Blake Stimson publishes “Should Protests Be Allowed in the Classroom?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education
Introduction
Should Protests Be Allowed in the Classroom? (Spoiler: yes)
A January 2025 classroom protest at Columbia University serves as a useful test case. Statements provided by two students enrolled in the course, a video of the incident posted by the Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students X account, and a second recording posted by another of the enrolled students tell the story. In the first minutes of the first meeting of the “History of Modern Israel” class, four protesters with faces covered by keffiyehs entered the room. One protester read aloud a prepared statement while another filmed. The statement included the phrase, “We’re giving you an inside scoop on Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.” Two fliers were distributed that included the headings “Crush Zionism” and “Burn Zionism to the Ground,” with drawings of a boot hovering over a star of David and a keffiyeh-clad figure holding a burning Israeli flag, respectively. A third flier read “THIS IS FOR HIND,” and a fourth was an uncaptioned picture of Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces and memorialized in previous Columbia protests and the 2025 film The Voice of Hind Rajab, among other sites.
[The article can be viewed via UIC login here (or if you get paywalled, a PDF is available here).]