Florida has an abortion ban that takes effect
The students of Columbia University and the Palestinians in the camps of the Israeli occupation of Gaza: An end to the prisoner’s rights?
So far, at least, a core of student protesters has vowed to stay put. Sueda Polat said at a news conference that the university had not made significant concessions to the protesters, who want the school to sell off companies that have links to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Columbia had also stopped negotiating. As a result, she said, the students inside the encampment “will not be moved unless by force.”
It said that students would not be punished for their participation in the encampment if they signed a form promising not to break any university rules through the end of the next academic year. The document stated that students who have faced discipline before may not be eligible for the same deal.
The administrators of Columbia University took the same step as did the ones at New York University. The school decided not to call in the police for a second time to clear the camp since it led to more than 100 arrests.
Police began arresting people at the California State Polytechnic University, after they had occupied a building for more than a week. Students took control of a library at Portland State University.
The occupation of a building at Columbia University’s campus in New York marked an especially tense 24 hour period, as police in California began arresting protesters who had taken over at least one other building and threatened to do so at others.
Palestine will be here forever. “Go away, yo.” It is free, free Palestine. “Free, free, free Palestine.” “Shut it down.” Palestine will be free. “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”
Seattle Organizing During the First Day of Anti-Semitic Protests: Students in a Portland State University Building are Suspended
Many protesters wearing helmets, safety glasses, gloves, and masks barricaded the entrance to the building. People are inside stacked chairs and tables. A protester smashed a glass door with a hammer. The protesters appeared to be free of control of the building.
In Portland demonstrators on Monday seized control of the library at Portland State University, where some had spray-painted words such as “Free Gaza,” a sign declared “Glory to Our Martyrs,” and activists called for the university to cut all ties with Boeing, which has supplied weaponry to Israel’s military.
Bob Day, the chief of the Portland Police Bureau, estimated on Monday night that perhaps 50 to 75 protesters were inside the building. Officials urged protesters to leave the area and warned that those involved could face criminal charges.
Just outside, about a dozen faculty in yellow and orange safety vests also stayed behind, with several saying that they planned to remain overnight to make sure their students’ right to protest was respected.
“We have begun suspending students as part of the next phase of our efforts to ensure the safety of our campus,” Ben Chang, a spokesman for the university, said.
“We’ve been asked to disperse, but it is against the will of the students to disperse,” she said. “We do not abide by university pressures. We act according to the will of the students.
Elga Castro, 47, an adjunct professor in the Spanish department at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school, was among the faculty and staff members guarding access to the tents. She said she had opinions on Gaza and Palestine but that she was mainly here to protect her students.
Students and the AAUP: How to stand up against the police and university leadership for students’ rights based on the principles of shared governance
She says that if it is not upheld when needed, it doesn’t mean anything. A rebuild of trust is going to be the first thing to happen. It takes a long time to build and repair that trust.
She said that most schools already have mechanisms in place for faculty members and administrators to talk about what’s going on. But at many schools, she says, administrations are currently ignoring that structure.
The principle of shared governance — which the AAUP defines as the “joint responsibility of faculty, administrations, and governing boards to govern colleges and universities” — is key to helping campuses move forward, Mulvey says.
And faculty members at some schools — including Barnard, Emory, UT-Austin and Cal Poly Humboldt — are issuing votes and statements of no confidence in their presidents, over their response to campus protests.
Many faculty members, disturbed by the forceful police response to protests, are increasingly standing up for students’ academic freedom — and pushing back against university leadership that they see as infringing on it.
Police were called to a protest at the university after the administration called in city and state police. Both high-profile arrests were captured on bystander videos.
Indiana professors wrote that they strongly dissent from the anti-democratic acts and that they were specifically charged with teaching their students about these values.
My job at this time of the year is to protect the students and academic freedom. She said she can do that better than they can. Faculty are both wanting to protect the students and want to call out administrations that are putting the students at risk.
Some are speaking up based on their subject matter expertise, like history professors at the University of Southern California and media school professors at Indiana University.
“I see my responsibility to speak up when I see harm being done to students and their rights being violated as a faculty member, who cares about freedom of speech, who really sees the foundation for a public education,” he said. “And if my voice isn’t enough, then I’m going to have to speak up, so to say, for them in other ways.”
When she arrived at the site of the IU protest she noticed some of her students were peacefully standing in front of the heavily armed riot police. She started walking towards them.
“My instincts just kicked in,” she told NPR on Monday. I was handcuffed and brought to the local jail with other students and faculty by a bus, which was about to take us away.
The students were protesting at the assembly area of the school, called “Dunn Meadow”, where they had set up a campsite in order to protest the school’s policy change.
The police arrested 33 people on Thursday as they tried to break up the crowd. Protesters regrouped, and they were alarmed to see that police officers were once again at the park.
Twenty years ago, she said, she probably would have been one of those protesters. She focuses more on the issue of higher education administrators deluding any kind of dissent and how that affects free expression than on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Demonstrators at Indiana, as in many other states, are calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to both university investment in Israeli-affiliated companies and its partnership with a nearby U.S. Navy installation.
Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words
Campus Protests and Faculty Arrests: How Some Faculty Members Are defending Student Protesters, in Action and In Words: On Monday, September 11
Most of the people arrested on Saturday, including Phillips, were hit with the misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass. The police gave the organizers slips of paper, banning them from the school for a year, and one of them was banned for five years.
The administration said that students and faculty who were arrested can appeal their warnings with university police, and that they will be able to finish the semester.
Phillips plans to do so. The experience of meeting with students and administering finals is important to professors, and this last week of classes has already disrupted that. On Monday, her students presented their final projects on Zoom rather than in their classroom.
“I know we’re all being very careful to not violate the terms of that trespass ban, because we’ve been informed that, should we do so, that the consequences could ramp up and be even worse than they are right now,” she said.
Protesters at Indiana now call for the university’s president and provost to step down. The current and retired faculty at the school have signed open letters calling for their resignation or removal.
It’s one of several schools around the country where professors are getting arrested at demonstrations, circulating letters in support of arrested protesters and holding no-confidence votes in their administrations.
At Columbia University, for example, faculty members in orange vests linked arms, forming a human wall at the entrance to students’ encampment as police arrived to break it up on Monday. At Emory University, Professors walked out, chanting “hands off our students”.
“I feel like faculty are in triage mode right now,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “They’re helping the students, putting their bodies on the line … they’re dealing with the administration with no-confidence votes, but also trying to deal with the administration directly to get them to back off and do the right thing.”
Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words
Campus Protests Faculty Arrests Letters No Confidence Votes: Stephen Fohlin is not a Demonstrationer
Steve Tamari, a history professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, was among the protesters arrested at a campus demonstration on Saturday at Washington University in St. Louis, with video showing several officers slamming him to the ground.
The student read a statement on Tuesday from a man who said he was crushed by several police officers and dragged across campus.
In one instance, economics professor Fohlin told the police to take the protester away as they wrestled the protester to the ground. As she approaches, one officer grabs her by the wrist and flips her onto the sidewalk. Another comes over to help zip-tie her hands behind her back, as she protests: “I am a professor!”
Fohlin was later charged with battery against a police officer. Gregory Clement told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the arrest was misguided.
Clement said that Fohlin was not a protester at the time. She came into her office concerned about the students on the quad.
Nolle was caught on camera urging bystanders to report her arrest to the philosophy department so that she could be taken into custody.
When she passed through the area, she came across a young protester and asked the cops to stop. She was charged with disorderly conduct after she refused to leave when police told her to.
Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words
The Educators for Justice in Palestine: Steven Thrasher’s guiding hand in the student encampment on Illinois’ Northwestern campus
Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor and chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern University’s Medill School, has been acting in what he calls a role of faculty support for the student encampment on its Illinois campus.
The group Educators for Justice in Palestine made sure that faculty members who were available for bail support, university negotiations and physically defending student protesters would be available when the encampment began last week.
We’re making sure that students know that four of us are there, as well as making sure that we’re able to come back if we need to,” she said. We weren’t expecting to be in a barricade in the first 10 minutes.
At protests, Thrasher identifies himself as someone who is willing to be arrested. He hopes the violence won’t happen, but believes he will put his body in that place if it does.
“I would think that if I saw students who disagreed with me politically … He said he would intervene on their behalf. I’m proud of them for supporting something that I think is very righteous.
Faculty members have said in speeches and social media posts that they fear losing their jobs if they speak out.
Mulvey, of the AAUP, says it’s riskier for non-tenured professors to take a stand — and the long-term decline in tenure at American universities means that most do not have it. She said that those dynamics are bad for democracy and higher education institutions.
Mulvey sees the way forward as through education both inside and beyond the classroom. Thrasher, at Northwestern, agrees. He’s currently teaching a graduate seminar called “The Theater of Protest,” and accompanied his students to the encampment for a field trip during Monday’s class.
Like Thrasher, she says the best thing to come out of this turmoil is the deepening of solidarities within the community — she says she’s spent time with colleagues in ways she hasn’t in her more than two decades at the university, and seeing many newly emboldened to stand up for their beliefs.
She says that there is no more business as usual. The community has come together in a way that has shown how important it is and how fragile it can be.
Source: How some faculty members are defending student protesters, in actions and in words
Up First Newsletter: Florida Abortion Ban Takes Effect; NYPD Breaks Up Columbia Demonstration in Florida
She said that she believed most faculty will bend over backwards to fulfill their academic obligations to the students.
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In rare circumstances, people in Florida can no longer have abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Since the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion, a 15-week ban has been in effect. Voters will have a chance to change this restriction in November when a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution will appear on the ballot. The ban has a huge impact on pregnant people and abortion providers.
Source: Florida abortion ban takes effect; NYPD breaks up Columbia protests
The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s List of America’s Most Extinction-Vectorized Historic Sites in the Light of Biden’s Proposal
The Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. It’s a Schedule I drug, the strictest category. Other drugs listed on the Schedule I are heroin, ecstasy and LSD. The proposal would reclassify marijuana as a lower-risk Schedule III drug — a category that includes ketamine, Tylenol with codeine, and anabolic steroids.
The next time you argue with your sibling, be thankful that your relationship isn’t a life-or-death one. For many birds, the sibling relationship is deadly serious. Some birds kill their siblings soon after hatching. Some people spend their entire lives with their siblings and others risk their own lives to help each other.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released its annual list of America’s most endangered historic sites. Included on the list this year are Eatonville, the all-Black Florida town memorialized by Zora Neale Hurston, Alaska’s Sitka Tlingit Clan houses, and the home of country singer Cindy Walker.
Look at photos of the most important historic places in the U.S. and learn how the National Trust hopes to breathe new life into them.
