A Year of Repression: How Ohio State Admin Repeatedly Failed Pro-Palestine students
Do we stand for “civil obedience” or defend the freedom to speak against genocide?
October 5, 2024
On September 12, after a rally and march against the genocide in Palestine, some student leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and I, as their faculty advisor, were interviewed by WOSU, our local NPR affiliate. The reporter asked me what I thought about the fact that Vice Admiral William “Ted” Carter, Jr., the new Ohio State president, had advocated “civil obedience” in a late August interview with a popular talk WOSU show, “All Sides with Anna Staver.”
Rather than “Buckeyes protesting against other Buckeyes,” Carter had said regarding anticipated fall protests, he hoped for “a good bit of civil obedience.”
Chilling words delivered with a smile, couched within assurances that the university wants listening, dialoguing, and critical thinking.
The term “civil obedience” might come as a shock given that Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and his tactics of civil disobedience are revered in this country — at least verbally. (I’m sure that MLK Day will be commemorated at OSU in January 2025 without even the hint of an administrative blush.)
In fact, Carter’s comment is consistent with OSU’s position, as stated in its revised webpages, that civil disobedience is not protected under the First Amendment or University policies.
In the FAQ section on the First Amendment, the answer to the question “Does the First Amendment protect civil disobedience on campus?” is given as: “Civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws as a form of political protest. The First Amendment does not permit individuals to break the law or violate university policies or rules.”
It isn’t hard to read between the lines. Practice what MLK preached on campus and you will be disciplined.
Whether shocking or not, I appreciate the clarity. Often, authority figures who care little about mass, nonviolent direct action weaponize MLK and Mohandas K. Gandhi to condemn protesters. But Carter’s coining of “civil obedience” and OSU’s clear rejection of the tradition of civil disobedience gives an honest picture of how the Ohio State administration thinks and what it wants at this moment. Students have the right to speak, theoretically, but they had better obey.
As we know from experience, the threat that civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent action will be punished is not an idle one. Behind all the talk about listening and free speech lies the repressive toolkit OSU has used over the past year against pro-Palestine Buckeyes, from suppression of votes, to academic probation and suspension, arrest and traumatic experiences in jails, and criminal persecution.
What’s in this essay
This essay is a long read, but OSU admin has many platforms and we have only a few — and a lot needs to be said.
What follows is, in fact, selected comments about contradictions in OSU policy and details from my experience in watching the OSU administration fail its students repeatedly over the past year. I am speaking in my individual capacity here, but my viewpoint is shaped by my positions and knowledge as faculty advisor of SJP, as President of the Ohio State chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), as a scholar of postcolonial and ethnic studies in the English department, as program director of Asian American Studies, and as a member of our chapter of Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP), part of a growing national network.
While I am speaking from my personal experience, I am far from alone in holding such views. Many campus constituencies, from their own diverse positions, were especially enraged by OSU’s excessive use of force on protestors on the night of April 25. This explains why around 150–200 faculty and staff joined the May 1 student protest, coming out in large numbers to try to prevent a repeat of April 25.
It was, in my time st Ohio State since Fall 2004, the only time faculty and staff have publicly demonstrated on this campus. It takes a lot of conviction to speak out against your bosses as a group. The turnout, and the many public statements made against the administration’s actions, gives you a sense of how much anger and discontent exists on this campus regarding the treatment of students.
Thus, FSJP condemned OSU’s excessive force on April 25, AAUP-Ohio State condemned arrests in March and April, and a whole slew of individual departments and groups spoke out about April 25, including official statements from the Ohio State’s Faculty Council and its Council of Graduate Students. [November 25: If the AAUP links don’t work, go directly to the advocacy statements page.]
I am writing–and potentially exposing myself to attacks and retribution as professors have experienced around the country–because OSU does not provide open and safe spaces for true dialogue. Between Ohio Senate Bill SB 83 — even though its Republican sponsors have repeatedly failed to pass it — and repression around Palestine, there are explicit and implicit pressures against open dialogue at Ohio State about a range of issues.
As I begin my 21st academic year at Ohio State, let me say — as someone closely associated with many vibrant campus mobilizations over that time, on a variety of issues — that this is the most repressive administration I have seen, hands down.
The national context of rightwing attacks on higher education coupled with bipartisan support for arming Israel and campus repression against pro-Palestinian students, faculty, and staff partly explains why. Yet individual administrators are responsible for their own policies and actions, and they, as a collective, have failed miserably when it comes to pro-Palestine and anti-genocide students.
And yet it appears the Board of Trustees clearly approves of this state of things–unanimously agreeing to give Carter a 3.5% increase to his base pay in August.
Space Rules and “Safety”
On September 23, The Lantern, Ohio State’s student newspaper, published a public letter to the university on its lack of clarity and transparency regarding the space rules–or, as they are now supposed to be called, the “space standards.”
It is important to see The Lantern take up these questions in the face of recent contradictions and inconsistencies in Ohio State’s policies. While pro-Palestine and anti-genocide students have borne the brunt of these contradictions, the lack of clarity from the administration has a wide impact that will affect the ability of everyone to voice their ideas, from students to faculty and staff, to campus workers, both union and non-union.
The space standards are part of what was clearly the university’s summer project: to clean up the rules and engage in a PR offensive to justify last year’s repression.
For months over the summer, and now into the fall (see this recent panel, for example), the university has been using every platform it can find to not only proclaim its commitment to freedom of speech and to listening, but to double down on every step it has taken.
We have seen not an ounce of self-critique or self-reflection from the administration, even as students–and sometimes staff and faculty– have been traumatized by surveillance, doxxing, arrests, nights in jail, and/or religious/racial abuse.
So many questions remain unanswered.
Does having tents on the Oval past 10pm justify snipers, riot cops, jail time in Jackson Pike (Franklin County Jail), criminal charges, and student disciplinary hearings?
Are we supposed to believe that all of the colleges and universities around the country who called riot police on pro-Palestine students, each of which has very different space rules, coincidentally conducted similar actions? And that they all just happened to change their rules this summer?
“Safety” is the term all of these universities use to justify their repression — but safety for whom? Certainly not of anyone attending the protests, who feel threatened by the heavy police presence. Sometimes the justification is “disrupting university business” — a term so vague it can be applied to anything the administration wants.
We can go line-by-line through the voluminous space standards or policies until we are blue in the face (and I have). We can talk to administrators to figure out what the free speech rules are and try to communicate (and I have). We can try to record inconsistencies in practice (and I have). And I will continue to do this if it supports students.
But let’s be honest. This dialogue is not ultimately about rules and policies but political content.
The inconsistencies around and inequitable treatment of pro-Palestine students only make sense if we understand what their real “fault” is: speaking out against a genocidal war conducted by a government that both major political parties in the US defend, often unquestioningly.
If you are a pro-Palestine student, faculty, or staff at this university, you have to watch your back. Freedom of speech does not apply to us in the same way as it applies to everyone else. Experience has shown that we are not seen as equal members of the “Buckeye community,” but people from whom others have to be kept safe. Our very cause — the end of a genocide that the Lancet estmated was near 186,000 deaths — is seen as suspect.
“Key Issues:” A Clear Double Standard
The double standard is apparent, for instance, on the university’s “Key Issues” page.
The university repeatedly says it “refrains from taking institutional positions on matters that extend beyond the university.” But to this day the “Key Issues” page says “Ohio State strongly condemns all terrorist groups and terrorist attacks, including those perpetrated by Hamas on Israeli civilians, Americans and others the weekend of October 7, 2023.”
Is this not a comment on “matters that extend beyond the university”? And if the university can “strongly condemn” the attacks on Israeli civilians, then why not at least mention the horrors inflicted on Palestinian civilians? Why the double standard?
Why pointedly say we condemn attacks on Americans in Israel–but say nothing of the Americans killed in Palestine and now Lebanon?
On October 2, OSU President Carter sent an email that again showed this inequitable treatment. Hamas conducted “deadly terrorist attacks,” he wrote, but the one-sided incessant bombings of Palestinian civilians is misnamed “the Israel-Hamas war.” Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead are squeezed into the term “grievous loss of life.”
Palestinians, apparently, cannot even be named. And there is no attempt to explain who caused the “grievous loss of life.” Israel is protected from blame for targeting civilians, for example, in schools and shelters. The direct role of the U.S. in aiding and abetting the terror that has been visited on Palestinians is nowhere to be found.
Better to say nothing, as “Key Issues” supposedly promises, than to claim neutrality while taking sides.
Meetings: Dialogue without Listening
The double standard is not just about words and policies — though they matter — but what happens on the ground, in day to day practice.
I attended several meetings between administrators and SJP leaders from October 2023 and into the early spring semester. These meetings were often with high-level administrators, including Dr. Melissa Shivers, Senior Vice President for Student Life, who was at most of the meetings I attended. The Interim President, Dr. Peter J. Mohler, attended one of those meetings (December 7, 2023), and President Carter attended another (January 12, 2024).
Though trust was eroding due to lack of progress, students took the spaces they were given to talk to upper admin. They kept attending meetings, sharing their experiences, and clearly voiced their perspectives and demands. But the utter inaction of the university on basic matters of equity — not to speak of big issues like transparency and divestment — finally made us stop attending them.
Apparently, even showing some public empathy for thousands of Palestinians killed, correcting misrepresentations of events (like calling a one-sided assault the “Israel-Hamas War” or talking about this as a Jewish-Muslim issue), or supporting students as they received death threats and harassment was beyond the capacity of a “listening” university.
In private, there were gestures of empathy at times. But in public there was either silence or, at most, a few general mentions of Islamophobia as wrong. Beyond saying something about the devastation of Gaza itself, the university was not even interested in letting the public know that students were suffering, that there were specific, reported instances of hate and racism that needed to be investigated.
The December meeting with Mohler, to my surprise, had some promise. He showed a level of empathy that I did not expect. But it all unraveled at the end when Mohler almost fled from the room when Palestinian students asked to take a photo with him. Mohler seemed to be embarrassed to stand with them.
The meeting with Carter in January, a few days into his new job, was a masterclass in how to not listen. Instead of commiserating with students he lectured and gaslit them, putting responsibilities for tensions on campus squarely on their shoulders. While defending their right to protest in theory, he blamed students and tried to tell them what words they should and should not use during protests.
I was not intending to speak much, but came in forcefully after seeing what the meeting was becoming. I learned something about Carter’s political stances at that meeting, and lack of interest in discussing positions he did not agree with. He stated, unasked, that Israel’s actions did not constitute a genocide. When I said that the university was contributing to campus tension by the suspension of a student group, Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists (CORS), he doubled down on the false claims of their affiliations with terrorism. When I questioned the suppression of a student group for a mere flyer when, in the past, armed right-wingers have been allowed to march freely on this campus, he seemed to brush it off.
When I raised the point that “terrorism” was a politicized term, given how the US had Nelson Mandela on the Terrorism Watchlist until 2008 but regarded the mujahideen in Afghanistan as freedom fighters in the 1980s, Carter showed little to no intellectual curiosity or interest.
I am not going to detail here the many phone calls, texts, and individual conversations (often unwanted and unsolicited) I have had with administrators at all levels, campus police, and others to defend students’ rights while keeping communication open. In most of these interactions it became clear that information gathering was their intent, not honest conversation and dialogue.
What Happened Before April 25
Another reason we stopped meeting with administrators in the early spring was OSU’s increasingly repressive actions. It is crucial to remember that while the night of April 25 was the most dramatic day, the pattern of repression had already been rising on campus. All of it directed at pro-Palestine students, though belonging to different organizations.
If you stand up against genocide, we learned, your group might be suspended and called a terrorist group without any evidence (like CORS in Decemeber), you might be disciplined for a nonviolent protest (like Ohio Youth for Climate Justice in February), and your ballot initiative through Undergraduate Student Government might be suppressed using the specious logic that a discriminatory anti-boycott law in Ohio means that OSU students cannot speak their minds (as the SJP/OSU Divest ballot initiative was in March).
You might be demonized publicly by your own university as engaging in “incitement or threat of violence” (April 20) — a tweet that laid the groundwork for the arrests and repression to come, as AAUP-Ohio State said in our April 27 statement.
And so we need to recall that on April 23, two peaceful protestors were arrested for “criminal trespassing.” Noise violations on Reading Day was the excuse for dragging two students off to Jackson Pike. We need to remember the arrest on the morning of April 25, when a Muslim staff member was suspected of protesting and hauled off by more than a dozen officers. We need to remember the arrests of Queer March for Palestine participants on June 1 for simply protesting in the Union.
Let us recall that assembling in the Union has been a robust tradition at Ohio State since the Black student-led protests in 2012, just after the Union’s renovation. The university’s space standards are clearly designed to take away student-driven traditions and political culture.
And add to this the many incidents of harassment of pro-Palestine students by OSU PD and Student Conduct that cannot be talked about because of privacy laws. Along with several dedicated colleagues, I have personally served as advisor in cases about actions that posed zero danger to anyone but, apparently, needed to be persecuted because they were pro-Palestine on content. These are cases that take hours and hours of time for students and faculty/staff advisors, create unnecessary anxiety, often lead to academic punishments, and alienate students from the university.
OSU Admin: Do Better
The University has rolled out a new plan: “Listen. Learn. Discuss.” Wonderful sentiments. But the actual practice of the administration seems to be: “Arrest. Don’t Listen. Don’t Discuss.” Or “Suppress. Gaslight. Justify.”
Was the Faculty Council resolution listened to, which came out strongly on May 17 against the arrests and called on the university to do better in embracing the values of civic engagement, to drop charges against students, and engage in meaningful dialogue? [October 10: As I said above, this link is currently broken.]
Was the Council of Graduate Students listened to, when it asked the university to rectify the wrongs of April 25 and defended the values of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly?
I was extremely disappointed — and angry — at the administration’s inability and unwillingness to listen when I attended the (public) University Senate meeting on September 19.
President Carter had spoken about listening and learning. Dr. Shivers had spoken about the real problems of student loneliness and mental health crises on campus. These are very important topics–as I know from working with hundreds of our students quite closely over two decades and, in fact, winning awards for my teaching.
So imagine the sheer cognitive dissonance I felt when a Palestinian-American student leader made a statement about April 25 at the Senate meeting (excerpts in the Columbus Dispatch story here) and explained the truly traumatic experiences students went through–and it received no empathetic response at all from upper administration.
I believe in listening and learning. I believe in dialogue and debate. But that’s not what’s happening at Ohio State.
We can do so much better. We have educated, smart, and thoughtful people on this campus who are concerned about violence and genocide, who care about social justice, freedom, and democracy. We need to allow these positions to be expressed, whether in protests or meetings or dialogues, without demonization, police repression, and excessive space and noise restrictions.
Let students–who have been nonviolent throughout– freely express and put into practice the Ohio State motto of “education for citizenship” in ways that are meaningful to them, not as predetermined by the clear political biases of the administration.
After all, administrators come and go. It is the students and teachers and workers at the university who have the greatest stake in the health of the Buckeye community. And all who live around Ohio State–including alumni–who often come to actions and events and use this public university as a resource.
We are the ones who make this campus what it is. And we need to be able to think and speak and act and assemble freely.
Especially when the world is on fire.
