As division on college campuses continues, one university bans its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter
Locally, Temple University has an SJP chapter. A university spokesman said the school hasn’t taken steps to remove it.
Brandeis University has become the first U.S. college to ban its local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, according to The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper that cover politics.
The group has a chapter at Temple University and was in recent years active at the University of Pennsylvania, where protest and political unrest have broken out since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
At Penn, donors have withdrawn support over the university’s response to the Hamas attack, and the Palestine Writes Literary Festival, which was held on campus in late September. Protest rallies for Palestinian students and Israel have been held on the campus, which also has experienced several antisemitic acts this semester.
At Temple Law School, some students complained last month after students participating in a walkout in support of Palestinian students chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” in a first-year law class, a phrase that some regard as a rallying cry for the destruction of Israel.
Temple has not taken steps to remove the SJP chapter, a spokesman said. An email to the student group wasn’t immediately returned. A spokesperson for Penn declined to comment.
» READ MORE: Penn, Drexel, and Temple students demand recognition of Gaza from universities amid fears of doxing and retaliation
SJP organizers at Brandeis told The Hill that claims made by the university that the group had supported Hamas in its call for the elimination of Israel were unsubstantiated. “This also comes as an attempt by Brandeis to silence Palestinian voices, as the administration has not shown any support to their Palestinian and Arab students, who lost many people in Gaza,” a spokesperson for the student chapter said in a statement.
The move at Massachusetts-based Brandeis — which was founded by the Jewish community in 1948 as a nonsectarian university — follows a letter from the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center last month to nearly 200 universities asking that they investigate their local SJP chapters “for potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”
» READ MORE: After protesters chant ‘from the river to the sea,’ Temple law school warns about disrupting class
The American Civil Liberties Union countered with a message to colleges, urging them to “reject calls to investigate, disband or penalize student groups on the basis of their exercise of free speech rights.”
“Ideologically motivated efforts to police speech on campus destroy the foundation on which academic communities are built,” the ACLU wrote. “A college or university, whether public or private, cannot fulfill its mission as a forum for vigorous debate if its leaders initiate baseless investigations into those who express disfavored or even loathsome views. Such investigations chill speech, foster an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, and betray the spirit of free inquiry, which is based on the power to persuade rather than the power to punish.”
Brandeis said in a letter to its SJP group, which was obtained and published by the Jewish Insider, that although it supports free speech, there are limits.
“‘The freedom to debate and discuss ideas does not mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish, or however they wish,’ and that, ‘… the university may restrict expression … that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment … or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university,’” the Jewish Insider reported.
Students who choose to support Hamas are “considered to be in violation of the university’s student code of conduct,” the letter said.
Brandeis president Ronald Liebowitz also said this week that student organizations engaging in antisemitism should “lose all privileges associated with affiliation at their schools.” His comments were made in an op-ed that was published in the Boston Globe.
“Specifically, chants and social media posts calling for violence against Jews or the annihilation of the state of Israel must not be tolerated,” Liebowitz wrote. “This includes phrases such as ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ — which calls for the erasure of the Jewish state; ‘there is only one solution’ — which echoes the Nazi strategy of killing all Jews; and ‘intifada, intifada’ — an incitement to violence against Israeli civilians.”
Some have called Brandeis’ decision an unfair restriction on free speech.
“None of the chants or slogans cited by President Liebowitz come close to meeting the legal criteria for incitement or harassment,” Zach Greenberg, senior program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Hill. “Make no mistake, Brandeis is punishing its students for nothing more than protected political advocacy.”