Columbia and Beyond: The Surge in Activism for Palestine, the Instrumentalizing of “Safety,” and the Attack on Education by the Far Right

Speaking Out of Place

In the wake of Congressional investigations into a wave of so-called “anti-Semitism” on university campuses, college administrators are bending over backwards to appease Right Wing politicians and wealthy donors at the expense of civil liberties, and free speech and academic freedom protections. They particularly operationalize notions of public safety and feelings of safety to mute protests over the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, a genocide enabled by these same universities and the United States as a whole. Thus we see a warped set of values and priorities wherein the most principled people are being disciplined, suspended, and expelled from campus. Hamza El Boudali, a student activist, Nicole Morse, a professor long involved in the movements for Palestinian rights and LGBTQ justice, and Natasha Lennard, a journalist from The Intercept who has been covering these cases join us for a conversation that ranges from the immediate case at Columbia to a broad discussion of attacks on education by the right wing. We end with arguments for the future.

Hamza El Boudali is a master's student at Stanford University studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Born in Morocco and raised in New Hampshire, he is a practicing Muslim interested in Muslim and Islamic causes worldwide. He is a former co-President of the Muslim Student Union at Stanford and he is passionate about advocacy for Palestine as well as other oppressed Muslim groups around the world such as the Uyghurs, Rohingya, Kashmiris, etc. After graduation, he plans to study the traditional Islamic sciences and combine his interest in AI with Islamic studies, philosophy, and intellectual activism.

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, Dissent, and the New York Times, among others. She is the associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism graduate program at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Violence: Humans in Dark Times (with Brad Evans, CityLights, 2018), and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso, 2019). She is working on her next book, on conceptualizing uncertainty, for Verso Books.

Nicole Erin Morse is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Their research has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, Jump Cut, Discourse, and elsewhere, and their book Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art was published by Duke University in 2022. They are a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has landed them on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.