The assault against free speech on college campuses

(Opinion) 

By Stephen Kennedy

In March Columbia University expelled its president Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (UAW), Grant Minter a Ph.D student worker at the department of English and Literature. The expulsion was a day before the union bargaining was supposed to take place, one of many sessions as the current contracts expires in June. In a statement, a university spokesperson for the union called the firing unlawful and said that Columbia administration has "violated labor law,” according to the Columbia Spectator.

According to the Columbia Spectator, this comes after the Columbia University Judicial board decided twenty-two cases from the encampments at Hamiton Hall last April where they were either suspended expelled or had their degrees revoked. Columbia recently revoked its sanctuary status which allows for agencies like ICE to arrest people on school grounds.  

This happened to one recent graduate, Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil was arrested by ICE for such involvements of pro-Palestinian protests. Khalil is currently being detained in Louisiana and has the chance of being illegally deported, despite being a legal citizen. A judge recently halted the effort to deport Khalil.  

The Trump administration has made it clear that he will throw any of these pro-Palestinians out of the country at the behest of the United States’ ally, Israel. 

“Any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country…there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they will behave.” Trump told a group of Israeli donors, as reported in the Washington Post.  

The conditions for this type of environment have been here for a while now. Last year, Congress tried to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill that would allow for the censoring of political speech against Israel. While the bill failed to pass in the House, it would have allowed for police to arrest student protesters. “Instead of addressing antisemitism on campus, this misguided legislation would punish protected political speech,” said Jenna Leventoff of the ACLU, widely reported including on aclu.org. “The right to criticize government actions is the most fundamental protection provided by the First Amendment – and this includes the actions of foreign governments.”