Tag: Columbia University

The Khalil arrest shows why we must protect ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’

The 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague. Rosika Schwimmer is fourth from left. Photo via Wikipedia.

What is the First Amendment for? Quite simply, it is for protecting our right to express views that are unpopular or even offensive. There’s more to it than that, of course, and it’s not unlimited. But it surely is there to act as a shield for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs have arrested and who the administration is now trying to deport to — well, somewhere.

Khalil was involved pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University last spring. As Philip Marcelo of The Associated Press reports, “The White House … claimed Khalil organized protests where pro-Hamas propaganda was distributed.” But Khalil also holds a green card, making him a permanent resident of the United States. Moreover, the First Amendment extends to anyone in the U.S., citizen or non-citizen, legal resident or undocumented immigrant.

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Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had a few things to say about another non-U.S. citizen with unpopular views. Rosika Schwimmer was a Hungarian immigrant, feminist and pacifist who sought to become a U.S. citizen. She was turned down because she refused to take the oath of citizenship, believing that it obliged her to take up arms if ordered to do so — notwithstanding the reality that, as a woman, she would have been exempt from military service.

Her case ended up before the Supreme Court, which, in 1929, on a 6-3 vote, overturned an appeals court ruling in her favor. Justice Holmes wrote an eloquent dissent that is still invoked as a defense of the First Amendment’s true meaning. He said in part:

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but, if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate. I think that we should adhere to that principle with regard to admission into, as well as to life within, this country.

“Freedom for the thought that we hate” is a concise and compelling explanation of why the First Amendment matters, and it’s a phrase that we’ve all heard over and over again. Anthony Lewis even made it the title of one of his books.

And it’s why Trump is acting illegally and unconstitutionally in holding Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. He has not been accused of providing material assistance to Hamas. Rather, he is being singled out for his political views. And let’s be honest — Trump is doing this in a deliberate attempt to rekindle left-wing activism on behalf of the Palestinians in order to harm Democrats, universities and anyone else who stands in the way of his authoritarian project.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called Khalil’s arrest the most significant threat to free speech since the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. “If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration,” she wrote. And indeed, Trump has boasted that more arrests will follow.

Schwimmer, at least, was allowed to remain in the U.S. as a non-citizen. She eventually moved to New York City and died in 1948. Khalil’s fate has yet to be determined.

The dangers that student journalists face as police break up campus protests

Hadas Gold of CNN reports on the dangers that student journalists have faced at the hands of law enforcement as police have been called in to bring pro-Palestinian protests to a close at Columbia University, UCLA and other college campuses. She writes:

The confrontations with journalists come as student-run news outlets and traditional news media descend on college campuses where police officers have clashed with and arrested hundreds of demonstrators demanding the universities divest any financial ties with Israel over the war in Gaza. On one campus, assailants reportedly followed and attacked student journalists.

At The Boston Globe, Aidan Ryan reports on the threats that student and professional journalists have come under at Columbia barely a week before the university is scheduled to host the annual Pulitzer Prize festivities. Ryan quotes Matt Pearce, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who’s now a union official with the NewsGuild, who tweeted: “Try not to trip over any hogtied student journalists while collecting your award.”

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Student journalists are on the front lines of protest coverage

The Berkeley Beacon, the student newspaper at Emerson College, has a live blog covering the arrest of students who have been camping out to protest on behalf of Palestinian rights in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war. More than 100 protesters have been taken into custody, the Beacon reports, citing the Emerson chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Student journalists have received a lot of much-deserved praise for their coverage of these encampments. In particular, the Columbia Daily Spectator has established itself as the go-to source for reporting on protests at Columbia University.

Update: The Huntington News has tweeted that students are setting up an encampment on Centennial Common at Northeastern University. On the one hand, I’ve been wondering when this might happen. On the other, we’re a week or two ahead of most schools; classes are out, and finals are nearly over.

Update II: Now The Huntington News has started a live blog to follow unfolding events at Northeastern.

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Flashback: The state of digital culture in 1993

In the spring of 1993 I attended a conference on journalism and technology at Columbia University. It was a time when the digital culture that was to emerge was right on the brink: the Internet was not nearly as much of a force in the lives of ordinary people as were commercial services like Prodigy, and Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, had just been released. With The Boston Globe just having run an image of the story I wrote for The Boston Phoenix after that conference, I thought I’d reproduce it here in full.

Future Watch: Lost in space

Why the electronic village may be a very lonely place

Copyright © 1993 by the Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.

May 7, 1993: From 500-channel interactive TV to portable electronic newspapers, an unprecedented explosion of information technology awaits us in the next several years. These services, media analysts say, will allow you to tailor news programming to your own interests, do your banking and shopping at home, and make restaurant reservations with a hand-held computer while you’re sitting at a bus stop.

Certainly the speakers were bullish at this past week’s conference on “Newsroom Technology: The Next Generation,” sponsored by the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, at Columbia University, in New York. Expert after expert talked in rapturous tones about the “information highway,” fiber optics, coaxial cable, digital compression, and the like.

But there’s a dark side to the emerging electronic village, acknowledged almost as an afterthought amid the glowing financial projections and the futuristic technobabble. And that dark side is this: as information becomes increasingly decentralized, there’s a danger that consumers of that information — all of us, in other words — will become more and more isolated from society and from each other.

What’s being lost is the sense of shared cultural experience — the nationwide community that gathered to watch, say, the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, or the Watergate hearings, in the 1970s. Media analyst Les Brown, a former television reporter for the New York Times, believes that for all their “insufferable arrogance” during that era, the Big Three networks “served the needs of democracy very well.” With 500 channels, he fears, users will choose news programming that suits their political biases — if they choose any news programming at all.

“Whatever happened to everybody talking to each other?” he asked during the Freedom Forum gathering. “What happened to this big tent we used to have? As the media become more democratized, they may serve the needs of democracy less well.” Continue reading “Flashback: The state of digital culture in 1993”