RUTHFULLY YOURS

For many Jewish students at the University of Michigan, their celebration of the Jewish New Year was unjustly marred by feelings of pain and ostracism. On Rosh Hashanah, a campus group called “Students Allied for Freedom and Equality” (SAFE) erected a so-called “apartheid” wall and mock Israeli checkpoints on the Diag, in the center of the campus. As one Jewish student described it, the wall falsely depicted Israel as an apartheid state, and falsely painted the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces as vicious murderers.

Many Jewish students expressed how hurt, offended and marginalized they felt by SAFE’s actions. SAFE unapologetically justified them, claiming that the group’s goal was “to start the conversation about the oppression of Palestinians under occupation.” If that were true, then SAFE would have scheduled its anti-Israel demonstration on a day when Jewish students could be part of the conversation. Instead, as SAFE undoubtedly knew, many Jewish students were observing the holiday, either on campus or elsewhere, and were thus denied the opportunity to stand up for their Jewish homeland in dialogue with others in the campus community.

Over 1100 students signed a petition urging University President Mark Schlissel to speak out. In addition, four national organizations, including the Simon Weisenthal Center and StandWithUS, co-signed the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) letter to President Schlissel, urging him to issue a statement condemning SAFE for erecting its “apartheid” wall and mock checkpoints on a Jewish holy day. While SAFE had the legal right to hold its demonstration on Rosh Hashanah, it was important for President Schlissel to acknowledge that SAFE’s actions had hurt members of the Jewish community and made them feel excluded.
Students, parents, donors, alumni, the regents, and members of the community should be asking President Schlissel why he seemingly takes the feelings and concerns of Jewish students less seriously than the concerns of other students who have felt hurt and marginalized on campus.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at New York University, argued in a recently published essay that while its traditional “telos” (end or goal) has been truth, within the last few decades the university has assumed another: Social Justice.

The university, however, can only have one telos.

The conflict between these two goals has raged for decades, Haidt claims. Last year, though, it became unmanageable when student groups at 86 universities and colleges around the country issued “demands” to administrators, demands for Social Justice that, by and large, were met.

The following statement is posted at BlackLiberationCollective.org:

“We demand at the minimum, Black students and Black faculty to be reflected by the national percentage of Black folk in the state and the country.

We demand free intuition for Black and indigenous students.

We demand a divestment from prisons and an investment in communities.”

A statement of “principles” follows. The Black Liberation Collective (BLC) opposes “anti-Blackness;” “sexism;” “ableism;” “capitalism;” “White privilege;” “inequality;” and “heteronormativity.” It rejects as well non-violence considered as a principle in contradistinction to a tactic.

“Anti-Black racism is woven in the fabric of our global society,” says the BLC. “When social systems are racialized by white supremacy, whiteness becomes the default of humanity and Blackness is stripped of its humanity, becoming a commodity, becoming disposable.”

Protesters at the University of California Berkeley shut down a bridge, preventing white people from crossing it. The protesters then posted an “eviction notice” on a campus building, and finally paraded through the student union and the campus entrance, disrupting students who were trying to study and blocking traffic in a central intersection.

A group of about 100 students united to block one side of a bridge, chanting, “Go around! Go around!” to any white people in the area. One black protester told a white student trying to cross, “I’m telling you, this isn’t about you. This is about whiteness, this is not about you. We don’t care about you.”

This new “safe space” segregation forced white students to go around the bridge, crossing Strawberry Creek below it.

Members of the University of California Police Department (UCPD) gathered to provide safety, and they gave helpful directions to white people who were physically prevented from crossing the bridge.

A lead protester shouted profanities at UCPD, even as the police had gathered to guarantee her safety. “Berkeley, why the f**k do you let UCPD do what they want with our bodies?” the protester belted, perhaps referring to the Black Lives Matter claims that police abuse people of color. “I’m talking to you, UCPD, I don’t give a f**k about you!”

Last week, Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., the president of DePaul University, prevented a College Republicans poster bearing the phrase “Unborn Lives Matter” from being displayed on campus.

According to Holtschneider’s open letter to the DePaul community, the poster constituted “bigotry . . . under the cover of free speech” that “provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.” Linda Brown Blakely, vice president of public relations and communications at DePaul, tells National Review that the banner in question “was, at best deceptive, and the words, font, colors, and design clearly were intended to do a disservice to the Black Lives Matter and pro-life movements.” Both Holtschneider and Blakely cited the university document “Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression,” which draws a “distinction between being provocative and being hurtful” and states that “speech whose primary purpose is to wound is inconsistent with our Vincentian and Catholic values.”

But Jorin Burkhart, the junior at DePaul who designed the poster in question, says that he did not mean for it to be “hurtful” to anyone. “The intention was for the poster to be eye-catching,” he tells National Review. The club planned to print the design on a large banner and hang it on the second floor of the student center beside a number of other large posters advertising student clubs.

“It has to stand out somehow if it’s going to hang there,” Burkhart added. “I decided to use a fairly simple, black-and-white design, with this three-word phrase [Unborn Lives Matter.] Yes, the style resembles the Black Lives Matter slogan and the way they tend to design it, but that was in an effort to make it stand out and to get people to look at it.” John Minster, a sophomore at DePaul and vice president of the College Republicans, agrees with Burkhart. He says the posters were merely meant “to promote our meetings, our presence on campus, and our values.”

“[The administration] constantly claims to know what our intentions are without ever asking us . . . or doing any sort of digging to figure out what we were thinking along the way,” Burkhart explains. “If we do something they don’t like, they assume we had bad intentions.” He also says that no one in the administration asked him or other club members what their intentions were either before or after the decision was made to ban the posters.

Some students at DePaul want to put up a pro-life poster.

You might think that would be uncontroversial at a Catholic university.

Wrong.

This is DePaul, where Free Speech Comes to Die.

They not only banned the poster. They cited “Catholic values” for banning it. You have to give them credit for a droll sense of humor.

Here’s the poster and here’s one article about it.

Now, just for fun, see if you can guess how this poster violates Catholic Values?

Here is the open letter from DePaul’s President explaining his reasoning.

As we have declined to host a proposed speaker and asked students to redesign a banner that provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.
Some people will say that DePaul’s stance unfairly silences speech to appease a crowd. Nothing can be further from the truth.
–Letter from DePaul Pres., Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., to the university community about speech and DePaul’s values