University of Michigan is disciplining 11 students for free speech

Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council Statement on Charges Brought Against University of Michigan Students

Dear Interim President Grasso and University Regents:

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace protests the disciplinary charges now being brought against eleven students by the University of Michigan (U-M) for exercising rights of expressive freedom in support of the Palestinian struggle for survival and human rights. These charges allege disciplinary infractions largely under the new policies for Student Rights and Responsibilities, implemented by the Regents over faculty objections last year.   

The charges concern four different protests and events that took place in 2024. Many of the students who are charged were victims of the University of Michigan campus police raid on the U-M Encampment on May 21, 2024 at 5:30 AM which sent multiple protestors to the hospital with concussions and broken bones. It is our understanding that, following the failure of U-M to get criminal charges to stick on student and staff activists in the recent past, the U-M Office of Student Conflict Resolution (OSCR) is likely to impose its own sanctions on students.  These could range from disciplinary probation to a lifetime ban on re-enrolling at University at Michigan.  Such actions, if left to stand, will have grave implications for these individual students’ futures as well as for the principles that permit protest on campus. 

The possibility of OSCR sanctions is especially disturbing in light of other press reports about the U-M Regent-led repression of pro-Palestine students and workers on campus, including: the outrageous firing of Rachel Dawson (which we have previously condemned); well documented repeated deployment of police violence against protestors, especially with chemical weapons; arbitrary bans of 60+ individuals from parts or all of campus; the use of undercover spies to report student activities to campus police, which resulted in the jailing of one student for four days; firings and employment bans of at least 12 students and staff who were given no recourse to any due process or appeal; and of course The Guardian newspaper’s report of the Regents’ recruitment of Michigan Attorney General Nessell to pursue criminal charges against young people on campus protesting the genocide in Gaza. It’s clear to us that the U-M Board of Regents has been explicitly dedicated to silencing growing opposition to Israeli state practices that include apartheid and genocide. This is unjustifiable censorship and retaliation against students and staff for exercising basic rights of assembly, association, and expression and standing for a principled objection to state violence.

The Academic Council affirms that speech and activism in support of Palestine—and in opposition to Israeli state oppression of Palestinians-–is neither antisemitic nor tainted by antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace, and we as its Academic Council, are committed both to Palestinian liberation and Jewish ethical values beyond Zionism, proudly and without qualification. The members of the Academic Council affirm that these twinned commitments are grounded in Jewish values of social justice and Jewish obligations to respond with support to those suffering from oppression. As a body of scholars–including leading experts on all periods of Jewish history; on Zionism and the history of Palestine/Israel; and on contemporary Jewish plurality–we  affirm that the disjunction of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is  grounded in the established and best scholarship in these areas. The Academic Council thus unequivocally supports the dropping of all charges against the eleven students.

Unfortunately, the Academic Council knows that these kinds of administrative attacks on pro-Palestinian students, staff, and faculty are hardly unique to U-M.  To the contrary, they are becoming increasingly commonplace in U.S. higher education. But this is wrong, and principled administrators refuse to follow this trend that separates universities from the core values of democracy. From fear and self-interest, many university administrators have bent to the will of the Trump administration, which has made federal grants conditional on unconditional fealty to the Israeli state—which means staying silent as that state carries out genocide in Gaza.  We call upon the University of Michigan not to engage in this complicity. To do so is to normalize complicity, that is, to ratify the banalization of evil, as Hannah Arendt trenchantly called it. 

As a body of faculty and scholars, JVP’s Academic Council calls upon higher education administrators—from chancellors and presidents to deans and chairs—to refuse to become part of a genocidal campaign that works in part through the criminalization of dissent and the stripping of rights for those who have the courage to speak out against it. We demand that the University of Michigan drop all charges against the students.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jonah Rubin, Sr. Manager of Campus Organizing

On behalf of the Jewish Voice for Peace – Academic Council