New terms started at most North American colleges and universities, but will a sense of normalcy return, or will students be forced to endure a third year of double-masked, keffiyeh-clad hipsters shouting, “Free, free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea?” On each campus, it will depend on how the administration deals with its Students for Justice in Palestine problems.
After years of enduring the anti-Zionist, antisemitic SJP, many administrations decided after Oct. 7 that its toxic campus presence could no longer be tolerated. But SJP will not go away as long as there is a Jewish state, so each school must devise a plan for dealing with its recalcitrant Hamas supporters.
The approaches to protests, riots, building takeovers and encampments range from conciliatory to combative, from acquiescing to banning.
As in all campaigns—physical and rhetorical—weakness invites aggression. The University of Maryland took the weakest, and arguably the worst, approach of all to an SJP problem by settling a lawsuit and agreeing to pay its SJP chapter. The university did not disclose details of the settlement to the suit brought by Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Palestine Legal claimed that the university paid SJP $100,000.
The university announced in a groveling statement: “UMD SJP is a registered student organization in good standing, which has had more than 100 events on campus since Oct. 7, 2023, for which it consistently followed the university’s policies and procedures governing such events.”
At least the public knows that calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state complies with University of Maryland policy.
Thankfully, the University of Maryland is an outlier. Far more schools have suspended their SJP chapters. Adelphi University recently joined those ranks when it announced in August that it had put its SJP chapter “on disciplinary probation for a year.”
Many other schools had already done so in 2024, among them: Columbia University, George Washington University, Rutgers University, Temple University, Tufts University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Vermont, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Brown University and Swarthmore College.
Some schools specified longer suspension terms. The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, banned its SJP chapter for three years, and the University of California, Los Angeles, banned it for four years.
The one-year suspensions issued to students in the spring 2024 semester of encampments have expired. We will soon learn what, if anything, they have accomplished. We may discover the mechanisms for reinstatement. An important question that will have to be answered by each administration is this: What does it mean to be an SJP chapter “in good standing?”
Some schools, not content with temporary suspensions, went for permanent bans, including Brandeis University and the University of Pennsylvania. So did Yale University, which called its version of the permanent ban a “de-recognition.”
Of all the ways that academic institutions have attempted to address SJP problems, the University of Rochester in New York has taken the most unique approach, one that I think qualifies as quixotic. Contrary to a mountain of evidence, it denies that it even has an SJP problem. After I mentioned the university’s SJP chapter in an article, the University of Rochester asked me to change what I wrote.
I declined.
Originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
