The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a letter to the heads of more than 650 American colleges and universities to defend the free speech rights of students protesting over Israel-Palestine. Citing the ACLU’s priorities of freedom of speech and association, and academic freedom, the letter — signed by executive director Anthony Romero; national legal director David Cole; national security project director Hina Shamsi; and speech, privacy, and technology project director Ben Wizner — urges university leaders “to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize student groups on the basis of their exercise of free speech rights.”
“Schools have a responsibility to address discrimination and harassment wherever it occurs,” the ACLU letter continues. “But the experience of our country’s universities during the McCarthy era demonstrates that ideologically motivated efforts to police speech on campus destroy the foundation on which academic communities are built.”
The letter comes partially in response to an open letter to university presidents from the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center issued on October 26 asking them to “investigate the activities of your campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine” over “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization” — referring to Hamas. It is also in response to the October 24 decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis to call for the dismantling of existing chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine at Florida's public universities.
While the letter takes pains to distance the ACLU from the substance of the national SJP’s promotional toolkit released following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which included language calling the events of that day ”a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (the source of significant backlash to the national SJP and individual chapters), the letter argues the group’s statements “are not material support for terrorism, but political advocacy fully protected by the First Amendment.”
Several campuses, including Cornell, Harvard, Brooklyn College, and more, have seen antisemitic and Islamophobic speech and attacks increase since October 7, a point also highlighted in the ACLU’s letter. On October 30, the Biden administration announced that they directed the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “partner with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools,” per NBC, framed as an action to combat antisemitism on campus.
“Colleges and universities around the country are managing heightened threats and anguished tensions, and it’s especially in times like these that they need to remain firm in their commitment to open debate and peaceful dissent on matters of great public importance,” Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, shared with Teen Vogue. “We think a blanket call to investigate student chapters of a pro-Palestinian student group for ‘material support to terrorists’ — without even an attempt to cite evidence — is unwarranted, wrong, and dangerous. It echoes America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era and university leaders should roundly reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups that are exercising their free speech rights.”
Last Wednesday, students at over 100 college campuses staged a walkout in which they called for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US military support for Israel. Two days later, the Senate passed a unanimous resolution calling student group organizing over the recent weeks “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas,” and denouncing their rhetoric as “antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible,” furthering the association being pushed.
Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Palestine Legal, an organization that has long represented free speech cases on behalf of SJP-associated organizers, told the Intercept that between 2014 and 2022, the organization took on about 2,200 cases. In the last two weeks, they’ve received more than 300 new requests, about what they usually get in a year.
“We urge you to hold fast to our country’s best traditions and reject baseless calls to investigate or punish student groups for exercising their free speech rights,” the letter concludes.
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