The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on May 18, 2024, 09:19:41 AMWe have an overlapping visitor coming to stay today, so I'll be glad to get in just 10 pages.

QuoteTwo Jewish advocacy organizations suing the University of California, Berkeley, over a "longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism" have amended their complaint to include incidents from antiwar protests.

<snip>

"For many Jews, including many Jewish students and faculty at UC Berkeley, a profound connection with the Jewish State of Israel is integral to their Jewish identity," the Brandeis Center said in a statement. "Excluding Zionists thus effectively excludes Jews."

Quote from: spork on May 18, 2024, 11:27:12 AM

Quote from: Langue_doc on May 18, 2024, 06:37:15 AM[. . .]

You should be protesting outside the offices of our law makers (the governor and the NYS Senator) as well as the Israeli embassies (country and UN) in the city.

[. . .]

But that would require taxi/bus fare.

From the NYT article "It's Not Just Gaza" linked above: "she connects the suffering of Gazans to the plight of other oppressed people worldwide." This person seems to be very badly educated, and I'd like to see whether she can locate Gaza or any other part of the Middle East on a map. It's highly ignorant to believe that every situation in the world that one disagrees with has the same identical cause. The attitude reminds me of an Al Jazeera program host's interview with three Americans that I saw a few months ago. One of the guests said "Revolution is the highest form of culture." Dude, you are completely clueless about what both of those words really mean.

Anecdata: spoke to a current Columbia undergrad yesterday. She was not a participant in any of the protests, had no interest in them. She was disappointed about final exams going online and the campus effectively closing to non-freshmen before the semester had officially ended (first-year students must live on campus).

Quote from: Langue_doc on May 18, 2024, 06:37:15 AM[. . .]

You should be protesting outside the offices of our law makers (the governor and the NYS Senator) as well as the Israeli embassies (country and UN) in the city.

[. . .]

QuoteWhy Is N.Y.U. Forcing Protesters to Write Apology Letters?
The university calls it a "restorative practice"; the students call it a coerced confession.

QuoteThe Ethos Integrity Series was not the only command. Some students would be assigned a "reflection paper," the details of which were laid out by the Office of Student Conduct. In it they would address several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to "justify" their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in "12-point Times New Roman or similar font."

In an email, John Beckman, a spokesman for N.Y.U., defended the protocols, explaining that these papers have been a common sanction at the university for at least eight years, part of an approach to discipline that relies on "restorative practices." In this instance, though, the exercise cannibalizes the mission, favoring a will to dishonesty — inviting a charade of guilt. Anyone driven to protest is marching and chanting precisely as an expression of a certain set of fiercely held moral beliefs and values — not in deviation from them. Someone leaving her dorm room with a sign that says "Free Palestine" probably believes she is already doing what she needs to do "to make things right."

As Ms. Garey put it, "I'm not going to apologize for opposing genocide." The risk to her — someone who has finished her Ph.D. work — is the threat of a mark on her transcript, she said, for a failure to comply.