How American colleges are suppressing political dissent
At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, someone splattered red paint on a statue honoring Benjamin Franklin, the school’s founder.
Within hours, campus workers washed it off. But the university was eager to find the culprit.
A pro-Palestinian group had claimed responsibility on social media. The university examined footage and identified a student’s cellphone number using data from the campus Wi-Fi near the statue at the time it was vandalized. Campus police obtained a search warrant for T-Mobile’s call records for the phone, and later a warrant to seize the phone itself.
On Oct. 18 at 6 a.m., armed campus and city police appeared at the off-campus home of a student believed to be the phone’s owner. A neighbor said they shined lights into her bedroom window, holding guns. Then they entered the student’s apartment and seized his phone, according to a police filing.
Months later, the student has not been charged with any crime.
The Penn investigation, which remains open, is one of several across the country in which universities have turned to more sophisticated technology and shows of police force to investigate student vandalism and other property crimes related to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. (The student who had his phone seized did not respond to an interview request.)
The warrants were first reported by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper, which filed a lawsuit after police did not initially file the warrants with a local court.
Much of it happened even before President Trump returned to office. Since then, he has made clear he will use his power to force universities to take a hard line on protests. His administration has warned 60 universities that they could face penalties from investigations into antisemitism, and has also begun seeking to deport protesters. At least nine current or former students and one professor who were legally in the United States with visas or green cards have already been targeted, with at least one student being detained on the street by officials in plainclothes. [Continue reading…]
On March 9, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, sent an anxious text message to Najiba Akbar, the university’s former Muslim chaplain, with whom she had become close.
“I recently learned that someone added all my information to a doxxing website called Canary Mission because of the op-ed published last March,” Ms. Ozturk wrote. She was trying to figure out what to do about it.
The website published her résumé and a picture of her in a red head scarf, and claimed that she had “engaged in anti-Israel activism.” It also linked to an opinion essay she had written with three other students in the Tufts student newspaper, critical of the university for not sanctioning Israel over the war in Gaza.
Ms. Ozturk had never struck the chaplain as the activist type, or the face of a movement. She was more of an introvert, the kind of person who liked to be helpful and would stay late after activities at the university’s Interfaith Center to help clean up.
So Ms. Akbar was shocked this week when she heard that the government had revoked Ms. Ozturk’s visa.
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations had concluded that Ms. Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” according to a statement from homeland security.
At a news conference this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about her detention. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Her friends and professors said that characterization did not square with what they knew of Ms. Ozturk. “It doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Ms. Akbar said. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”
Ms. Ozturk is one of many international students whom the government is seeking to deport after President Trump promised to combat antisemitism on campus and punish student protesters for misbehaving. Her detention suggests that the government is casting a wide net, finding not just prominent protesters who pushed limits and broke rules, but also apparently some who were more quietly involved.
The American Civil Liberties Union signed onto the case Friday and filed court papers demanding her release from custody, arguing that detaining her is a violation of her First Amendment rights, which extend to noncitizens on American soil. [Continue reading…]