At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, 11 students stand accused by the administration of assaulting college staff during Palestine solidarity protests in the last year. Yet there wasn’t any pushing, grabbing, nor any kind of harmful touching.
The alleged assaults occurred, according to internal disciplinary charges, because some of the students used a bullhorn to amplify chants and slogans calling for the school to divest from Israel’s military-industrial complex.
The students, in other words, could face expulsion on assault charges for making a noise and amplifying it using, perhaps second only to the placard, the most standard of protest equipment.
“I feel like this is kind of a humiliation ritual, to make us apologize for protesting our college’s complicity.”Swarthmore, a Quaker-founded private liberal arts college, prides itself on a legacy of promoting social justice. In the last year, however, the school has followed the trend throughout higher education in meeting protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza with extraordinary repression.
In framing students as potential assault perpetrators for using a bullhorn, Swarthmore may even be raising the bar in punishing routine — even sometimes celebrated — protest activities.
“I feel like this is kind of a humiliation ritual, to make us apologize for protesting our college’s complicity and investment in genocide,” said Fatima, a Swarthmore senior and core organizer with the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of online harassment. Fatima, among the students charged with assault for using a bullhorn, said, “It’s heinous and it’s ridiculous.”
A first-generation, low-income undergraduate, Fatima told me she feels she has been specifically targeted as a Arab Muslim student in a vulnerable economic circumstance. She said that many of the students facing disciplinary charges for their involvement in SJP are Black and brown.
“Swarthmore College is deeply committed to freedom of expression, including the freedom to protest and dissent peacefully,” said Alisa Giardinelli, the assistant vice president for communications at the college. “While we do not publicly discuss specific student conduct cases, I can confirm for you that in May, the college issued charge letters to students alleged to have violated a number of campus policies in the fall and early spring.”
The students, and the faculty defending them, attributed an uptick in disciplinary charges to a “Palestine exception” to free speech.
“According to our last........