenda and what the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be. Dr Bazian explained that studying settler-colonialism doesnt constitute a political agenda and that Paul shouldnt need to have a solution in mind to contemplate an alternative to the status quo. Ultimately, the suspension was rescinded, without any changes to the course content. Paul was relieved as were his students, who had unanimously signed anopen letterdemanding the course be reinstated.

Sadly, the special scrutiny on Paul and his course was not unusual under Obama, and promises to be less unusual under Trump, as we saw at last weekslovefest between Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and an anti-BDS conference organized by a number of the groups that called for the suspension of the Berkeley course and applauded arecent decisionby Fordham University to deny club status to a Students for Justice in Palestine group because the group would lead to polarization.

In spring 2015, the AMCHA Initiative, which organized the campaign against Pauls class, and applauded Fordhams decision, similarlycalledfor the elimination of a student-led UC Riverside literature course on Palestinian Voices. The university was forced to launch an investigation and ultimately determined that the class was fully protected under the UCs course content and academic freedom policies. Though the course went forward, the student instructor was subjected to weeks of Islamophobic and misogynist cyberbullying.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), also a signatory to the letter against Pauls class, has likewise complained about courses it disagrees with. In spring 2015, itthreatenedColumbia University with legal action if it allowed a teachers workshop by law professorKatherine Franketitled Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine to go forward, declaring that it was one-sided, riddled with anti-Israel bias and inaccurate . . . since there is presently no country called Palestine. The letter also accused Professor Franke of antisemitism for her public support of using boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The workshop proceeded as planned.

The ZOAs record goes on. In 2011, the organizationfileda Title VI complaint with the Department of Educations (DOE) Office for Civil Rights arguing that a Rutgers University event featuring a Holocaust survivor and a Nakba survivor created a hostile environment for Jewish students, andwroteto Northeastern University in 2013 complaining of one-sided course readings hostile to Israel. Its fourteen-page letter to the City University of New York (CUNY) last February urging the banning of SJP chapters for alleged antisemitic actions sparked a six-month independent investigation by a former federal judge and prosecutor. All of these attacks failed. The DOEthrew outthe Title VI complaint, and the CUNY investigationfoundthat SJP was not responsible for any antisemitic incident, and that the tendency to blame SJP ... is a mistake.

Again, these attempts at censorship garnered little of the attention we see when a few college students protest, interrupt, or shut down talks by neo-Nazis and racists.

The First Amendment protects the right to free expression from government interference, whether that expression be Marxist or anti-Zionist.Cases like Pauls are precisely why the Supreme Court warned against anticommunist loyalty oaths in its 1967 decisionKeyishian v. Board of Regents of University of New York.In that case, professors at the State University of New York sued after they were notified that if they failed to sign a certificate swearing that they were not communist, they would be dismissed. In holding that the oath was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court noted:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident . . . To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.

When close family members saw the news about Pauls course, they told him he was putting the family in danger. He received a barrage of media inquiries asking whether he was attempting to indoctrinate his peers with antisemitic thinking. The story was covered in Russian, Turkish, Emirati, Israeli, Palestinian, Latin American, and American outlets. He couldnt sleep. He became physically ill and was overwhelmed by anxiety as he worried for his familys safety while he balanced his coursework, fought to reinstate his course, and worked to clear his name.

Its particularly disconcerting that Berkeley informed powerful Israel advocacy groups that Pauls class had been suspended, ostensibly for failing to follow proper procedures, before contacting Paul or anyone in the layers of faculty oversight that had approved the course in the first place.

Such censorship attempts have the potential to cause a tremendous chilling effect on campus debate on Israel/Palestine and alienate Palestinian students and Muslim students in an increased climate of fear.

Students and citizenry should of course feel free to debate scholarship, analyze research, and question underlying theories taught in college classes. But when powerful groups call for scrutiny of classroom discussion that appears to challenge the status quo, colleges should tread carefully.

Theres a lot oftalkthese days on how student-led calls for trigger warnings and against microaggressions may be affecting classroom discussion. A recentarticledescribed a Syracuse University professors decision to disinvite a filmmaker because she (wrongly) speculated the film would be protested by the BDS faction as the chilling effect of political correctness.

But idiosyncratic decisions made by individuals are not comparable to systematic decisions made by powerful institutional actors pressured by states and donors. In looking at issues of free speech and academic freedom, its important to note the difference between individuals responding to the free speech of other members of the academic community, and the free speech of the academic community responding to pressures from big donors and the state.

Its critical for us all to make that distinction clear, and recognize that the actions of institutional actors have much broader implications than the actions of individual students or professors inside the university. And its time that universities recognize that in order to pursue their function as spaces for free intellectual inquiry, they cant succumb to the political pressures of multi-million-dollar suppression industries.

This post was originally published here on April 6, 2017, by Jacobin.

View post:
The real free speech threat - Mondoweiss

Ken Livingstone, suspended from Labour for claiming that Hitler supported Zionism. Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA Wire

Whatever motivated Ken Livingstone to play the Hitler card in a bizarre, unprompted and unwanted attempt to defend Naz Shah, justifications on the basis of alleged historical accuracy (Letters, 6 April) miss the point that the context and purpose of such remarks need to be taken into account.

It is difficult to see them as anything other than another way of saying that Zionism equals Nazism, an equation that is not only offensive to many Jews and others who resolutely oppose Israels policies, but also undermines the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people. It would have been difficult for members of Labours national constitutional committee to have reached any conclusion other than that the party had been brought into disrepute, though the sanction has proved controversial.

In this respect, the party might usefully learn from the practices of bodies dealing with professional standards. In the case of doctors, for example, a tribunal will consider a series of factors including remorse, insight and risk of repetition in deciding between suspension and erasure from the medical register. It is also axiomatic that the reputation of the profession as a whole is more important than the interests of any individual doctor.

Given the pressing need for a credibleLabour party to challenge Tory hegemony, it would be a sub-Shakespearian but necessary outcome of continued due process if Livingstone, who has indeed done the state some service, proves through persistent lack of insight to have effectively written his own political obituary. Dr Anthony Isaacs London

It is not as a Jewish Labour party member but as a historian that I am offended by Ken Livingstones views on Hitler and Zionism. Livingstone has a feeble grasp of this history and his repeated claims tobe merely speaking the historical truth compound his original error.

To claim that Hitler was supporting Zionism travesties the fact that Zionists aspired to create a Jewish state in Palestine, while Hitler was committed only to achieving the wholesale removal of Jews from Germany. Some German Zionists were prepared to negotiate with the Nazis in pursuit of their objective, but Hitlers own interest in Palestine waspurely opportunistic.

Nazi thinking was based on the premise that a resettled German-Jewish population in Palestine would remain under the firm rule of the colonial power, Britain. In this vision, German Jews in Palestine, far from achieving the statehood to which Zionists aspired, would live in a kind of controlled reservation policed by the British.

To the extent that a Jewish state nevertheless seemed likely to emerge in time and threaten to provide a new basis for the global Jewish conspiracy, Hitlers interest in a Palestinian solution cooled. Why these simple factsescape Livingstone and his defenders is beyond me. Jane Caplan Professor emeritus of modern European history, University of Oxford

The Guardian accuses Labour of having forgotten a fundamental principle in not expelling Ken Livingstone (Editorial, 6 April). I suggest that it is the Guardian that has forgotten an even more fundamental principle: free speech.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, the paper waxed lyrical about free speech, quoting the maxim I do not agree with what you have to say, but Ill defend to the death your right to say it (8 January 2015).

Yet with Livingstone it joins in the witch-hunt. Your editorial invents the principle that the motives of those claiming to be victims of racism can never be queried. So when Ulster loyalists, Afrikaners or Israelis claim that they are victims of racism, we must nod our heads accordingly? The British empire repeatedly claimed the mantle of the oppressed. The Zionist movement has repeatedly used the false allegation of antisemitism to defame its opponents, including Jewish anti-Zionists.

British Jews do not speak with one voice. The suggestion that it is only a matter of decorum that people distinguish between Jews and Zionism is outrageous. The only people who use the two terms interchangeably are Zionists and antisemites. Livingstone is accused of a grotesque misreading of history because he asserted that Hitler supported Zionism. This is a historical fact attested to by historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz, Francis Nicosia and David Cesarani. It has nothing to do with antisemitism. Tony Greenstein Brighton

I have struggled to understand the fury and vituperation heaped on Ken Livingstone. Two facts are clear: Livingstone is not a Holocaust denier; and he nowhere alleges that Zionists were complicit in the plans to exterminate the Jews.

It is hardly surprising that Zionists had contact with the Hitler regime. Theyhad extensive contacts with many European governments and groups during the interwar years to promote support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Members of the British royal family and the aristocracy admired Hitler and the Nazi regime but we do not accuse them of complicity in the Holocaust.

So what is Livingstones crime? Is it that he is a long-term supporter of Palestinian rights? Is it that he dared to voice criticism of Zionism? There is no doubt that branches of the Zionist movement were quite ruthless in their violent struggle, razing and displacing Arab villages, murdering Arab and British citizens through terrorist outrages. After the end of the first world war a detailed Zionist plan for the establishment of a Jewish state explicitly committed to respecting the rights and property of all citizens, whether Jewish, Arab or Christian. How does this square with an Israeli state that flouts international law and creates and extends illegal settlements?

The conclusion that I deduce from your editorial and Suzanne Moores piece (Labour is weak and immoral, 6 April) is that you will not defend free speech and that any support for Palestinian human rights or criticism of Zionism will be judged to be antisemitic. Ron Walton Penarth, South Glamorgan

Thanks to David Baddiel for clarifying the problem at the heart of the current Livingstone antisemitism controversy (No sympathy, no compassion, 7 April). Baddiel says that the statement Hitler supported Zionism is not a fact, but an interpretation. I would go further, and say that it can be both of these things simultaneously, depending on the perspectives of those making the claim or assertion. Its exactly the same with every theological argument, in my experience. Consider the phrase: Christis risen! Father Alec Mitchell Manchester

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Link:
Free speech and historical accuracy in the Livingstone affair - The Guardian