Just when you think about it You will never laugh again, Columbia students pick up a new reason: freedom of speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newly discovered First Amendment champions really mean it, and their next move is to advocate for the Zionist speech (probably by them) to regulate and demand that his right to free expression be maintained? Magic 8 Ball says: Don't count on it.
Two kinds of speeches are often reviewed on university campuses: anything that may fall into the taxonomy category of “hatred” and some factual statements can cause pain to community members. The vague goal is the life of students, in which the feeling of "orthodox" and "inclusion" are extremely important and actively cultivated. Students are beginning to understand that college campuses are a place where a frustrating word will never be heard.
Observers question whether these institutions are instilling students’ vulnerability rather than resilience. whether. Protesters in Colombia seem to be struck by the idea that speech may be a form of violence. But they are nothing fragile. Casting an activity that includes the murder of a child as an act of "armed resistance" requires cool calculations. (What exactly did Hamas resist among those kids?)
My tolerance for student protests is high, even if the cruel cost of colleges turns many of them into bourgeois decadent exercises. But protests in Colombia are different from past campus uprisings. They exposed the entire “attribution” and “inclusive” system to deal with offensive rhetoric. The intimidation and harassment that Jewish students experienced over the past year and a half should be enough to remind certain cavalrymen, but Jewish students are among the only religious minority that is not protected by them. (A regular conversation point from the camp last year was that there was no reason for college Jewish students to feel harassment or intimidation by protests, an claim that at best it was ignorant and at worst sinister.)
And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.
Until my bones and marrow, I am American. And we don't.
Everything that failed In American universities, it failed due to opposition to freedom of speech. It was a sad subject for me because I was almost a kid in the UC Berkeley Free Speech movement, which started when I was 3 years old, with thousands of teachers among them. The movement follows an earlier struggle for free expression: the oath of the struggle against anti-communist loyalty, which teachers and faculty must sign from 1949. As a girl, I know adults who suffer from the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was Charles Muscatine, my father’s colleague in the UK department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches in Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn't have an autograph:
"It's against academic freedom, and it's the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers can express and believe everything they think is real," he said. "As a young assistant professor, I've been insisting on holding on to my own guns to children, you tell you in your own way, you think yourself, you express things yourself, I feel like if I'm not doing the same, I really can't tell me. So I can't sign the vow."
Muscatin knew he might lose his job because of this, but he was a principled man who was willing to leave college after being fired. A dramatic legal battle occurred in which the causes of academic freedom conflicted with the intimidating beating of the Red, and in 1952, the First Amendment won a huge victory. Many fired teachers, including Muscattin, returned to college.
More than a decade later, the second battle at Berkeley (not being forced to speak but freedom of expression itself) will forever change the nature of campus life. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who went to Mississippi for the Free Summer return to campus, eager to tell their California counterparts what happened in the South. Students set up tables near Sproul Plaza and, like now, are a place for students to live. They were told to disband; political speeches were not allowed.
The university’s intention was obviously to squeeze anything that might encourage racial tension, and it clearly asserted that it did not have the power. As students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, universities are public institutions that when they boarded campus, they did not lose their constitutional rights. The university government has no honest way to resist this challenge, and students win.
I grew up with a man’s daughter, a man like Muscatin, who also saw the battle in World War II, and he stood firmly on the side of the free speech movement, and his belief in the university’s commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I know that searches for truth must always be protected, and I know that tenure is not a lovely deal, promising lifelong employment, but rather ensuring that no matter what political pressure it puts on the scholar and his work, he will not lose his job. If students and teachers cannot speak, write and think freely, then a university is an imitation of what should be.
One night last spring, Dozens of protesters in Colombia have participated in the long tradition of occupying Hamilton Music Hall. (Ask about how many of these people are actually Colombia and its affiliates.
Two of the three men - Mario Torres and Lester Wilson The New York Times In the article on May 8, 2024. Torres worked on the third floor of the building when he heard the commotion below. He found five to six protesters blocking the stairs with chairs. Since Lionel Trilling took his last shot, he was the best employee at Columbia University and was back home forever, Torres said: "What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?"
Torres said he was told he didn't make enough money to get involved and got "fist cash" to look at it in another way.
Torres replied, "Man, I don't want your money. Leave the building."
It's a confrontation between Ivy League values and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand in that particular game.
In an interview eraTorres said he was injured in the incident and called public safety personnel innocently for help when he told Colombia: "I can't believe they would let this happen."
Wilson was another maintenance worker, but went downstairs to find the main door had been zipped. "So, I beg them," Wilson said. Eventually, someone cuts his tie and allows him to leave (and is soon allowed to leave afterward). When the maintenance staff must beg for their own freedom, his fate is in the hands of the people who must be cleaned up on his mess, and you have to doubt whether these people are simply not on anything.
Torres and Wilson reported things we had never heard of before in a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently investigated their claims: Long before the spring of 2024, they were again ordered to remove swastikas on Columbia University’s whitewash. I don't want to believe the testimony of these two hard-working people.
Believe in freedom of speech It means that even if the relevant speech is for you, you support the reason. In an inappropriate way, you have almost all these situations. This is how you keep your account clean yourself. So, I'm by Mahmoud Khalil.
To some extent, any layman could understand the scope of the legal issues in his case (including anti-communist laws in the 1950s, and the obvious uncertainty of the extent to which non-citizens have the right to amend the first, it is clear that the government is eager to relate Khalil to the qualitative qualities of his political speech. The two-page memorandum of Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Khalil, released earlier this month, did not accuse any criminal activity.
However, Khalil believes that the genocide position in Gaza is exactly the kind of possible objectionable but protected remarks the United States aims to tolerate. Since the 18th century, our country has the legal right to freedom of speech, and nonetheless, we have not become great. We are the successors to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky.
If the United States seems to be folding its tent, then look up. Once you become part of the greatest idea in world history.