By Patty Fong
I was a university demonstrator at the University of Washington when (then President Richard) Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia. We students shut the university down. It was a day of no ‘business as usual.’ We were not assaulted or arrested. We were not criticized for exercising our views.
I urge all of us to support university academic freedom—the constitutional right to free speech should be unequivocally supported and protected by all universities.
I urge all of us to demand university accountability towards and responsibility for its students and faculty. Universities should listen to their students. Universities have an obligation to protect their students—from attacks for exercising their rights, from violence, from injury, from militarized law enforcement. Have we already forgotten about Kent State?
I urge all of us to respect and support the current very public face of protest against horrific violence in Gaza—not just now, but for the past 70 years. Not unlike the Black people who put their lives on the line against the police and lynch mobs, students have risked their education and their physical safety to speak truth to power.
Their tents, encampments and the subsequent destruction and removal are not unlike the horrific razing of the tents, homes, schools, hospitals, and lifelong communities of now displaced Gazans. Their experience of assault, injury, and arrest at the hands of riot police is not unlike that of the Gazans and Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces on the West Bank. The criticisms and disapproval of the student protesters are not unlike that of those who would be anti-Muslim or even those who would destroy and replace our democracy, bit by bit, with more neat authoritarianism. For those who allege anti-Semitism and feeling unsafe around protesters, how safe do we think anyone, including the aid workers such as those working for World Central Kitchen, feel right now?
Unlike the Palestinians, however, the university students are supposed to be living in a free society. One has to wonder, in the light of recent events, if this is any longer the case.
Criticizing free speech is a slippery slope. and yes, democracy is messy. Yet, I argue that protecting free speech on college campuses is an urgent, important front in saving our democracy—if it’s not too late already.