UCSD and the Palestine Exception to Free Speech

encampment movement. First of all, the fact that they met with such severe repression is very suggestive that how effective they were in bringing the issues related to the genocide and the occupation of Palestine to the forefront in ways that certainly were aren't happening in the US at the time.

Another thing about the encampments that I found really interesting but also I mean, I think brilliant from a organizing perspective, is that they were very visually and viscerally recreating the conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza were living at the time and still are, having been displaced from their residences and being forced to live in these very makeshift at tent encampments. And so there was a recreation len of

those conditions in a very visual way. And I think that that also was in some sense reminiscent of the shantytowns that were constructed on college campuses in the US in the mid eighties in the anti apartheid movement, So I think paying attention to some of those those details which off and get lost. We started talking about, you know, rise police and so forth. These encampments were They weren't

just you know, a bunch of students hanging out. These were constructed and developed in a very thoughtful manner, and that was definitely the case at UCSD, as I was told by students who were participating in it, as a space you engage in education and research about the genocide and about the occupation of Palestine, as well as the ties that UCSD had to the occupation and the genital side in Palestine. So you had, and I talked to

many students who were actively engaged in this. You had students sitting on their laptops doing research about the UCSD's ties to weapons and manufacturers, the ways that UCSD supported the discourses that were enabling the genocide and the occupation, including archaeological research, and also you know, there was a program associated with every day and the students would plan teachings. Sometimes professors would do the teachings, sometimes students, sometimes community members.

There were teachings on a whole range of really interesting topics, including of course about Palestine, about the genocide, but also about other issues like the role of surveillance and surveillance technology in the genocide, the ecoside that was happening continues to happen in Gaza and Palestine. And so it was it was a place of an amazing place of learning

and research and also community engagement. So as I said, you know, outside speakers are being brought in, community members were coming in and participating and learning, and so you know, those three things, research, teaching, and community engagement, those are precisely the things that the university tells us as faculty

and students that we should be doing. So it to me the encampment was functioning even though it wasn't getting any support from the university, and it was actually Universities throughout its five days of existence, was trying to shut it down despite all that it was functioning essentially like any other research institute on campus, and I would say probably than many of the research institutes on campus.

at the university purports to believe in. Let's discuss briefly the history. UCSD hasn't always come down so hard on protest movements, but it also has something of a history of handling these moments very poorly, I would say. So perhaps we could begin, yeah, if you could talk about the antia partype movement, and then we can move through what people have called the Black Winter at UCSD and some of the other things that we both have some experience of.

that are directly relevant to people's lives. So many of those topics and so now, of course the UCSD celebrates Angela Davis without mentioning that they fired her. So there's kind of a there is a little bit of this. This Okay, we're going to try to suppress Steed's movements, but then later on celebrate them. So there, of course

were quite a number of other stuphle led movements. One of them, as you mentioned, was the anti apartheid movement, and of course that was also part of a national movement. Especially Berkeley was very strong campus in that respect, but you know, numerous campuses across the US were involved in that movement, as was UCSD, and we had the UCSD the students, and this was in nineteen eighty five. It took place over a period of out about four or

five months. As I recall, the students had numerous protests and at the time for people who were familiar with the u SSD campus. UCSD has grown significantly since the eighties, but at that time, the central meeting place for campus was and what's called Ravel College and Revel Plaza. So there were numerous protests there anti apartheype protests. The students on several occasions set up replica shanty towns on the Revel Plaza, as happened at many other universities in the US.

Those were basically replicas of impoverished conditions that South African black folks had to live in under apartheid in South Africa. So they were setting up to the shantydown student kind of reprinting those conditions visually. And additionally, during that four or five month period, the students occupied the Humanities Library which was called Galbraith Hall. It's just adjacent to rod

All Plaza. They took over the library and they occupied it for a month, more than a month, okay, Yeah, And like all of these things happened and there were no invasions of the riot police or anything. And what came out of that movement that the U sees was that the regents decided to divest from all corporations associated with South Africa. So that was like a major win. But it was not just a win for the student movements,

but it was also a win for the university. Because the students were basically able to show the university that participating in this very unjust system with something that shouldn't be doing. And so the students basically helped the university

to see that. Yeah, and so by kind of allowing these protests to happen, in a sense, it allowed the university administration and I'm not singing their praises, because you know, they were quite retrograde in many ways as they are now, But by kind of stepping back and allowing these things to happen, the university was able to learn from what

the students were saying and to act on it. So I feel that that moment in history was something that I mean, I know the current administration hasn't forgotten because they celebrate it now. They say, you know, how wonderful we were for divesting from South Africa and look at our great students, you know. But Okay, so that happened in the eighties. Before we get to Black Winner, I'm just going to mention one other event, which I think

is significant, especially when we're thinking about encampments. So, in nineteen ninety two, UCSD was the only UC campus that did not have a Women's Resource center. And women and their allies on campus had been organizing to get a women's center since the seventies on the UCSD campus, but they have mostly been ignored by the administration or you know, where are we going to find the money, blah blah blah.

So a student led but they were also like staff and faculty involved as well, because the famal misogyny was very real on the UCSD campus. Then I arrived UCSD in nineteen ninety and I immediately saw problem, so I was very aware of it. So the organizers then of this movement decided to set up an encampment on what is called sun God Lawn, which is kind of a

major open space on campus. So they set up this encampment and basically they reproduced what they envisioned a women's center would look like, and so they essentially opened a women's center in this open space. They set up this encampment, they staffed it twenty four to seven and it was up for a week. No arrests, room made, no disciplinary

charges resulted. But the university then started paying attention to the demand for a resource center, and it took them several years, but they eventually set up the Women's Resource Center that exists now in ninety five. So again that was an encampment where the administration was basically able to learn from the acticus on campus about you know how they basically kind of behave reasonably.

you know, characters from from Compton would look like. And of course, you know, students who found out about this, you're very upset at the time. The students in the Black Student Union and in Match, who were working very closely together, had been organizing for quite a number of years prior to this around you know what at the time,

this is twenty ten, was called campus climate. And that's basically just the fact that there was a lot of racism, sometimes overt racism, sometimes less overt microaggressions that were very common and for many especially black students but really all states of color and also queer and trans students as were basically had to navigate this like every day, I mean as part of their everyday life. So it was this extra burden on our students, and they had been

organizing around this for quite some time. They had written a report that was all do you see us? So you see do you see us? In many ways, they were ready for an event like this. They were prepared. They had been doing a lot of organizing already, and so when this hit they they basically immediately went to the administration and said, you know, can you do something about this? The administration said, you know, it's free speech.

They deployed that phrase when it's useful to them, but yeah, tactically, so that was the message they were putting out and it became it very quickly became a news item. So local outlets were reporting on it, and the response of the university was free speech, and it basically started escalating. There were a number of students on campus at the time will be still today but maybe a little bit quieter. We were fairly openly racist, and there was one group.

They published a newspaper newsletter which was particularly so, and they also had a television show on It doesn't exist anymore. It's called the UCSD TV. It was kind of a local TV station. The company cookout party happened on Monday,

and that was like a holiday in February. And then on Thursday of that week, the student group that I was talking about how a TV show and they started using the N word explicitly on that show, and a number of students saw that, and of course, we're completely outraged.

And so the students in the Black Student Union and kind of their friends were basically trying to figure out what to do, and so they decided to call for a rally on the Library Walk, which is the main one of the main walkways and UCSD, and they called for a rally right in front of the where the Chancellor's office was located at the time, and so they had this rally quite a number of people. They called

the rally Real Pain, Real Action. You know, they were saying, we were feeling real pain at these kind of racist incidents, and we want to see real action by the administration.

So they had this rally and the chancellor at the time, who is Mary Anne Fox, came out to the rally and there's video of this somewhat pathetic video, and basically the organizers of the rally were like chanting leading the chance and then the Chancellor was basically following the organizers and trying to put her arm around them, as if somehow that would solve everything. You just need a hug. Then of course the organizers were like, no, not getting

hear me. I don't want to hug, I want some action. Yeah, this kind of snowballed. The Chancellor basically then met with a bunch of these students who had been at a rally and kind of they had they had a list of like thirty demands, and she went through the list and it was just like there's video of this too, and it's it's almost I mean, I just feel because I knew like a bunch of these students that I was like, oh my god, you know how awful this

must have fell to them. But she was going through this list very rationally and dispassionately and saying, oh, you know, we can't do that, sorry, but this one, yes, this one's done, This one's done. And the students were sitting there like, well, if it was done, you know, why haven't you done it? You know, if it's so easy to do. Yeah, And so a thing very definitely came out of that meeting. But the university decided to make

a teaching the following Wednesday. And I mean, of course, teachings are not the things that people in power do, so they're obviously kind of co opting and appropriating that term.

out of march. They marched around the Chancellor's complex, you know, continuously chanting up to the point of the teaching, and so then they all went into the teaching. They had like five hundred people by that time. Yeah, the room was just completely packed, and so they allowed the teaching to start. But then at some point one of the Black student Union members went up and said, we've had enough of this. We're now going to do our own

teach out. So they marched out of the teaching and went around to this area that has these steps, and just you know, five hundred folks, incredible concentration of black folks and people of color, students and faculty and all of their allies all gathered together and they had to teach out, which was incredibly powerful. And that day I said it myself and for many other people that I knew at the university. We basically all said, this is the best day we've ever had at UCSD, so amazing.

The next day, in the library, in the main library, one of the students who was who there found a newsing in the library. And of course, I'm sure your listeners know that the news is a very powerful symbol of violence against black folks in the US, and so that was that was traumatizing for so many students. I remember getting text messages from students, you know, saying, you know, I can't come on campus because I don't feel safe

here anymore. Yeah. So the next morning, the students held a rally again in front of the Chancellor's office where they were probably I'm guessing close to one thousand people, and people just got up and were talking about what they were feeling in their analysis. The university came in. They sent like a spokesperson to say, oh, you know, we have the police out like looking for whoever hangs on the noose or whatever. And I mean, you know, the police are not a comfort.

So then this all culminated about a week later in a huge rally where much of the library walk was completely packed filled with people. It was definitely blocked, and during that rally the university said, we will commit to implementing these demands, the demands of the students. Of course, in the end they'd backed off much of that, but so that was like a huge victory, and it did result in some pretty substantial changes to UCSD. I'll just

mention a couple of them. So UCSD create a Black Resource Center which didn't exist before, a Roser Resource Center, and a inter Travel Resource Center, so those were, you know, significant victories. They also created a undergraduate requirement or requirement that undergraduates take a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion course, and that was an attempt to try to change the climate

and do some educating. You know, students in California universities come from also to different backgrounds, and some of them are very aware of racism and its impacts and anti blackness and impacts that some come without that knowledge. So that was a significant help, but also at the time

was boosted a little bit. It didn't end up maybe being such a great boost, but it didn't boost the departments that teach those kind of courses because now they had, you know, a significantly greater number of students and we're getting more resources as a result. So all those things were were good again, no arrests, no disciplinary actions, and the university learned some valuable lessons.

that was pretty appalling. Now, if we skip forward thirteen years right to the beginning of the genocide and Gaza, a lot has changed on campus, but also a lot has not. Right, It's still not a massively diverse institution UCSD,

even compared to other institutions in the city. But from twenty twenty three through twenty twenty four, right, we have this movement on campus to end the genocide, and Gaza comes a movement it's about more than that, right, about liberation for Palestinian people, and then broadly about like I guess, liberation in the region and what that means. And the university did not respond in the same way. This has led to people theorizing a Palestine exception for free speech.

So could you explain that to people? And I thought you had a really interesting approach to it as a scientist that practice could share with people as well.

this is something that continued. It was essentially recalling, even though it kind of had this neutral sense to it, it was recalling the you know, the decades of Islamophobia, anti aerb racism that happened in the wake of of nine to eleven. So in a sense, they were communicating by using that kind of language language around you know,

using words like violence and safety and civility. They were communicating very clearly that people could talk about what happened on the morning of October seventh, but not about anything else. And that was entirely clear. I mean, it's not like we had to do any deep analysis to figure out that's what the administration was saying. And you know, as students organized over the following months, students who were engaged

in that organizing or being subject to disciplinary investigations. There were some faculty who were investigating for mentioning the jedocide and the occupation of Palestine in their classes, and all of these things were creating a climate of fear but also uncertainty, like you could never be sure if what you would say could get you in trouble. Yeah, and so the easiest thing to do would be to say nothing at all. Yeah.

there's a huge amount of scholarly work on it. There's an excellent report that's available freely online which is called exactly that The Palestine Exception to Free Speech, written by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, very easy to find online. And one of the things as a physicist, I'm very critical of the role of physics in society. You have to think very deeply to be critical of physics,

thinking about nuclear physics and so forth. But as a person who does physics professionally, I often think about problems from a physics perspective, and so when I think about the Palestine Exception, I kind of bring a bit of a physics lens to it. So in physics, when we're looking at a phenomenon, we often can't observe that phenomenon directly.

And so for example, people who study the physics of subatomic particles, they will to study how to sub atomic particles interact, or many sub atomic particles interact, they will collide them together. They don't have the precision and the resolution to observe exactly that interaction, but they can look before the interaction and then what comes out afterwards, and by looking at those patterns of what goes in and what comes out, they can get an idea of what's

happening within that black box. And so this is the way I view the Palistine exception, because the Palestine exception to free speech is just the idea that there are these structures in society that have been formulated such that it makes it very difficult to engage in speech about Palestine. And the impact of that, of course is that if you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that's committed against Palestinians is something that's enabled facilitated by that lack of discussion.

Like I don't have access to the conversations amongst you see the administrators, or between u SEE administrators and the main office of the president of u SEE, Like I don't have access to any of that information. In some sense, that's the black box part of it. But what we can see is kind of what's going in and what's coming out of that box, and so we can see

the behaviors, the patterns of behaviors. And so as a physicist, I'm like, Okay, if we're going to look at the UC and say the University of California and say is this a place where the Palestine Exception of free speech is operating, then we were not going to be able to add access to the rooms in which that's planned, if it is being planned. But rather we can look at the pattern. And the really interesting thing about this report I cited all signed legal and the Center Constitutional

Rights is they like that out very clearly. They lay out, Okay, the Palestine Exception of free speech is basically a combination of these kinds of behaviors. So they talk about things like accusations of anti Semitism, for example, and accusations of

support for terrorism. So if you come to any rally pro Palestinian rally at UCST, there's always at least one or many counter protesters who are shared shouting exactly that that this is anti Semitic, that everyone here is supporting Hamas, you know, and when we say Hamas, you know, that just immediately goes to everybody's mind to terrorism. Yeah, all these kinds of behaviors on it they lay out are things that can be seen on you see wide campuses. But definitely.

opposition to genocide. To finish up, I guess we're not just doing this at the university because it's a place where we like to argue, or because students are particularly predisposed to radical politics, or for any other number of reasons. Right, the university is also part of the apparatus. Can you explain that little bit like the university is not neutral in this to begin with?

quite a lot of military related research. You know, some of the research is not directly related to the genocide, but as we all know, the US is supplying many of the weapons that are being used in the genocide and now Iran as well, and some of those weapons like drones. The aspects of them have been designed and

worked on at UCSD. Kind of the hardware then, of genocide is very much a product of university research, part of which has been done in UCSD and other uc campuses, and part at other universities in the US and Israel as well. Another aspect of it, which I think we don't know as much about is software. So you know, there's a huge amount of research on artificial intelligence that's happening at UCSD, other UC campuses, of other university campuses.

I mean, all that research came out of universities. You know, as we now know through credible journalistic investigations that the Israel is using artificial intelligence and it's targeting. Yeah, and apparently that's also happening in the US military as well.

You know. So there's like another very direct connection. A third connection which is very strong at UCSD or so many other campuses, is that part of the creation of a discourse that legitimizes and justifies Israel's occupation of Colstein

is archaeology. And I'm not an expert in this field, but I could just kind of cite what other people I've talked about, But there are many archaeological investigations that UCSD academics have participated in Israel that contribute to creating this story that the people running Israel and Israeli citizens are the rightful owners of that land and that the Palestinians came in at some late point, maybe a couple of decades before the founding of Israel, which of course

is completely false and there's so much scholarship about that. But that's the purpose of those investigations, and so again that's connected to universities and the UCSD in particular. Well, it can't really are you that they're having a discussion about simplicity and jazz side is something that is not of interest to UCSD the definite ones.

I understand some people, especially international students and non citizen faculty, et cetera, have real concerns and they want to respect those But for people who would like to they should continue to speak out right, like, we all lose even if we have if you somehow are unconcerned by genocide of fellow human beings, if the university becomes a space where certain things are oppressed, and what we can't stand up for each other. So, like, what resources would you

suggest for those people? As new students are coming into university this year, they've lived the high school years through this genocide, I'm sure many of them will want to continue advocating. What would you suggest for them?

sustainability collectives. They're all coming together to talk about Palestine and the eco side Palestine and the genocide in Palestine. So I think that there are ways for students from a broad range of interest and background to get involved in organizing. You know, it's not like you have to start that from scratch. People are already doing that. It might be a little bit hard at your university to find those because of the suppression, but if you if you ask around, you will, or if you look on

social media you will, you will find those folks. That's where I would start as a student. For faculty and staff especially, it's a little bit more difficult because we're, you know, as employees, we're very vulnerable. Faculty with tenure are less vulnerable. But you know, my case and other faculties cases are our examples of how tenure doesn't really protect you from this if they're determined. So I feel

that there's again here. What we need to do is to kind of work collect so you don't want to fight the system on your own, but find other faculty who are doing this work and basically who can can work as a support network and kind of collectively find ways to speak out to support our students, which I think is in many ways our primary responsibility with regard to the genocide, and basically create spaces where where it's possible to talk about the genocide.

be happy if you did. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people before we'd wrap up?