This month, 26 students and two faculty who were arrested for trespassing at the November 9 Rosenwald Hall sit-in will appear in court. The sit-in disrupted classes and admissions tours, while nearly 100 other protestors rallied outside. The protestors eagerly recorded police officers and Thinker Editor-in-Chief Declan Hurley but tried to prevent Thinker correspondents from recording reciprocally.
Protestors were keen to record police officers. “Take out your phones and record everything,” one organizer yelled into a megaphone. “If they stop free speech, we’ve got to let them know.”
Thinker Editor-in-Chief Declan Hurley was also recorded by the subsequently arrested protestors inside Rosenwald, and UChicago United for Palestine uploaded the video onto their Instagram story. In the process, they tagged Hurley’s personal Instagram account.
Protestors Want Their Free Speech but with None of The Accountability
Despite recording Thinker affiliates and other passersby, chant leaders outside Rosenwald deliberately avoided public recognition, directing protestors to prevent reporters from recording. Members donned surgical masks to cover their faces and used keffiyehs to block the Thinker’s cameras. One apparent leader of the crowd asked the Thinker to obscure all faces because “it’s journalistic integrity, it’s the polite thing to do.”
After one arrested protestor was released and started giving a speech, other protestors surrounded the Thinker correspondent recording the scene, hitting the correspondent’s phone, and yelling insults. Members of the protest declined to comment on this story. This longer video depicts chants, students utilizing medical masks to hide their faces, and attempts to block outsider recordings.
While the demonstrators encouraged outside reporters to embrace “the polite thing to do,” some of their comments could be interpreted as not abiding by their own principles. One woman who brought food to the trespassers said, after successfully throwing food to them, “Yo, send me to Gaza right now!” After seeing that she was being recorded, she commented, “Oh, it’s the Ziods.”
Her husband, an SJP leader who has led Palestine 101 events, said, “Look at that pretty pale skin that will burn in the desert, you’re indigenous right? Wait, where’s your 23andMe? Can you show me your 23andMe? Is 5,000 kids enough for you?” The woman, who identified herself as a non-student, continued: “How many sons of b****** do we have to kill before Ben Shapiro gets his d*** hard?” The outburst then devolved into repetitions of “Britney, tell me how you’re indigenous to Palestine” and “Oh my god, she’s so indigenous” from the two.
The University and The Protestors Respond
If anyone deserves a gold medal for their politeness on November 9th, it would be university administrators. Associate Director of Public Affairs Gerald McSwiggan made the following statement to the Thinker:
“At approximately 11:30 a.m. Thursday, protestors entered the second-floor lobby of Rosenwald Hall. The protestors were instructed on multiple occasions to leave the building, and were informed that their activity constituted disruptive conduct under University policy.
The University’s normal business hours conclude at 5:00 p.m. Protestors were notified by Deans-on-Call that if they failed to vacate Rosenwald Hall by 5:30 p.m., they would be in violation of the University’s Building Occupancy Policy, and that their unauthorized presence would subject them to arrest by law enforcement for criminal trespass. They were reminded that they were free to go at any time without arrest.
After these repeated warnings, starting around 6 p.m. University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers arrested 28 protestors, cited them with criminal trespass under the Illinois Criminal Code, and released them. No force was used.
As part of our commitment to free expression, the University of Chicago is deeply committed to upholding the rights of protesters and speakers to express a wide range of views. University policies also make it clear that demonstrations cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”
Student protestors were apparently unimpressed with the university’s response, however. After being arrested, given paperwork for a court appearance, and released into the crowd, one protestor remarked:
“I want to take a moment to laugh at how stupid this s*** is. They basically took us one by one to a little spot and sat down and like gave us a little form and ‘you do know you’re getting arrested right?’ I was like, that’s nothing to me, the students at [unintelligible] that I’m in contact with, same age as me, they get 11 months, 12 months administrative detention, no contact with anyone on the outside, torture, abuse f****** no, no idea of the conditions of their arrest, nothing. You think this is something to me, this stupid little . . . what is this? I don’t even know what this is . . . it’s goofiness, it’s funny, the administration just needs to meet with us, that’s all we’re asking, meet with us! Instead, they send these goofies out and ‘ah, you’re released now.’ What did you achieve? Nothing.”
The organizers behind the protest are Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago (@sjpuchicago) and UChicago United for Justice in Palestine (@uchicagounited).
SJP highlighted several other groups in an initial Instagram post about the event, including @carenotcops (a student organization promoting the tag #AbolishUCPD), @nlg_uchicago (The National Lawyers Guild chapter of UChicago Law), and @ej_taskforce “UChicago’s Environmental Justice Task Force fighting for people and the planet over profit.”