“Hundreds of people have been arrested in California, Massachusetts, Texas and other states during the tense [student] protests, following several rounds of arrests in New York in recent days.”
“Students at dozens of other colleges—including the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, Berkeley, and Yale—have established similar encampments in a widening showdown over campus speech and the war in Gaza.”
"One of the most violent police crackdowns took place at Emory University in Atlanta on Thursday, when local and state police swept onto the campus just hours after students had set up tents on the quad in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza as well as the planned police training center known as Cop City."
Dave Karpf says that all university administrators had to do with students protesting in solidarity with Gaza was to ignore them. And university professors are good at ignoring students.
Instead, following Minouche Shafik's lead, they've chosen to crack down and call in police, and as a result, the protests are proliferating, as is the menacing pushback – snipers on the roofs of universities.
TikTok CEO #ShouZiChew has said the company will take the fight against the new law to the courts, but some experts believe that for the #US#SupremeCourt, national security considerations could outweigh #FreeSpeech protection.
New today: A UT professor and expert on freedom of expression weighs in on the controversial arrests of 57 individuals, including a journalist, at a campus demonstration yesterday. An interview from Reporting Fellow Francesca D'Annunzio ... https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-dps-palestine-first-amendment/
So, anyone know how this ban is going to be enforced? Or attempted to be enforced?
I'm guessing government forced removal from mobile app stores, but then what about people who already have the app? Or who side-load it on their Android phones. Or use a web app?
"University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.
At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio."
"This week may end up marking the moment when Republicans and the far-right hijacked the campus protest movement and tried to turn it into the same bogeyman they made of Black Lives Matters protests in 2020.
Radical lefties needing to be taken down by force plays to the right’s pre-existing authoritarian tendencies, and is a handy election-year cudgel for Republicans."
"A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested."
"Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested.
So how can Abbott justify such a reversal to his call for free speech? The protestors are anti-semitic, he says. Really? How does Abbott and the police wading through the crowd know the students are anti-semitic?"
“In this new book, [Jonathan] Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.” @mmasnick