Student Speech, Education Policy, and College Campuses Today

By Marissa Sasso

On December 4th, 2023, the Antiracist Research and Policy Center hosted a panel titled Student Speech, Education Policy, and College Campuses Today to discuss the recent infringements of student activists’ free speech. As anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian activism have surged on college campuses due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, A.R.P.C. invited scholars Thea Abu El-Haj, Lara Schwartz, Miriam Durrani, William Youmans, and Dwayne Wright to share their expertise with the A.U. community, hosted by A.U.’s own Aamarah DeCuir. This transcription is intended to be used as an archive for those who are interested in the topic and were not able to attend.

Sara Clarke Kaplan: I am Sara Clarke Kaplan, the executive director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center and an associate professor here at A.U. in literature and critical race, gender, and culture studies. So for those of you who've been to our events before you know I always start by just telling you a little bit about the center, housed within the College of Arts and Sciences and supported by the Office of the Provost, the Antiracist Research and Policy Center is an interdisciplinary hub for the research and practice of racial justice and intersectional liberation. 

So what makes us unique among centers of our type is two things: first, that commitment to putting research into action for social change, and second, our holistic approach which I'm hoping you will see in this event today. At A.R.P.C., we understand the study of race, racism, and racial justice as always intersectional. That is, we can't really work to understand race or to combat racism without thinking about related modes of power and difference, gender and class, sexuality and ability, religion, or national status. We understand that race, that is, how ideas of innate difference are mobilized to create differential access to power and opportunity can only be understood if in relation to those other forms of difference. 

We also understand that while race is not the same everywhere in the world, the problems of race, power, and difference that we call racism are not simply an exceptional U.S. phenomenon. Rather, they operate historically and geographically specific ways across the world and therefore the work to combat racism cannot be thought of without being thought of as transnational. 

Third, we know that the conditions that limit and enable us to combat how power and difference produces unequal access to life and opportunity don't exist in a vacuum. They aren't limited by location, nor are they limited by identity. In short, the understanding of power and difference can never be really fully fleshed out if we continue to think of it as unique or as a zero sum game. In short, we understand that race, racial categories, the process of racialization, and as a result, the attempt to challenge and combat racism must be relational. 

As Fannie Lou Hamer put it far more simply, "nobody is free until everybody is free." Right now at A.R.P.C., we focus our work on four areas that are central, not only to our seventy faculty affiliates working across American University, but to changing the conditions of racial justice in the world and in the United States. Race, policing, and incarceration; race, climate, land, and environmental justice; race and reproductive justice; and race, educational access, and equity. And it is that fourth area that this event falls squarely within. 

I don't think it's a shock to anyone in the room to say that this is a pivotal moment for race and social justice in education. Colleges and universities across the country, programs that support equity and inclusion on campus, are being outlawed and eliminated. Students and educators from kindergarten through college have been under attack because of their teaching or studying of race, racism, or racial justice movements has been deemed un-American, racist, or divisive. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's recent decision on race-conscious admissions will dramatically curtail access to higher education for Black, Latinx, and other students of color in the United States. We do not understand these issues at A.R.P.C. as separate, rather we understand them as interlocking and closely related. Over the last year, A.R.P.C. has worked to not only draw awareness to the dangers of this current moment, but to draw on critical race studies scholarship and intersectional scholarship to contextualize this moment within longer legal, political, and social histories, to discern facts from fears and from naturalized rhetorics of innate difference. 

In short, to shed light, we're all too often with these controversial issues, there is far too much heat. That is what this event today is intended to do as well. Over the last few weeks, we've seen controversies on college campuses across the country that have permeated the highest levels of government, including the Senate and the House of Representatives, discussing the meaning of antisemitism, the limits of free speech, and what forms of access to speech student activists and organizers should have. These resolutions that have come out of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the forms of guidance that they are, whether intentionally or unintentionally, providing to college administrators across the country, are having a profound impact on student activists on college campuses across the country. I think it goes without saying that the majority, not all of those college student activists, are often students who are marginalized due to their race, their religion, their country of origin, their immigrant status, and other categories. It is therefore vital for higher education faculty, students, and staff to have an informed understanding of these resolutions and the discourses within which they're rooted, their impact on university policies, campus climate, and public discourse, and the challenges that they pose for college campuses across the country. 

That is what today's event gives us an opportunity to discuss. This event obviously was an absolute hum digger to pull together this late in the semester. And more than anything else, A.R.P.C. would like to really thank Miriam Durrani and Aamarah DeCuir, both of you, for helping to pull together these remarkable panelists and this remarkable group of scholars and this incredible discussion. We'd also obviously like to thank the A.R.P.C. team who always make these events possible, Phil Morse at A.U.P.D., and Matt Bennett in University Communications and Marketing for helping us make sure that this event could operate with safety and comfort for all, and both Diana Burley and the Dean's office, Linda Eldourie in the College of Arts and Sciences who offered their council feedback and support as we put this event together. 

At this point I'm going to introduce Aamarah DeCuir who's going to start us off as the moderator for this event and we'll introduce our panelists. Dr. DeCuir is an educator, researcher and inclusive pedagogy fellow and a faculty member at American University in the School of Education. as well as an executive board member at the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University. Her scholarships span the areas of antiracist pedagogy, Muslim student experiences, prophetic pedagogy, faith erasure, equity, antiracism and social justice, education leadership, teacher education and faculty development. Dr. DeCuir has published articles and chapters in peer reviewed journals and books, and her public scholarship appears in news and media outlets. A highly regarded educator and facilitator, she teaches education studies and social justice, education leadership and an antiracist research methods course that she co-designed. She brings over 20 years of teaching and leadership experiences from public and private K-12 schools to inform her current work in higher education, and her role as the moderator of this panel. And with no further ado, I will turn it over to you. 

Dr. Aamarah DeCuir: Thank you, Professor Kaplan, for answering our call to convene such a distinguished panel to lead us in today's conversation. Here at A.U., colleagues and students have been asking for more conversations rooted in critical inquiry to address the urgent needs of today. We appreciate your leadership and the steadfast commitment of the whole team at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center to create spaces for critical conversations about equity, access and the embodiment of antiracist commitments during times like these. 

I want to acknowledge that it will be difficult to moderate today's conversation and focus on equity and access in higher ed, while many of us are grieving and mourning. We feel shock and outrage at the devastating loss of life that has erupted since October the seventh. The onslaught of violence upon children and their families is unbearable. And among many of the horrific realities, as an educator, I'm called to bring attention to the indiscriminate destruction of over 300 schools and universities, institutes of learning and places of refuge across Gaza that have been destroyed in the past two months, leading to the abrupt end of their academic year. 

So I ask you to join me at holding two things possible at the same time. One, that we hold space for the grief associated with the loss of human life for all those that we have lost since October the seventh. And two, that we make time for today's conversation to discuss what is occurring. on campuses today that identify the additional challenges facing many of us who have come here gathered together. On October the 26th, the United States Senate unanimously passed Senate Resolution 418, and on November the 2nd, the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 798. 

Let's begin by making sense of these congressional resolutions. When I teach education policy, I often begin by using an article by Jean Anyon titled, “What 'Counts' As Educational Policy?” In it she argues that any federal policy that impacts students should be understood as educational policy. Education policy doesn't only originate from the Department of Education. In fact, using her analysis today, we must read S.R. 418 and H.R. 798 as education policy texts because of the ways they specifically address institutions of higher education. And when I teach a policy, we don't limit our examination to textual analysis of policy documents. We read policy to understand the discourse it communicates. I said this to my Complex Problems students. 

Education policies are forms of discourse. They work as symbolic politics that define what knowledge, values, and behaviors are legitimized in schools. This is why we cannot overlook S.R. 418 or H.R. 798 as simply congressional resolutions. We have to understand the discourse that is communicated through these federally endorsed documents. And standing here as an antiracist pedagogue, we know in order to study anything that happens within schools, or frankly anything that happens within society, we must consider how power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization have shaped our social realities. When we read S.R. 418 and H.R. 798, we must read to determine what narratives are lifted up, whose voices are demonized, and what oppressions are rendered invisible. So let's look inside the resolution to read, critically read, not just the words on the page, but for the discourse being communicated, for the ideas being centered and the ones being erased. 

One: the resolutions read that student groups, specifically identifying Students for Justice in Palestine, defined as repugnant, morally contemptible, that risk the physical safety of Jewish Americans by glorifying violence. And two: that campus administrators are called to condemn antisemitism and that is narrowly defined as condemning the actions of these same student organizations. So like me, you're likely reading these resolutions and asking yourself why. Not only why is this policy discourse that Congress directed at higher education institutions after October the 7th, but more importantly, why are these resolutions having such material impacts on university policies and decisions, campus climate, and student activists. 

So we've assembled a panel of experts today who will help us understand the historical and sociopolitical contexts that have led to these resolutions and assess their impact on equity and access on campuses today. Let me begin by introducing our first speaker, Professor Thea Abu El-Haj. She is a Professor of Education at Barnard College at Columbia University. She is an anthropologist of education. Her research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship and education raised by globalization, transnational migration and conflict. Funded by the Spencer Foundation, her current research entitled “Disrupting Dispossession, Teaching Palestine in Exile from 1970 to 1990,” is an oral history project with Palestinian teachers in Lebanon. She was principal investigator of the U.S. National Interview Study exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from Muslim immigrant communities, also funded by the Spencer Foundation. She is past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Her second book, Untitled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth After 9/11 is an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015, it won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award. Please join me in giving a warm welcome for our panelist, who will be joining us over Zoom. 

Thea Abu El-Haj: Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I'm sorry I can't join you today in person, but I want to start by thanking American University and Sara Clarke Kaplan and the University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center for sponsoring this event, especially at a time when so many events are being canceled on university campuses, my own included. 

I also want to thank very much my own Jurani and Aamarah DeCuir for inviting me to be part of this panel. So what I'm going to try to do briefly is how to think about the war on, and I say this with quotations, the "War on Terror" as a context for understanding these House resolutions that are targeting student activism on college campuses, in particular, you know, Palestinian and anti-Zionist student activism, and calling out only one form of discrimination on our college campuses. And what these resolutions are also showing is the way that there's been no distinction between acts of antisemitism and anti-Jewish racism and criticisms of the state of Israel.

There's a total collapse in most of our institutions between definitions of those two, between racist speech and action, and political speech and action. This is a time where I need not remind you that as these revolutions are happening, we've witnessed the murder of a six year old Palestinian child in Chicago and the wounding of his mother. Most recently, we've witnessed the shooting of three Palestinian American students in Vermont. So, again, there's a unilateral focus on one problem of racism and not another. What I want to start thinking about with you is why this focus is happening and what are the consequences of it. 

I've spent the last two decades conducting research with Palestinian American, Arab American, American Muslim youth from immigrant communities. None of those categories are contiguous categories. There's some overlap. But I hope that many of you know that many Palestinians and Arabs are not Muslims. Most Muslims are not Arabs. But I've been studying these overlapping communities and I've been really looking at and focusing on the civic and political identities and practices that young people develop, forms of racism that are directed at them in their communities, and particularly how this unfolds inside schools and universities. 

So that's the parameters of what I've been doing. And I'm going to think about it with you today. So before I go further, I want to ask somebody. I know there's a lot of young folks in the audience, so please raise your hand if you think of yourselves as having grown up during wartime education. And I wonder if I could get a sense of the audience and how many people raised their hand to say yes to that. OK, five. Is that about right? OK. I've been going around in the last two, three years asking folks this question because I think what we have to understand is that what's going on in our university campuses is the near invisibility of the "War on Terror." There's an entire generation plus of young people in this country who have grown up without having to focus on the consequences of the United States military action and their allies' military action in so many places in the world. 

Along with that, there's these military actions that have been happening, there's this silence around that in our schools and universities, more in our, I would say, K-12 schools. And I also want to take us back to the language that President George W. Bush used immediately in his first address after the September 11 attacks. In his first address to the nation, he made this statement that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." And although that division of the world doesn't start with 9/11, Arabs and Muslims were certainly racialized and cast as terrorists well before 9/11 happened.

But I think that's a really important thing to understand that the world gets divided in the discourse of the war on terror. The world is divided into good guys and bad guys, into terrorists and everyone else. I'm going to let the lawyers in this panel later maybe address questions about the material consequences of what we get from this. We get the Patriot Act, we get very big definitions of what material support for terrorists constitutes. we're hearing a lot of that discourse about material support for terrorists right now, especially in relation to the activism that students and other folks are engaging in on our university campuses and in the streets. 

There's this sense that anything and everything, including words and symbols themselves, might be construed as forms of material support. We need to pay close attention to that. If you're not terrified by this narrowing of what's deemed acceptable speech and the kinds of acts of civil disobedience that are acceptable, you should be. You should be very worried about this, not just on this issue. So I see this all as related to what I and others refer to as colonial and imperial amnesia, our tendency to forget or to refuse to see the workings of U.S. colonialism and imperialism and that of other Global North countries in general. 

And instead of seeing those workings, we pit and imagine "liberal, democratic us" against an "illiberal, dangerous other." And in the most recent decade, that "illiberal dangerous other" is created through racializations that render all Palestinians and more broadly, Muslims-- and again, a number of Palestinians are not Muslims-- as part of that "illiberal" world. Again, it doesn't start at 9/11. There's a long history, and I think I point you all towards Edward Said's seminole work Orientalism. But what happens is this discourse comes into schools too. There's a positing of the "liberal, multicultural democratic West" and, again, Israel gets to be a part of that. We're seeing a lining up of all these different countries. The values of freedom, individualism, and tolerance are ascribed to this Global North. And others, in this case again, Palestinians and Muslims are ascribed as illiberal and intolerant.

The other thing this does is it makes us blind to any actions that the U.S., and in this case also Israel and other Global North countries, do that contradict these values of freedom, tolerance, and liberty. I don't know if any of you noticed, but a few weeks ago, Anthony Blinken spoke with the Qatari P.M. telling them to curtail Al Jazeera's reporting. The United States, which again we pride ourselves on free speech, free press, et cetera, is telling the Qataris to try to restrain journalists.  

One of the things that has emerged over the last 20 years is an idea of conditional belonging. So you can belong in this country if you speak and act in particular ways. So for example, in the early days, post 9/11, in the school that I would come to, not just early days, in the years following post 9/11 at the high school that I would work in, the Pledge of Allegiance and standing for it was treated as mandatory, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that students would not be disciplined if they didn't stand for pledging allegiance. And when I spoke with lots of young Palestinians about why they weren't standing for the pledge, some stood, some didn't stand. One young woman said to me, "I don't stand because am I asking for more Palestinian students to be killed?" So again, what we see is narrowing a space for these conversations in schools. We're seeing that discussing context gets collapsed and dismissed as supporting terrorism. 

AD: Thank you for taking the time to join us.  Let me move to our second guest. I'd like to introduce my colleague across town, Dr. William Youmans. He is an associate professor of media and public affairs and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at George Washington University. He is broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power, and communication. His primary research interests include global news, law, and politics. His other areas of interest include researching terrorism, American international broadcasting, Middle East politics, and Arab American studies. He is the author of Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera's Struggle in America, Oxford University Press 2017, which discusses the news market in the United States. 

William Youmans: Thank you for inviting me and I look forward to the conversation. I know I have a very short amount of time to talk about a very long history, so I'll be speaking very quickly. The thing that interests me is what I'm calling the Palestine Exception to free speech. And what I've been looking at is how this  nexus  of pro-Israeli advocacy groups, especially outside of campuses, the university administrators, and government authorities have basically come together to create the zone of exception when it comes to free speech. That leads to the suppression of pro-Palestinian campus activism and scholarships since the 1960s. Now pro-Israeli activism for the most part is treated as normal free speech activity.

But my argument is that there's a gaming of the rules that's going on. That's an avoidance of actual debate. It's a way to foreclose, to narrow the grounds of debate by using laws and regulations. Nationally, but also on campuses as well. A lot of that narrowing is counter to the spirit of free speech. Now I wanna point to this article [pictured below] from 1966, which in many ways sets the parameters of what I'm interested in. This is an article in 1966 that draws on Anti-Defamation League, which is a well established civil rights organization that is focused on combating antisemitism but also does a lot of advocacy on behalf of pro-Israeli politics. 

Here, the focus of the A.D.L. is a concern with an organization, which is no longer around anymore, that was called the Organization of Arab Students, which was founded in 1952. So this begins a long history of hyperbolic fear of mongering about what's being said on campus about Israel and there's a moral panic that's at play here. It begins with a false conflation that what's anti-Israel is inherently anti-Jewish. It goes on to paint the Organization of Arab Students as something that is funded and controlled by the Arab states as a tool of theirs. 

It's not difficult to see echoes of that in the way that S.J.P. is talked about as something that might be funded by Iran or Hamas, or some sort of centralized authority when in fact S.J.P. is organic and from the ground up in everything I've learned about O.A.S., it was similar. These are and were just students who are showing up in U.S. campuses speaking what they know and what they think. But in this article, it claims that these students raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Arab states. 

None of this is documented or proven that they were going to build a half a million dollar headquarters, which was never built. There's a bit of a fear of mongering which part of it is that the A.D.L. needs to show that the O.A.S. is this dangerous thing because the A.D.L. is fundraising for its own campus efforts. The A.D.L. claims in this that the Arab students are actually ordered by superiors to spy on the A.D.L. and the spy on campus activities. But where we start to get into this legally dubious argument, a lot of argumentation is towards the end of the article. It says, "We have long regarded the activities of the Arab students as inconsistent with their purported, scholarly aims in American universities." That's a legalistic argument because it's referencing the basis for their presence in this country as being on student visas. After the 1967 war where U.S. foreign policy really becomes a solidly pro-Israel for geopolitical reasons, not just a domestic political factor but for international politics as well, this is where the D.O.J. starts getting involved with this line of reasoning. 

The Department of Justice said that it will remain alert to operations of the O.A.S.. In 1969, there's mounting support for a federal investigation of the anti-Israel activities carried out by some of the 10,000 Arab students in the United States on the basis of a violation of visa provisions, including that they're supposed to be focusing on students, whereas the A.D.L. is  arguing that their actual function in the U.S. is as propagandists. The culmination of this is Operation Boulder in the 1970s under Richard Nixon, where immigration law is instrumental as a way to actually clamp down on Arab students' speech. They looked closely at 9,000 Arab students to make sure that there were no violations in their visas, and as well as Arab aliens outside of the student population. The critical report of Operation Boulder noted that there was inquiry by immigration authorities into the political beliefs of Arab students and the requiring of sign affidavits by Arab students that they do not engage in political activities. 

This is a clear sort of nexus of the government authorities working in concert with pro-Israeli advocates to carry out this formal limiting of the range of free speech. Fast forward several years, and there's this high-profile deportation case of Elias Ayoub, who's actually my uncle, so I grew up with this story. The deportation proceedings against him commenced in 1978, the year I was born, and they didn't end until 1982. And by that time, he was almost done with his PhD. It began right after he finished his BA. The I.N.S.  kept losing his forms and applications mysteriously. The local A.D.L. chapter was advocating against him vis-a-vis the government. And he sued the government. And part of it he notes that the defendant, who was with the I.N.S. Immigration Authority questioned Mr. Ayoub about his political viewpoints on the Israeli-Arab conflict. He won the case, but the message was sent. The damage in many ways is done. And he was to be made an example of, even if there was a very thin sort of legal grounds for it, the A.D.L. engaged in First Amendment protected surveillance of Arab students. 

This was before Canary Mission, before Stand With Us. The A.D.L. introduced a blacklist book that listed and named scholars and student organizations that were critical of Israel. The A.D.L. reported it had a special program to help  leaders combat antisemitism and anti-Israeli propaganda. "P.S. says, one note of caution, this book should be considered confident, although most of the information contained in it is derived from public sources. It easily could be misconstrued, so please use your discretion." It included A.A.U.G., Association of American University Graduates within this listing and the Organization of Arab-American Students, or O.A.S.. It also included faculty like my dear mentor, Samif Hassoun, who was actually on the faculty here in sociology. 

Another high profile case of students was involved in the L.A. Eight, who were being deported on the basis of the McCarran Act, which was a prohibition on basically visa holders promoting world communism. This deportation proceeding for students ended up lasting two decades. It wasn't resolved until 2007. They were all prolific activists in Southern California and they were made an example of. There was a lawsuit in the early 1990s against the A.D.L. for hiring police officers to collect dossiers using state information against activists. This was something that included surveillance of the General Union of Palestinian Students, Iranian Students Association, Muslim Students Association, and Muslim Students Union.  

I'm unfortunately pretty much out of time but I just wanted to close with this thought. When we look at the current state of the exception of Palestine in free speech, let's look at the anti-boycott divestment sanctions law. For example, if you're in the University of Arkansas and you want to invite a speaker and pay them an honor rating, the speaker has to sign a pledge that they do not support the boycott of Israel or else they can't get paid. This is a very clear free speech exception that will affect activism on campuses. Or they reference the material support clause from the anti-terrorism law that's being codified, for example, through Florida's legislature to ban Students for Justice in Palestine. 

The key case of the material support clause is the Humanitarian Law Project. They used this law to prevent an N.G.O. from giving nonviolent legal training to an organization only because it was deemed part of the State Department's foreign terrorism list. So it even goes against advocates for nonviolent resistance as well. I'll also point to the assumption of the I.H.R.A. definition for antisemitism, which is overly broad and meant to associate antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel, which is at the heart of what we see in these congressional resolutions. 

So these strategies of speech suppression are all to foreclose the possibility of debate. And what universities are about is debate is about knowledge and learning. And I think that that's why there's such a focus on campuses, because these are the remaining institutions where policy and perspectives can be presented without censorship, without filtration. As much as these efforts to suppress are happening and will have material consequences, I think so far they're largely failing and we have to continue to confront efforts to do so in ways that protect the university as an institution for free exchange of ideas. 

AD: Thank you. I'd like to call up my dear colleague across campus who helped me bring this event from an idea to fruition, Dr. Mariam Durrani. She is currently a professorial lecturer at the School of International Service and a faculty member with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center here at A.U.. Dr. Durrani has a joint PhD in linguistic anthropology and educational linguistics. As a decolonial feminist scholar, she seeks to shift how academic scholarship and public discourse reflect and reckon with the impact of global wars and related insecurities, especially the impact on higher education in the U.S. and Pakistan. Her work draws on multisided ethnographic research and multimodal methodologies to study global racialization, migration, education, and the geopolitics of war. Related to our conversation today, she has written extensively on the importance of academics moving beyond the classroom or the traditional confines of the university, has challenged the Western-centric canons that still shape too many scholarly conversations, and has been an advocate for killjoy studies, which centers a feminist approach to dialogue, collaboration, and knowledge production. Please join me in welcoming Professor Durrani.

Miriam Durrani: Hi everybody. Good afternoon and salam alaykum. I am honored to speak alongside my esteemed co-panelists and colleagues in my deep gratitude to Sarah Kaplan, to Aamarah DeCuir, and to A.R.P.C. for helping us arrange this panel today. My remarks will speak to the historical context of the relevant congressional resolutions, and I will focus on how such policies and official statements function simultaneously as both matters of education policy and as foreign and or national security policy. 

I want us to consider the role of educational institutions in how these policies are enacted on college campuses. My remarks will consider insights from my research that explores a similar intersection between higher education and U.S. State Department policies and programs under the jurisdiction of the global war on terror, or what scholars theorize as the global terror industrial complex. There's a paradigm to see the encroachment of foreign and national security policy and priorities into higher education spaces as just that. An encroachment on university classrooms, potential for evidence-based research, and critical inquiry. An encroachment on student and faculty civil rights and academic freedoms. We must do everything we can to protect the university as a critical site for faculty and students to collaboratively study and work against global systems of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. 

And so to introduce my research, I am currently working on a book titled The Imperial Optic at the Intersection of Migration, Racialization, and Higher Education in the U.S. and Pakistan. The book is based on multi-sided, long-term ethnography from 2013 to 2019 about the impact of the global war on terror on the educational lives of Pakistani diaspora Muslim college students in New York City and on the lives of Pashtun ethnic minority college students in Lahore, Pakistan. 

Although college campuses are far from what we typically imagine as theaters of war, my work demonstrates how war on terror policies and programs shaped key features of college life for particular college students across both contexts based on the unregulated influence of U.S. based war policy on educational context. In my analysis, I draw on the deep reservoir of scholarship about race as a global, historical, and inherited phenomena who offers great explanatory power once we establish that race operates differently in different contexts. So my work tracks how the race concept shapes the intersection of war policy and education policy. I theorize about how student counters with war on terror policies and programs serve as examples of what I call imperial racialization, or racialization that is shaped by imperialism. 

And so a quick definition about racialization, which I define as the process by which some perceived capacity, deficiency, and or criminality is ascribed to particular individuals in groups. One of the key mechanisms that perpetuates racialization as an everyday feature of higher education are the ways that new policies build on and exacerbate pre-existing stratification systems and processes that are endemic to education institutions. In the U.S., we know that these pre-existing stratification systems have been historically based on segregation, discrimination and inequality along the lines of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, and national origin. 

So now I'm going to shift to my study with college students in New York City and connect it to our topic for today. During my New York City fieldwork, I observed that once on campus, Black, Arab, and South Asian Muslim college students quickly realized that their mobility and likelihood of success during college, such as when applying for an internship or a coveted research position, demanded that they perform the stereotype of the "good Muslim" for their professors, peers, administrators, and staff. However, this demand to perform the "good Muslim" was not only based on campus culture, but how the campus culture was a part of a larger racial climate of anti-Muslim racism that targeted and criminalized Muslims and Muslim communities since 2001 in New York City and across the U.S.. 

It's important here to note that many Muslims and those who are perceived to be Muslims in the U.S., including myself, regularly experience such racializing situations, which anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani has written about in his book called Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror about the hegemonic expectation that Muslims or anyone perceived as such must first identify as a "good Muslim" that loves the U.S. and its freedoms, or they are automatically positioned as a "bad Muslim." The more important historical context is that the racialization of Muslims based on this "good Muslim, bad Muslim" framing originates during the Cold War when U.S. foreign policy sought to position Muslim nations as either "good" nations, or allies, or not. 

U.S. foreign policy priorities already shaped so much of U.S. news media and public discourses, which echoed these simplistic, reductive, racist ideas about Muslims, Arabs, and Islam as threatening and routinely amplified political figures to humanize Arabs and Muslims with their community, including the sponsors of the Senate Resolution, Josh Hawley and Rick Scott. The deep root of this logic has permeated in many U.S. institutions and settings, and the consequences of these state-sanctioned forms of racialization include increasing incidents of irrational racist violence against people seen as "bad Muslims" surge across schools, colleges, hospitals, etc. 

In 2012, the Associated Press released a major news story that revealed following 9/11 the N.Y.P.D. initiated a program known by its critics as the Muslim Surveillance and Mapping Program. This program was targeting the Muslim student communities that I've worked with at the college where I was doing fieldwork. The perverted rationale for this unconstitutional surveillance was captured in a 2007 N.Y.P.D. intelligence division report titled "Radicalization in the West, the Homegrown Threat." The report claims to identify a radicalization process by which individuals turn into terrorists. It was a process so broad that it seems to treat with suspicion anyone who identifies as Muslim, harbors Islamic beliefs, or engages in Muslim religious practices. For example, a perverted radicalization indicator included First Amendment protected activities, including wearing traditional Islamic clothing, growing a beard, abstaining from alcohol, and becoming involved in social activism. The program identified individuals based on the intersection of religion and 28 ancestries of interest. And so we can see a process of racialization emerging whereby state policies about terrorism are imposed onto college campuses and their student populations. 

But Muslim students in New York City have long known and experienced the N.Y.P.D. surveillance of their club rooms and online far before the 2012 report. And in response, they would post signs, for example, around club room walls cautioning their peers, quote, please refrain from political convos in the M.S.A.. They cautioned each other about potential informants lurking on their social media accounts. They had to learn to develop a defensive approach to their education due to these routine forms of state surveillance. 

It is hard to miss discrimination-based disparity between students and student groups whose speech is protected under university policies while other students and student groups are surveilled by police on their campus. And I'm sorry to report that rarely any protections have been offered by the universities to these students. In fact, following the damning report about N.Y.P.D. surveillance across New York and New Jersey and even as far as Philadelphia, the majority of the universities that were surveilled did not release a public statement in defense of their students. In 2012, the N.Y.P.D. Chief of the Intelligence Division admitted under oath that during his six year tenure, the surveillance programs did not yield a single criminal lead. But the lack of leads did not mean the surveillance had no impact. Across campuses, these programs led to the marginalization, racialization, and discrimination of Muslim and Arab students and shaped their access to educational and professional opportunities. 

In closing, I want to connect my remarks to a developing story at the University of Pennsylvania to understand how racialized discrimination based on the encroachment of foreign policy concerns are manifesting in higher education right now. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article, a progressive Jewish student group, Penn Chavura, screened the acclaimed documentary Israelism to a university audience through the university's Middle East Center. They had originally intended to screen it on October 28, but following the October 7 attacks, they moved their plan to November 28. In the wake of their screening, the university is now going to investigate whether a violation of the Code of Student Conduct occurred and whether the student group will lose funding. Relatedly and very unfortunately, the director of the Middle East Center has resigned in response due to pressure from administrators who allegedly directed these centers to cancel the screening. It's unclear if the disciplinary action will be directed at the students or the student group. 

I'm going to end with the words from Jack Starobin, a political science economics major at Penn and the student leader of this group, who states, "It's very stressful for us. It's also alarming to us that the university would double down in trying to restrict not just our freedom of speech, but the academic freedom of every student in student organization on campus." When student speech is based on foreign policy and national security objectives, we should all be adamant that our universities respond with declarative statements of how they will protect students' rights and freedom on campus. 

AD: Thank you so much. I'd like to bring up my other colleague across campus. Welcome Professor Lara Schwartz. She is a senior professorial lecturer here at American University and serves as the director of our Project on Civic Dialogue. She specializes in dialogue across differences, constitutional law, civil rights, politics, communications, and policy. Drawing on her experience as a legislative lawyer, lobbyist, and communication strategist in leading civil rights organizations, she is a great teacher. Lara encourages students to approach complex questions from multiple perspectives. She is the co-author of How to College, What to Know Before You Go, and When You're There, by St. Martin's Press in 2019. In her next book, Try to Love the Questions, from Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms of Life will be released in early 2024. Professor Schwartz, join me. Thank you so much. I'm grateful to be here. 

Lara Schwartz: Here's a good tip-- I used to be a ghost writer-- start with a quote that's a little better than your own writing, so I'm going to do that. "Had those who drew and ratified the due process clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew that times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress." So that's from Lawrence v. Texas. It's not a First Amendment case. It's a case striking down sodomy laws. For many of our undergrads, there was a time in the United States when consensual adult sex in the privacy of the home by gay people was illegal. It was a felony in multiple U.S. states. So why do I bring this up? Because times can blind us to certain truths and sometimes are more blinding than others. 

And my colleagues and I here were talking about these times that are more blinding, more blurring of our morals and our understanding of the world than others, and it seems like we're actually in tons of them right now, whether we call it "pandemic times" or "anti-democratic times" or "war times" or "war on terror times." Just pick your "times." We are in crisis and these are the times that it gets harder to honor our commitments to things like freedom of expression, to things like love and respect for the people around us. The hardest of all the academic disciplines is just not organic chemistry, it's listening. 

The university, I would say it was designed to be this listening space that inoculates us to these blinding times, but they were mostly designed to be places that you sent your second sons who couldn't inherit land to learn and do something, but they're supposed to have become something better. Most of us are here in a university space for that time-unblinding process of inquiry. And one of the things that's necessary for that is expressive freedom, freedom of inquiry, and academic freedom. 

So here at A.U. I've taken this very seriously. I was honored to serve on our committee that revisited and reinforced our freedom of expression guidelines. And it was a hard thing to do because it turns out expressive freedom is really hard. It involves a lot of junk, right? This marketplace of ideas sells a lot of junk. One of the things that's great about academia is that out in the marketplace there's no protections for things that are junk, things that poison you. That's our political landscape, Twitter, all of this. But in academia we have these standards, right? All of these scholars here. Whether it's sociology or anthropology or history or education or law, we have these standards for sorting through all of these hard ideas that come to us and coming to answers. It's one of the reasons actually that universities are often under fire, right? Because people have conversations here that are brave and people have conversations here that often come to answers that do not please our political leaders. 

So expressive freedom is necessary to this. To have these conversations, we need to not be impeded by the cops, whether the cops are the actual cops or they are our board of trustees or our president and our president's cabinet and our donors. And I probably here mentioned the Palestine Exception to free speech and so I think my best use of my moment is to say, what is this an exception to? What is this free speech thing that this exception has been carved out from? And the free speech that we're supposed to have is that the institution doesn't exclude us whether in our individual form of our speaking on campus, in our social media, or in our lives. It doesn't take any scholar and say: "the research that you do that meets the standards of your discipline can't be done here nonetheless because we don't like what you learned." And that viewpoint alone isn't going to dictate how your speech is treated on campus, in your related work or scholarship, or in your life. 

Now, how do you carve out a Palestinian exception? How do you do that? That sounds hard. You do it a couple of ways. One is that you weaponize the permissible regulations that we have on speech which are called time, place and manner restrictions and conduct rules. So the idea is, it's not hostile to our idea of free speech on campus that we can't use a megaphone in Letts Hall after 10 pm. That's just a time, place and manner restriction. But if we said that the pep band that we don't have can use it but the grad students union can't use a megaphone at that time, that would be viewpoint discrimination. 

Our institution and many institutions understand they're not supposed to commit viewpoint discrimination, so they can leverage things like this resolution or things like overbroad definitions of material support for bad stuff to try and translate viewpoint into conduct. So that's one thing that has been done, just attempts to translate viewpoint into conduct. I understand I'm not supposed to call out specific campuses, but you might notice there have been some campuses that have said, "oh, it's not that we have a speech code, it's just that they did an antisemitism by using these words." 

And it's like, you're going to have to just admit to having a speech code because that is just purely speech. Another is to change your conduct regulations, which a few campuses have done, too. Say, "we know that we can exclude people from gathering in a certain space to do the kind of protest and student engagement they've done forever because it's just a time, place, manner restriction. It just so happens, coincidentally, we're going to do it right now because of the specific group that's doing that and then we can punish them for that conduct."

So everybody feels really good because I just spoke very nicely to everybody's sense of self-righteousness about how great and not implicated in this they are. The bad news is when you invite me it's always going to go wrong. And here's the thing. There's another thing, and it's this. There's another thing that's been weaponized. And I am not one of these people that harbors a false sense that there's an equivalence between student activism and actual state legislatures across the country banning books, banning ideas, banning people, banning boycotts. There just isn't, right? That's a culture war, moral panic nonsense. But there are some students in the room, there are some faculty in the room, there's some people involved with campuses. If you've been asking colleges to ban any kind of speech, you've been involved in this illiberal thing that now is feeding and nourishing the Palestine exception to free speech. If you don't like the Palestine exception of free speech, then get on board with free speech. When you weaponize the administration to punish and exclude people, they're going to come after the people with the least power. It has always been us.  

AD: Thank you. Thank you. Good question. We were very happy that you joined our panel. Thank you. And last, but definitely not least is a dear colleague also across the way in D.C., Dr. Dwayne Wright. He is an assistant professor of higher education administration and director of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. His research and social activism seek to advance educational opportunity and equity for all students, particularly those historically oppressed and marginalized in American society. His areas of empirical research interest include access, diversity and equity policies for underserved populations in higher education, the use and influence of social science research in or on the law, undergraduate and professional multicultural Greek life, and critical race theory and critical pedagogy and post -secondary education. His legal research interests focus primarily on education law, First Amendment jurisprudence, and American equal protection theory. Dr. Wright is currently licensed to practice law in New York and New Jersey. Please join me in welcoming Professor Wright. 

Dwayne Wright: Thank you and good afternoon. It is wonderful to be here with you, wonderful to be here for this conversation. I have the unimbulable position of going last today, which is difficult because you've heard a lot of great information from this panel and I am what's standing between you and your questions. So I will try to go as succinct as possible, but there are a few things that I would like to say. I begin with two caveats, particularly for this conversation, but not exclusively for this conversation. 

Number one, I do not have any answers. A smart person once told me, "all regret is based on expectations." So if you came here seeking answers, let me pop that bubble right now, because you're not gonna get it from me. I'm only here to be part of a conversation, and I invite you to have that conversation with us when the Q and A comes. Number two caveat is I really want you to hear me. Not just listen, but hear me. I may say some things that you disagree with, And that is fine, because disagreement is not just necessary, but it is one. Before you get to that mindset where you disagree, I just want you to hear what I say, because a lot of us just aren't hearing each other, alright?  What I do want to talk to you about is simply good teaching and learning. I want to tell you why these resolutions discourage good teaching and learning. I want to just give a warning for the times and say how what's going on right now is part of a trend. 

So I come from higher education, I am a higher educator, I study higher education, I teach people that will get a degree in higher education. And as an educator, the best teaching does two things, and it goes to something that Thea was talking about. It balances two traditions: the traditions of safety and challenge. Psychological safety and intellectual challenge. In order for my students to learn, they need to be safe enough where they're out of fight and fight response, right? But they need to be challenged enough to grow. A little bit too close to safety and the student learns nothing. A little bit too close to challenge and the student won't be in the mindset to actually sink in what you want them to learn, no matter what you teach them.  

Many of you here today are here today because you chose what? Challenge, right? You chose that, you didn't know what was gonna be said today. You probably had an idea. You looked at the panelists' names, you made an assumption, but you didn't know. You didn't know how this was gonna affect your day. But you decided to come here despite it. There's a young lady at home right now that chose psychological safety, I don't know her name, but when she was, she was tired of having to completely and utterly intellectualize genocide when people like her are dying every day. She chose safety and she's gonna miss out on this conversation. There's a young man at home right now that says, you know, I'm not gonna go to this conversation because I am tired of listening to another panel where folks are gonna quote unquote "justify the actions of a terrorist." 

And the reason I put "terrorist group" in quotation marks is not because I don't believe Hamas is a terrorist group, it actually does not matter what I believe, it's how the student gets to that conclusion on their own. That, my friends, is good teaching. That, my friends, is good learning. 

America started off with the greatest riot, the greatest rebellion of all times called the Boston Tea Party. You understand, when you get power, you can name your riots "tea parties" and then write off people's riots, rebellions, and terrorist groups and other things, right? Because the power is within the label. 1.7 million, nearly close to two million pieces of tea and property were thrown over to start this. So you said, well, Dr. Wright, are you comparing Hamas to the Patriots? No, I'm not. But that would be a really interesting conversation to have in the classroom. Wouldn't it be nice to have a space where that conversation could actually happen? 

Now, bringing it back to these resolutions, there are three reasons why these resolutions do not actually help us when it comes to teaching and learning. One: it says to teachers: forget challenge, go all safe. It then goes further. Two: it says to teachers: privilege someone's psychological intellectual safety over others’. And then it makes the classroom unsafe for those teachers to actually execute that. Therefore there is no balance between safety and challenge. So there is no learning going on. Let me take all three of those things in common. Why does it say to an intellectual space? And again, teaching is not just in the classroom, right? Teaching is everything that goes in the co-curricular. The organization that puts on this event is teaching. I am teaching right now. Your teachers are teaching. But when from the aisles of the U.S. Congress, you say to somebody, "not only if you go and dissent on an issue, not only are you intellectually wrong, but you're un-American as well." So  how do I make space for a conversation? How do I make space for critical thinking? 

Really, the straight aisles of power are telling me what to think. Again, it's defeating good teaching and learning. Again, what you're saying to students who have never felt psychologically safe on a predominantly white campus is "your safety doesn't matter." If someone else's safety must be privileged, you're saying you don't care about their learning. Because once again, you have to balance psychological safety and intellectual challenge to get to learning. So when they say you're not even allowed to put up your flag, and then you must actually march to someone else's flag, when they say we will suspend your groups, yet the other groups that represent the other side of the situation don't get punished for anything, you have decided to choose one student's learning over the other. And finally, the last thing they're doing is you're saying to professors, some might have protection of tenure, some might have nice and fancy titles: "You are not responsible for the classroom. We are. Your expertise means nothing." I told you that psychological safety balance when challenges just happen for our students happens for us as well. I am not a foreign policy expert. My expertise is education. And because of the emotional toll of this conversation, I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stick to education in my comments today. I chose safety, but I'm still here speaking the truth. 

Today, under the eyes of this revolution, speaking the truth has become a challenge. It has become what's morally expected. What's seen as morally wrong is challenging your institution because your job might be on the line. For movie stars, your career might be on the line. The way you feed your kids might be on the line while we're watching 6,000 kids die over in Gaza. Now, I'll wrap up right here by saying the warning. The warning is to see this as an isolated incident. But the organization is putting this on as the Antiracist Center. So what does this have to do with race? Well, there were a lot of people called terrorists before. The freedom riders and the people that were sitting in the counters in the South were called terrorists. And there were some resolutions that came out of the South, and those resolutions said that they condemn the actions of people that went on to be called so-called American heroes, like John Lewis and Brian Rustin. 

So what we're seeing is not just a weaponization of antisemitism, Lara put that very correctly, but the weaponization of truth in and of itself. Ignorance is being weaponized, and therefore in Florida, you can't teach critical race theory. History is being weaponized, and therefore, people don't want you to teach African American history. You understand? Everything is being weaponized. And I'll leave you-- and I don't usually do this, so this is a gift-- with a word of hope. 

And the word of hope here is, this is how empires act right before they fall. If you look at the fall of Russia, If you look at the fall of the Soviet Union, if you look at the fall of any empire, it's the insecurity of your ontological power and the fact that that is going away that makes you start acting more like Babylon than like Zion. 

AD: Thank you. From Professor Abu El-Haj to Professor Wright and all of my colleagues here who have spoken today, please join me in offering one more strong, enthusiastic round of applause. 

So, in moderating the question and answer session, we wanted to make sure that we created space student leaders across our campus to be able to pose questions to our panelists first. So panelists with permission of yours, I'm going to pose three questions from three different student groups here and I'm hoping that you each will be able to offer a comment to at least one of the questions that our student leaders have posed. And then with some brief comments on your end, then we'll be able to open up for some questions from the audience that is assembled here today. 

The first question is submitted by campus leaders from Students for Justice in Palestine. Their question is, "students who support Palestine around the country have come under attack, including the shutdown of the George Washington University, S.J.P. chapter. What protections do we have as student groups against administration who make decisions seemingly behind closed doors and without proper consideration of official policies?" 

Question two, submitted by the Muslim Student Association leaders: "After September 11th, we saw a rise in surveillance within the country. Arabs and Muslims started being hyper aware of the phrases that they could and could not say, noticing their phones being tapped or wired and even started to see suspicious vans parked outside of their mosques and their homes. What do you expect the heightened surveillance to look like this time around? And what do you believe the lifelong implications that will leave on Muslims and Arabs?" 

And then question number three, submitted by student leaders from Jewish Voices for Peace: "How can students help professors talk about Palestine and feel comfortable talking about Palestine and help protect Arab and Muslim professors who are being targeted about their views on Palestine?" Professor Abu El-Haj, do you mind starting your remarks first and then we'll allow the panelists that assembled here to use your question that you would like to respond to?

TE:  I'm going to say one quick thing in response to S.J.P. and J.V.P. because I think they're related. What I would say to S.J.P. is find your allies among professors. Columbia is one of the universities that has banned S.J.P. and J.V.P. and our faculty has been very active in pushing, along with student groups, for a change. The other smart thing that happened at Columbia is that a lot of other student groups pledged to support S.J.P. and J.V.P. if they got shut down. So, I know different places are doing differently, but a lot of universities are using administrative rule changes to enforce these bans. For us it was that suddenly there's a 10 day requirement to register any kind of gathering. So find your allies. And that also goes for J.V.P.. I think it's really, really important that there are clear anti-Zionist Jewish voices in this fight. 

And although I think this is some of the worst restrictions of speech I've seen in my many decades in the U.S. now, the change is that there's a lot more activism. When I was an undergraduate, there was nobody who would stand up with me on these issues. Literally nobody on my campus. And so I think you have a lot of power with professors, many of whom you can get to because they sign statements, you can tell who they are. 

MD: I think my response to the three questions speaks to all three questions in a way, which is the importance of recording and archiving the various kinds of communications that you are engaging in right now, especially those that are public facing. I would advise having a community archive amongst the student groups for exactly this reason, to have a record for yourselves in terms of what's happening. So that way, if there's any kind of conversations that are happening, there is a record to go to. Because too often with student groups, things are organized last minute, so there might not be that record-keeping practice, but it's really important in this moment. 

LS: Campus specific, I would say, familiarize yourself with the policy on freedom of expression and dissent that was adopted last year and the conduct code. Have an incredibly precise understanding of the possible touch points where the institution could attempt to exercise its power. There have been times when this institution has attempted to exercise its power in violation of its commitments, such as when it investigated W.C.L. students for absolutely protected speech in the context of a group chat. We're there for you. It is my position, based on helping to write it and reading it, that our code of protection for speech and dissent would not permit A.U. to exclude a group for what A.U. decides is unfavorable speech. Conduct codes can be weaponized, so know them, but this institution has committed to freedom of expression, association, dissent, and inquiry, and come find me if they try something. 

WY: Just to add something to that, you have to know the code and the regulations because one problem is selective enforcement of rules. So student organizations will break the rules all the time, and sometimes pro-Palestinian organizations see that and don't think that there might be a violation of regulations, they just do what every other student org does, but then they get nailed on the technical violation of the procedure or whatever. So I would also just try to document that stuff as much as possible. Use what outside of campus resources are available on top of what's inside. So Palestine Legal is an organization that does a lot of representation for S.J.P. specifically. They are a very good resource. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has a network of pro-bono lawyers. All these organizations by the way are stretched very thin, so don't put all your eggs in that basket. 

I did want to say one thing which is that the power of groups like S.J.P and J.V.P. is their diversity. It totally sets them apart as dynamic organizations. They're not limited, they're not narrowed organizations and what I'm afraid of is if we let the dominant sort of logic of surveillance and of repression-- if we internalize that too much as student groups, then we lose that openness to new people. We might see each new potential member as a potential agent or an informant and that is hugely destructive and corrosive to what makes these organizations so powerful. Sometimes I do say we have to err on the side of trust. I like the idea of creating your own archive of your activities-- document everything that you do so that you can't be misrepresented. 

DW:  So I'll start in general and just say that if you're at a public university-- which most people in here aren't as American's not, GW's not-- you do have the Constitution on your side. For the moment, we still interpret the Constitution as a free speech Constitution, but that is rapidly changing. Well, the only thing I can say about that because this election coming up is probably one of the most important for the preservation of free speech and democracy. At a private institution, I think you have to hold the organization towards its hypocrisy. I know there are university administrators here. Please know I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the organization as a whole. The whole heart of critical race theory is not the criticism of individuals, but the criticism of systems and structures. And these systems and structures were not made to give you free speech. It was "free speech for me, something else for thee." And to think that we can sit at George Washington University, named after one of the most notorious slave holders, to think we could criticize America for being sexist, racist, patriarch, homophobic, and then go to American University and think everything's going to be hot and dandy, I'm going to version bubble again. That's not how life works. So I think you should actually use the fact that these organizations will not always stand up to their free speech policies against them. Highlight their hypocrisy. I have seen amazing work done in student newspapers and blogs. I've seen amazing interviews given by people half my age. 

The second thing is for us to help your professors, know that the classroom is yours as well as ours. You understand, if I put something pro-Palestinian on there, they're just going to label me antisemitic. If you come to me and say, well, Dr. Wright, why isn't that one there? I'm just helping a student, I'm helping a customer. So why don't you talk to your professors during the office hours? If you say "hey, here's an article" and they're going to include it, then you can get this conversation going. Or they don't, and that's another conversation in and of itself, right? Because most of the time, I tell you what, we're very lazy. I'm just going to include it. I don't want to, you know, not include it or I'm going to get labeled. It's probably just going to go in there. And half of the students don't even ask. Closed mouths won't get fed. 

The last thing I will say on this to S.J.P. and everyone else, is that you actually have to make good trouble. I think that what has happened to our student organizations is a pure travesty, but we need to, at least in this room, put our minds, it may be necessary, right? Dr. King wrote “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” when he talked about the moral of the universe being long,  injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, it wasn't “Letter from an Alabama Coffee Shop,” he had to actually go to jail to talk to white liberals about the hypocrisy of their policies. We have to sacrifice something. 

Now, protect yourself. We talked about psychological safety and challenge, right? I want everyone here to graduate. Don't sacrifice that. I want everyone here to actually graduate and have enough left to contribute to your family and community. Don't sacrifice that. But if you think we're gonna get to where we need to be without actually putting something on the line, that's a fantasy. So be ready to be in good trouble. 

AD: All right, so after that, I'm gonna go to the room and I'm gonna try and entertain two or three questions, rapid fire, one and two, and then I'm gonna invite the panelists to make some comments to those questions. 

Roger: My name is Roger. I'm an intercultural and international communications student. I have the pleasure to see my professor sitting on this panel. The question that I wanted to ask is, well, basically, I was doing a little bit of research and a semite is a member of any of the people who speak in a Semitic language, where the Afro-Asiatic language family of languages that include Arabic, Amaric, Tigrinia, Hebrew, Tigray, Aramaic, and Maltese, which includes both Jews and Arabs. So why is antisemitism used only to encapsulate the struggle for Jewish people and what are the communicative implications of limiting the word to a specific group?  

Reba: My name is Reba, and this question is for everyone, but especially Professor Schwartz, I'm actually registered for your class next semester on mediation. So I just wonder, especially in the academic sense, how mediation might cross the line into performative advocacy, and how as professors, you're sometimes fortunate to position and make your students professionalize or academicize their advocacy, and how do you draw the line between mediation and advocacy? All right, colleagues, who would like to start with some responses to question one or two? 

AD: All right, colleagues, who would like to start with some responses to question one or two? 

WY: I think for the question by Roger, I wanted to say that this is not my expertise, but my basic understanding is that antisemitism was a reference to an actual European movement of anti-, directly, profoundly anti-Jewish politics and practices. And so for antisemitism to become to be construed as that label as an adoption of this European logic and rhetoric.  We don't have a unique term for anti-Arabism– we have Islamophobia, which is different of course. I think in talking about these European logics that we operate under, we can reimagine ways that create solidarity between these groups. The historical experiences of both groups within this country and others have been different, so labels have evolved over time. We can continue to evolve in order to reimagine and build solidarity.

MD: So I was gonna just add a little bit to that, just to think about race across context. And so similarly, thinking about anti-Jewish racism as it manifested in Europe, and as it manifests in other contexts in different formations, in different relationships to the state. That's connected to what I was talking about today in regards to the racialization of Muslims here. And in my work where I'm looking at the racialization of students in the U.S., it's a very different context of the way that racialization looks in Pakistan, where the majority of the country is Muslim, and so then particular ethnic minorities become racialized as potential terrorists. So that's just to say that race is always situated in its own context, historically, geographically, and we have to think about our definitions of racism in relation to the history and the context in which it's occurring. 

LS: So just a quick thing on mediation class, which I think there are still spots in. We do have some other dialogue offerings as well. Mediation is a method of facilitating agreement among disputing parties and the class is going to be a practicum in learning some of the techniques that mediators meaning a neutral person that doesn't have the power to issue a decision like a judge does, but it is vested with the the privilege to get to to disputing people talking to each other and try and find common ground and possible solutions between them. So it's not a class about fomenting structural change in your legislature, though it very well could be, because this method has been used for everything from divorce and custody disputes to bilateral negotiations between sovereign nations, and the theory behind it is about the same. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have you mediating a dog custody dispute among a breaking up couple, so it might be a little bit of a break from some of your other heavier course work. 

DW: So very quickly because I have no knowledge about the class, I just will say that there does need to be a balance between advocacy and anything we can do. I think we need to recognize that we need both, that it's not a "either or," it's a "both and." We need people who will come and learn the Queen’s English and understand the interest convergence or compromise, and we need the people that will continue to have conversations with people on the street. The beautiful thing about the George Floyd protest was that it wasn't just academics that were saying Black Lives Matter, it was all types of people. So I don't really see a conflict there. 

AD: So on a university campus in another two weeks, we're about to have a large group of people with a whole lot of extra time on their hands. What book would you recommend to this room to continue self study and exploration of the topics and ideas that you have brought with us this afternoon? 

DW: I can't do one. That's impossible. The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee,  because I think that we're really thinking that this pie is a one type pie, you understand. And I think while we're fighting for the crumbs, we need to be fighting for the table. The Racial Muslim, Sahar Aziz. who is a brilliant scholar out of Rutgers doing lots of work and fearless on these issues. And I think if you're trying to understand, you know, how a religion becomes a race of ethnicity, Sahar has done amazing work. And then finally, I forget the author's name, but he's at Georgetown. It's called Elite Capture [by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò]. And the thing about intersectionality, you know, what intersectionality is, is not just a system, but it's a warning. It's a warning for those of us that are privileged not to forget those of us that aren't. And what I find in particularly the African American community on this are certain people that are economically privileged don't see that they need to actually have solidarity with Palestine. And I think that's a little bit of Elite Capture, that they're forgetting where they came from.  

WY: The Rise of the Urban American Left: Activist Allies in their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s to 1980s by Pamela Pennock. 

LS: So on the issue of free speech on campus, there's a great book called Campus Misinformation by Bradford Vivian, who teaches at Penn State. It really tells you more about the kind of free speech moral panic than I think you're ever going to find elsewhere. You should read anything by James Baldwin, but in particular read on Notes of a Native Son, read an essay called “Stranger in the Village” to sort of fill out your sense. It really resonates the idea of how contextual racialization is and identity is. 

And the third thing for a downer is, read Korematsu v. U.S., the Supreme Court decision that upheld the internment camps for Japanese American citizens, and you can go see the memorial on Capitol Hill. You want to understand where you live and what people who are supposedly the "smartest" people and authority came up with and how easy it was for them to write garbage and make it law, and what you're up against. 

TE: I'm also going with three, two on Palestine. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine. It's an old book, but it needs to be read. My colleague, Rashid Khalidi's book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, also for context is super important. And then I really highly recommend Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion, which helps us think about the limits of tolerance discourses. I think it's a really important book. 

MD: I was also going to recommend Professor Khalidi's book, so I would definitely recommend The Hundred Year War on Palestine. And the other book that I wanted to recommend is Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs as a salve to this moment in another way of thinking right now.

AD: Professor Kaplan, I turn it back to you.

SK: I will resist from adding books to the list. As you all know, it's a huge thing to ask for a professor standing in front of a room not giving you more things to read. But I will say this: I'm going to end this panel here, and I'm going to end it one with a deep, deep thanks to everyone who helped organize this event and put it on at a time when I think we all are aware events like this can feel a little scary, both in whether they will happen and what will happen if they happen. 

Who will be hurt, who will be happy, who will be okay at the end of the day. I want to actually recognize that this is not an easy time on any college campus. It has not been for quite a while, but there are many campuses where this event would not have taken place today. I appreciate being on a campus where it did. That means something, especially for somebody who came all the way from a big radical public university across the country to A.U.. It means a lot that this event happened here today and that it had the support of administration at all levels. 

These panelists, I want to thank you so much for being here and also point something out in terms of the question that you were asking me about advocacy versus scholarship and learning. I think one of the things that's at the heart of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center and our statement on free expression of political speech. I went to Peter Starr and Max Friedman who were the Dean and Provost at that time and said, "I don't know what to do, we're not supposed to put out political speech under the letterhead of any academic unit on campus, but I'm an antiracist research and policy center. Everything we do is political speech. What do I say?" And I want to really thank you for your support and point to the ways  I believe that this panel has evidenced the capacity for rigorous, critical, intellectual engagement and debate to also be a site where the changemakers that we pride ourselves in at A.U. on creating, develop not only tools to investigate or to be informed, but also to be empowered to actually produce social change in the ways that they choose to do so. 

That said, we do take that empowerment very seriously. Thank you all for being here and as you may know, A.R.P.C. has made a commitment this year that we will be continuing where we don't just have panels that give you information, we try to actually give you resources coming out of it. 

So just like we are currently finalizing our toolkit for organizers around turning the U.S. Farm Bill toward racial justice, we will also be coming out with a resource guide online related to this event around questions of free expression, Palestine, antisemitism, and freedom on college campuses. It will include all of the books recommended by our speakers. It will include the text of these two resolutions as well as the new senate resolution 888, the A.D.L. and Brandeis Center's statement to university presidents and a variety of resources including tools for student organizers who are seeking answers to some of the questions you had today around maintaining free expression. 

So that will take a while but it is coming as all of our toolkits do. They take a while to turn all of our academic language into things that are actually accessible and usable, but we do have that commitment. Thank you all. We look forward to seeing you at our spring events. Take care and have a good day.