Student groups call out U. of C. and UIC for restricting freedom of speech
When Youssef Hasweh got arrested for trespassing on his own college campus, he lost that “beaming sense of pride” he once felt for the University of Chicago.
“It’s a really weird time to be a UChicago student right now,” Hasweh said. “I feel like part of my love for the university has died.”
Hasweh, a Palestinian and Moroccan fourth-year student studying political science, was among the 26 students arrested last month by the University of Chicago Police Department during what he said was a peaceful sit-in objecting to the U. of C.’s alleged ties to weapons manufacturers supplying arms to Israel.
By arresting students instead of opening up a dialogue, the campus’s United for Palestine coalition said, the university stifled their freedom of speech in a move that contradicts the school’s reputation as being the “vanguard of free speech.”
University President Paul Alivisatos called protests and demonstrations an essential part of the university’s “culture of free expression” in an email to students a week before the sit-in.
“They reaffirmed that they stand with the right to expression and the right to protest and then within that same week, they arrested us,” said Hasweh, who now faces charges of trespassing, with a court appearance scheduled for Dec. 20. “We’re often seeing our side is the one that’s shut out.”
Law student Katja Stroke-Adolphe said the university refused a meeting to address student concerns over the university’s investments in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, during which more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct 7.
“That was the ask at the sit-in — if they had granted a public meeting, then students would have left. But they chose instead to arrest students rather than just meeting with them publicly,” Stroke-Adolphe said. “My understanding is that it doesn’t necessarily matter what we do, they respond with repression.”
In a statement, the University of Chicago said it told students multiple times to leave the building and that their activity constituted disruptive conduct under university policy.
Before the sit-in, Hasweh said the students understood that arrest was a “viable threat,” with most of them filling out arrest forms with contact information. But, based on the precedent of successful peaceful sit-ins at the U. of C. in the past, students didn’t think the situation would escalate as quickly as it did, he said.
“What is free speech if they won’t listen to what we say?” Stroke-Adolphe said. “What is free speech if they choose to threaten students with disciplinary action? They say they support free inquiry, but they refuse to even engage with our demands, and our demands are urgent.”
Similarly, Palestinian students and their allies at the University of Illinois Chicago have repeatedly criticized UIC’s decision to invest in activities and programs connected to Israel, including university-sponsored study abroad programs, because of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank and of UIC students who visit their families in that region.
“Our universities are like microcosms of the real world and if we get our universities to divest, what’s next … maybe our government,” said Jenin Zayed, a third-year student at UIC studying history and a board member of UIC’s Students for Justice in Palestine. “They (UIC) definitely know our presence. They definitely know that we’re here to talk to them and to try to get them to reach our demands even if they want to silence us.”
UIC’s administration didn’t respond to questions about students’ free speech but offered a statement saying, “UIC acknowledges that our community continues to experience pain and anguish resulting from the Middle East crisis.”
In the email statement, the administration added that it has worked diligently to increase awareness of comprehensive resources and safety measures to support students, faculty and staff.
Students for Justice in Palestine’s calls for divestment and its rallies are often met with silence, Zayed said.
At a recent board of trustees meeting for the entire University of Illinois system, a large swath of students inside the Isadore and Sadie Dorin Forum, including Mahdi Muhamad, a third-year student at UIC, chanted calls for UIC’s divestment from Israel.
Muhamad said that when students started calling on the administration to stand in solidarity with Palestinian American students, the board fell into an “awkward silence” until the students’ calls got louder and louder.
“They were just staring at us and ignoring us until we were eventually pushed out by police,” Muhamad said.
Cellphone footage from inside the meeting obtained by the Tribune shows students desperately pleading, “How many times do we have to yell for you to hear us?” while another student said, “Your money is murdering babies.” In the video, security guards tell students they’re “now trespassing.”
Jenin Alharithi, a senior public policy student at UIC and vice president of Students for Justice in Palestine, said the group shouldn’t have to create such a disruption to be heard.
“We are actually at the worst moment of Palestinian displacement and Palestinian deaths ever in history — call it for what it is; it’s genocide,” said Alharithi, who has family in the Israel-controlled Palestinian territory of the West Bank. “If people are not willing to see that or understand, that’s just a personal problem and they have underlying biases.”
Alharithi shared an email sent out by the University of Illinois System in March 2022 — during the height of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in more than 9,900 civilian deaths — showing support and solidarity for Ukrainians at University of Illinois’ campuses in Chicago, Springfield and Urbana-Champaign.
“We are deeply outraged by the unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine and the worsening humanitarian crisis facing the people there,” the March statement said. “We stand with the Association of Public & Land Grant Universities in sharply condemning the unnecessary use of force and calling for an end to this devastating conflict.”
Alharithi said that when the students are Palestinian or Muslim, even condemning the violence against their group is a big ask, noting that the mass email students and faculty members received in October regarding Israel and Gaza didn’t express adequate concern for Palestinians.
“In the past few days, we have watched the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza with great anguish and alarm. The unspeakable brutality of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians is simply horrifying. Such acts can never be justified and we condemn them in the strongest possible terms,” the university email said on Oct. 11.
The letter also expressed concern. “As the conflict continues, additional innocent individuals will be injured or killed in both Israel and Gaza. We are gravely concerned for Israelis and Palestinians who have been and may now be in harm’s way,” it said.
“There is a clear double standard,” Zayed said, noting that the climate on campus can be polarizing. “It’s really dehumanizing that my identity makes people so unbelievably angry to the point where three Palestinian boys are shot and a 6-year-old is stabbed to death.”
Protests over the Middle East conflict are occurring on college campuses nationwide, and the sheer volume of deaths of Palestinians and the number of displaced families in Gaza have heightened tension between administrators and students advocating for the Palestinian cause.
At Columbia University in New York, pro-Israeli students and pro-Palestinan students had dueling rallies in October, with each side calling on administrators to do more, and the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And over at Stanford, the university openly took a position of neutrality, telling students they should not expect frequent commentary from the school.
Meanwhile at UIC, Muhamad, who proudly wears the keffiyeh — a traditional white scarf woven with black threads that reflects Palestinian nationality — said he was initially nervous about displaying his heritage outwardly.
“The amount of side eyes I get on a daily basis is crazy. I’ll be walking and I can just feel the energy,” Muhamad said. “It doesn’t matter at this point. I’m going to keep it on. But ever since those three students in Vermont got shot (while wearing keffiyehs) my mom said, ‘You better not wear it every time you go out.’”
For students already on edge at the University of Chicago, a recent move by the administration didn’t help. On Nov. 29, members of United for Palestine wrote the names of Palestinian men, women and children who have been killed since Oct. 7 on wooden plaques and hung them on trees in the main quad. Stroke-Adolphe said the plaques were removed without warning the following day.
“Despite the university constantly saying that it values free expression, they took down our art that was memorializing the Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel,” Stroke-Adolphe said.
Gerald McSwiggan, the U. of C. ’s associate director for public affairs, said in an email that the administration removed the art because it went against guidelines that state art installations need to be approved and scheduled by UChicago Student Centers.
“A student group requested to utilize trees on the Main Quadrangles for an art installation and were informed that trees cannot be used for that purpose. The group declined an alternative location. As a result, the installation was set up without approval,” McSwiggan said.
Hasweh said the move reinforces the university’s suppression of free speech.
“We’re sacrificing a lot of time to create beautiful displays for what we’re feeling and the despair that should be felt by our entire community,” Hasweh said. “And then to have the display taken down is just the most encompassing image for what UChicago has become.”
Stroke-Adolphe, who is Jewish, said the U. of C. appears to enforce its policies differently when it comes to pro-Palestinian advocacy and that it is struggling to show “basic humanity.”
“I think that it should be a natural reaction of any human being who sees what is happening right now — the bodies, the children being murdered, the babies being murdered — to want to come out and say this is wrong,” she said.
The United for Palestine Coalition is demanding a meeting with Alivisatos and asking that the university’s investments are made public. In April, Amnesty International released a scorecard grading 10 of the largest university investment offices in the United States on their human rights due diligence processes when it comes to investments in venture capital. The U. of C. was one of seven institutions that received a failing grade.
“The stonewalling has been relentless,” said a fourth-year doctoral student at the U. of C. who was one of the 26 arrested and asked not to be named because of a pending court case. “We want to know the scope of investment in Israeli military or weapons manufacturers and the student government voted in support of divestment from Israel years ago, but the university ignores these things.”
McSwiggan said that “through a great deal of vigorous debate” spanning more than a century, the U. of C. developed a consensus against taking political stances on issues unrelated to its core mission.
“The university’s long-standing position is that doing this through investments or other means would only diminish the university’s distinctive contribution — providing a home for faculty and students to espouse and challenge the widest range of social practices and beliefs,” he said, citing a report written by a faculty committee in 1967 about the university’s role in political and social action.
The report states that the university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. This principle continues to guide the university’s approach against taking collective positions on political or social issues outside its core mission, including calls for divestment.”
Both student groups at UIC and the U. of C. noted that organization chapters like Students for Justice in Palestine have existed since well before Oct. 7 and have been trying to educate people about Israeli settlements and the occupation of Palestinian land for decades.
But the responsibility of activism can be a heavy load to carry when students are fighting both their educational institutions and society, said Alharithi.
“Just the act of saying ‘I’m Palestinian; I believe in the Palestinian cause’ on a college campus is resistance, and keeping the narrative alive that Palestine should be free and that we are fighting for an end to Israeli occupation is super powerful,” she said. “And even though the work can burn you out, I never want to let the movement die.”