Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours.
But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives.
Lmao they thought suspending students for exercising their first amendment rights was going to calm things down? We have truly forgotten how to deal with protests in this country without resorting to authoritarianism.
To forget something you have to have known in the first place. The US has a very very long history of trying to smash protests with the law. All the way back to the whiskey rebellion and before.
To be fair the Whiskey rebellion was more of an armed insurrection than a protest. But yeah, point taken.
Well the whole USofA as a nation is a violent protest in long form. Kinda hard to say they never knew the thing that started them.