Left-wing protesters forced California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, to shut down for the semester, reports the Chico Enterprise-Record:
Cal Poly Humboldt officials are closing the campus for the remainder of the semester with classwork continuing remotely, as pro-Palestinian student activists refuse to end their occupation of two academic buildings….The far Northern California campus had already been shut down since Monday, when dozens of students set up an encampment inside Siemens Hall, an academic and administrative building, at the Arcata school in an act of “solidarity with those … in Gaza,” organizers said. They demanded that the university divest from Israeli companies.
Collin Rugg notes that
students have seized multiple buildings on campus. Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall East have been barricaded and taken over by pro-Palestine protesters. The buildings are completely trashed with graffiti plastered all over the walls and have been under the control of the protesters for 5 days now. One building is now named “Intifada Hall.” “The occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall East is causing ongoing inability to open other campus facilities,” the school said. “Since Monday night, protestors have attempted several times to break into multiple locked buildings with the intention of either locking themselves in, vandalizing, or stealing equipment. Vandalism and theft have continued across campus.”
According to one source, “Administrators estimate the damage to be in the millions. Why are universities letting criminals take control of their campuses?”
Disruptive protesters have been emboldened by the earlier refusal of progressive officials to enforce trespassing laws and school rules against protesters who flout them. As the National Review earlier reported:
Police in Washington, D.C., rejected requests from campus officials at George Washington University to clear anti-Israel protesters from their campus encampment this week, fearing that doing so could be bad publicity.
Although police were poised to disband the encampment at around 3 a.m. on Friday morning, city officials in the police chief’s and mayor’s office told police to stand down and said that it would look bad publicly for police to disrupt a “small number of peaceful protesters,” the Washington Post reported on Friday…George Washington officials originally wanted to clear the encampment by 7 p.m. on Thursday. The school said on Friday that protesters “violated several university policies and were trespassing” and added that “any student who remains in University Yard may be placed on temporary suspension and administratively barred from campus. Several students have already been notified of their suspensions.” Police who reportedly lined the encampment’s perimeter on Friday warned protesters that they would soon issue arrests, but they never did.
“After demonstrators refused multiple instructions to relocate, GWPD requested additional support from the DC Metropolitan Police to ensure the safety and security of all our community members through a measured and orderly approach,” George Washington said in a statement….Dozens of anti-Israel protesters are still occupying the encampment…At a rally held at George Washington this week, a speaker was recorded saying, “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the United States of America.”
Camping out against a college’s wishes is trespassing, not speech protected by the First Amendment, as UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh notes. The Supreme Court ruled that protesters had no right to camp out on federal property regularly used by the public, in Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence (1984). George Washington University is private property, to boot! As Professor Chris Freiman notes, “Studying at a university doesn’t give you an unrestricted right to control its space, just as patronizing a bookstore doesn’t give you an unrestricted right to camp out in the nonfiction section.”
Colleges have often let left-wing protesters get away with disruptive behavior and occupations of campus property they would never tolerate if conservatives did it. When Pro-Hamas protesters “shut down a Democratic” Congressman’s speech at the University of Maryland, the school’s president praised their action as an example of “democracy and free speech and academic freedom,” in comments he made to Capitol News Service.
Colleges have routinely allowed pro-Hamas protesters to block roads, disrupt classes with bullhorns, and prevent students from hearing what their instructors are teaching. As law professor David Bernstein observes, “the biggest problem with how many campuses are handling pro-Hamas protests” is “a failure to enforce existing, content-neutral rules” against misbehavior like going into classrooms to disrupt class with noisy protests that make it impossible to hear what the professor is saying. As history professor KC Johnson notes, “recent disruptive anti-Israel protests –students with bullhorns interrupting classes, etc)–were organized by unrecognized student groups. They’re ‘technically not permitted to stage on-campus demonstrations’” at schools like Harvard, because of their unrecognized status. So “Why hasn’t Harvard enforced its rules?”
By contrast, colleges have called in the police to try to catch and punish students who quietly express views that some minority students find offensive — such as posting flyers saying “It’s OK to Be White,” or flyers bearing the confederate flag.
The president of Western Connecticut State University threatened the unknown persons who posted flyers saying “It’s OK to Be White”, saying that they would face the “severest disciplinary actions, including dismissal as well as possible civil and criminal actions.” The university said its officials immediately reported the flyers to local and state police and the FBI office in New Haven, all of whom were investigating who made the flyers.
Never mind that far more offensive speech on campus has been deemed protected by the First Amendment in federal court rulings. For example, a federal appeals court overturned a fraternity’s discipline for a racist, sexist blackface skit. See Iota Xi Chapter v. George Mason University (1993). Another federal appeals court overturned sanctions against a professor for writings depicting blacks as racially inferior to whites. See Levin v. Harleston (1992).
Colleges’ stark ideological favoritism violates the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court, government officials — and that includes state college administrators — are constitutionally forbidden to have ideological double standards in who they allow to demonstrate. (See Police Department v. Mosley (1972)).
Law-enforcement officials who investigate people for posting things like “It’s OK to Be White” flyers should be sued under the First Amendment, in light of court rulings such as White v. Lee (2001), which let citizens sue civil-rights officials who investigated them for speech perceived as prejudiced (speech opposing a housing project for a category of disabled people). A federal appeals court found that a protracted eight-month investigation of the speech violated the First Amendment by chilling constitutionally protected speech, notwithstanding the defendants’ claims that they were just enforcing the Fair Housing Act.
