The Princeton, New York and California Pro-Palestinian Students are Suspended for Using a Tent at the Campus of Columbia University

At Princeton, where two graduate students were arrested and suspended from campus for setting up tents, faculty members signed a letter condemning their punishment and demanding their reinstatement. More than 300 professors at Yale signed a letter in support of the protesters, calling on university leaders to remove charges against them and not punish them.

Students who sign a form promising to stay out of trouble by the end of the year will not be punished for their participation in the camp. The document states that students who are already facing discipline for previous violations may not be eligible for the same deal.

At New York University, there was a renewed pro-Palestinian camp on Monday. It didn’t call in the police for the second time in a week to clear the camp because it was moving forward with its punishments against students who didn’t follow the rules.

At Princeton University in New Jersey, a group of protesters briefly occupied Clio Hall, home of the graduate school, on Monday night. There were 13 people that were arrested, including five undergrads, six graduate students, one professor and one person not affiliated with the university. All those who have been arrested have been banned from the campus. The students will face university discipline which could include suspension or expulsion, said the president of Princeton in a statement.

The pro-Palestinian protesters who took over a building on the campus of the Columbia University early Tuesday were arrested in California, as police in other states began arresting other protesters that had taken over buildings and threatened to do so at others.

Palestine will live forever. “Go away, yo.” “Free, free Palestine.” “Free, free, free Palestine.” “Shut it down.” “Palestine will be free.” “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

Protesters in the Portland State University Building on Monday night protested to Israel’s War Crimes and the Security of the University Campus

Protesters wearing helmets and safety glasses barricaded the entrance to the building. Those inside stacked chairs and tables at the entrance. A protester took a hammer to smash the glass part of a door. The protesters appeared to have free rein of the building.

In Portland demonstrators on Monday seized control of the library at Portland State University, where some had spray-painted words such as “Free Gaza,” a sign declared “Glory to Our Martyrs,” and activists called for the university to cut all ties with Boeing, which has supplied weaponry to Israel’s military.

Bob Day, the chief of the Portland Police Bureau, estimated on Monday night that perhaps 50 to 75 protesters were inside the building. Officials urged protesters to leave the area and warned that those involved could face criminal charges.

Just outside, about a dozen faculty in yellow and orange safety vests also stayed behind, with several saying that they planned to remain overnight to make sure their students’ right to protest was respected.

“We have begun suspending students as part of the next phase of our efforts to ensure the safety of our campus,” Ben Chang, a spokesman for the university, said.

“We’ve been asked to disperse, but it is against the will of the students to disperse,” she said. “We do not abide by university pressures. We act according to the will of the students.

One of the faculty and staff members guarding access to the tents were Elga Castro, a professor in the Spanish department at Columbia’s sister school. “I have my opinions on Gaza and Palestine, but I am mainly here to protect my students,” she said.

Taking a stand against the anti-democratic actions of students and the administrations: An anthropology professor’s encounter with a campus protest

She says if you’re not taking care of it when it’s needed, then it’s meaningless. The first thing to do is rebuild trust. And that trust takes a long time to build and repair.”

She says that the majority of schools have mechanisms in place to allow administrators and faculty to communicate about what’s happening. She says that administrations are ignoring that structure at many schools.

Mulvey says the principle of shared governance is a key to helping campuses move forward.

And faculty members at some schools — including Barnard, Emory, UT-Austin and Cal Poly Humboldt — are issuing votes and statements of no confidence in their presidents, over their response to campus protests.

The professors said that the use of policing, Penalization and Retributive to avoid protest or dialogue with students is no model for an educational institution.

Students have been arrested at campus protests in recent days. There is no exact count of how many professors have been arrested, but news stories and social media reports suggest the number is increasing.

“As a faculty expressly charged with teaching our students about these values in the pursuit of journalism and other expressions of public communication, we strongly dissent from these anti-democratic acts,” the Indiana professors wrote.

My job at this time of the year is to protect students and academic freedom. She said that she could do that better than they could. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing with faculty all over, both wanting to protect the students and wanting to call out administrations that are actually putting the students at risk.”

History professors at the University of Southern California and media school professors at Indiana University are two examples of people speaking up because of their subject matter expertise.

“I see it as my responsibility to speak up when I see harm being done to students and their rights being violated because I have a belief in freedom of speech and the foundation for a public education,” he said. I’m going to have to speak up for them in other ways if my voice isn’t enough.

When Phillips, an anthropology professor at IU, arrived at the site of the campus protest she recognized some of her students, “completely peaceful,” standing face-to-face with what she described as heavily armed riot police. She began walking towards them.

“My instincts just kicked in,” she told NPR on Monday. “And a few moments later, I found myself on the ground, handcuffed and being marched with some students and other faculty to a bus that was ready to take us away to the local jail.”

The students were protesting at Dunn Meadow, a university-designated assembly area since 1969 and the site of an encampment that the school administration banned in a widely criticized last-minute policy change.

A few days earlier, on Thursday, Indiana state and university police had arrested 33 people as they tried to disperse the crowd. Protesters quickly regrouped, and were alarmed to hear on Saturday that armed police were again gathered at the park.

She said that she might have been one of the protesters twenty years ago. She focused less on the Israel- Gaza conflict at the forefront of the demonstrations and more on the issue of higher education administrators delegicuping any kind of dissent.

In many other states, there are demonstrations calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to university investment in Israeli companies that do business in the U.S.

Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words

University Protests, Faculty Arrests Letters, and No-Confidence Votes: Columbia University students and faculty protesting against student protesters

Most of the people who were arrested on Saturday were charged with a crime. All were also handed slips of paper by university police banning them from school property for one year (with the exception of one organizer who was banned for five years).

The administration later said that students and faculty who were arrested can appeal their trespass warnings with university police, and will be allowed on campus to finish the semester while that process is underway.

Phillips plans to do so. She says that this last week of class is especially important for professors because they need to meet with students and administer finals. On Monday, her students presented their final projects on Zoom rather than in their classroom.

She said that the consequences of violating the ban could be worse than they are at the moment.

Protests at Indiana have continued, with demonstrators now also calling for the university’s president and provost to step down. An open letter has been signed by more than 800 current and retired faculty from the school.

It’s one of several schools around the country where professors are getting arrested at demonstrations, circulating letters in support of arrested protesters and holding no-confidence votes in their administrations.

Faculty members wearing orange vests formed a human wall at Columbia University’s entrance to the students’ camp as police tried to break it up on Monday. Professors at the university staged a campus walk out and chanted “hands off our students”.

“I feel like faculty are in triage mode right now,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). They’re helping the students. they’re dealing with the administration with no-confidence votes, but also trying to deal with the administration directly to get them to back off and do the right thing.”

Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words

A student wrestles with a protester: Professor Carolyn Fohlin and a student, charged with battery against a St. Louis county police officer

Several officers slammed Steve to the ground while arresting him at a campus protest at Washington University in St. Louis.

In a statement read by a student on Tuesday, Tamari said he was “body slammed and crushed by the weight of several St. Louis County Police officers and then dragged across campus by the police,” and remains hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand.

In one of the videos, economics Professor Fohlin asked the police officers if they were doing anything while they wrestled a protester to the ground. As she approaches, one officer grabs her by the wrist and flips her onto the sidewalk. A person is helping her zip-tie her hands behind her back.

Fohlin was later charged with battery against a police officer. Her lawyer, Gregory Clement, later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the arrest was misguided.

“Caroline Fohlin was not a protester at Emory on April 25,” Clement said. “She emerged from her office, concerned only about the treatment of students on the quad.”

The other professor was captured on camera urging bystanders to notify the philosophy department of her arrest as she was taken into custody.

McAfee later told 11Alive News that she was passing through the area of the protest when she came across cops “pummeling” a young protester, and stood nearby asking them to stop. She did not leave when police told her to, and was charged with disorderly conduct.

Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words

Steven Thrasher and the Educators for Justice in Palestine: Bringing About Democracy through the Student Encampment on Northwestern’s Campus

Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor and chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern University’s Medill School, has been acting in what he calls a role of faculty support for the student encampment on its Illinois campus.

He and members of the group Educators for Justice in Palestine went to work to make sure there were faculty available for bail support and to defend student protesters on site when the camp started.

“We’re making sure that there’s always four of us who are there, that the students know that we’re there,” Thrasher told NPR on Friday. We didn’t think we’d be in a human barricade position in the first 10 minutes.

Thrasher is willing to be arrested at protests. He hopes it doesn’t happen, but will put himself in harm’s way to make sure it doesn’t happen when he’s there.

“I would think that if I saw students who disagreed with me politically … He would intervene for them on their behalf. “But for me, it’s also, I’m supporting them in something that I think is very righteous, and I’m very proud of them.”

Several faculty members have said in speeches and social media posts that they fear they will lose their jobs or face other repercussions for speaking out.

Mulvey, of the AAUP, says it’s riskier for non-tenured professors to take a stand — and the long-term decline in tenure at American universities means that most do not have it. She said those dynamics damage democracy itself and the higher education institutions as well.

Mulvey thinks education can bring about the way forward. Thrasher, at Northwestern, agrees. He’s currently teaching a graduate seminar called “The Theater of Protest,” and accompanied his students to the encampment for a field trip during Monday’s class.

Like Thrasher, she says the best thing to come out of this turmoil is the deepening of solidarities within the community — she says she’s spent time with colleagues in ways she hasn’t in her more than two decades at the university, and seeing many newly emboldened to stand up for their beliefs.

“There’s definitely no more business as usual,” she says. “We have shown how important community is, but also how fragile it can be,” he said.

Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words

Up First Newsletter: Florida Abortion Ban Takes Effect; NYPD Breaks up Columbia Protests During the November 11 Session

She said that she believed most faculty would bend over backwards to fulfill their academic obligations to students.

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Beginning today, people can’t get abortions after six weeks of pregnancies except in rare circumstances. The Supreme Court upheld the repeal of the 15-week ban. Voters will have a chance in November to change this restriction after the state constitution is amended to include abortion rights. The ban affects pregnant people and abortion providers.

Source: Florida abortion ban takes effect; NYPD breaks up Columbia protests

The National Trust for Historic Preservation (Nt): A list of historic sites in the United States that aren’t deemed dangerous under the Biden administration

Marijuana is being reclassified into a less dangerous drug by the Biden administration. It’s currently classified as a Schedule I drug, the strictest category. Other Schedule I drugs include narcotics such as heroin and ecstasy. Marijuana would be reclassified as a lower-risk Schedule III drug, which would include tiank, Tylenol with codeine, and anabolic steroids.

If you fight with your sibling, be thankful that you don’t have to die. The sibling relationship is very serious for many birds. Birds kill their siblings after they hatch. Others spend their whole lives with their brothers or sisters and sometimes they even risk their life to help each other.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a list of America’s most important historic sites. Included on the list this year are Eatonville, the all-Black Florida town memorialized by Zora Neale Hurston, Alaska’s Sitka Tlingit Clan houses, and the home of country singer Cindy Walker.

The National Trust hopes the attention will help with efforts to revive certain historic places in the US.