When students, staff, or faculty are accused of being associated or "aligned" with terrorist organizations, universities may be pressed to take immediate and harsh action, if only to quell media attention and appear compliant with this lawless Administration’s wishes. Universities must prepare for this possibility, learn about the underlying legal frameworks, and refuse to operate on the basis of fear rather than legal necessity or moral principle.
The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.
Institutional leaders must affirm that advocacy for Palestinian rights, as well as concern for and celebration of Palestinian lives, is squarely within the sphere of legitimate discourse.
Recent efforts to suppress the expression of the most basic aspirations for Palestinian freedom offend not only civil libertarian commitments to free speech and related ideas of academic freedom, but, perhaps more surprisingly, civil rights commitments to nondiscrimination.
How might organized labor be engaged in ending mass incarceration? One approach is to emphasize how carceral labor is exploited as a substitute for rights-bearing “free labor." But the mere threat of substitution does not ensure solidarity. A more promising avenue is to consider how carcerality itself extends into so-called "free" labor markets. Under this "carceral labor continuum," anti-carceral unionism emerges not from broad concerns over economic substitution but instead from the practical demands of workplace organizing.
Two different mortal threats to democracy have been on vivid display this past year: Trump’s January 6 insurrection and the Supreme Court’s rampage through statutory and constitutional law. Considering these events on split-screen raises some uncomfortable questions about LPE analysis of democracy, law, and courts. In particular, certain law-is-just-politics views deployed to dismiss the Court seem to foreclose criticism of Trump’s attempted coup as lawless. More generally, for democratic institutions to assert and receive primacy requires some conception of law that does not just dissolve back into “politics.”
