Photo: Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images
At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, 11 students stand accused by the administration of assaulting college staff during Palestine solidarity protests in the last year. Yet there wasn’t any pushing, grabbing, nor any kind of harmful touching.
The alleged assaults occurred, according to internal disciplinary charges, because some of the students used a bullhorn to amplify chants and slogans calling for the school to divest from Israel’s military-industrial complex.
The students, in other words, could face expulsion on assault charges for making a noise and amplifying it using, perhaps second only to the placard, the most standard of protest equipment.
“I feel like this is kind of a humiliation ritual, to make us apologize for protesting our college’s complicity.”
Swarthmore, a Quaker-founded private liberal arts college, prides itself on a legacy of promoting social justice. In the last year, however, the school has followed the trend throughout higher education in meeting protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza with extraordinary repression.
In framing students as potential assault perpetrators for using a bullhorn, Swarthmore may even be raising the bar in punishing routine — even sometimes celebrated — protest activities.
“I feel like this is kind of a humiliation ritual, to make us apologize for protesting our college’s complicity and investment in genocide,” said Fatima, a Swarthmore senior and core organizer with the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of online harassment. Fatima, among the students charged with assault for using a bullhorn, said, “It’s heinous and it’s ridiculous.”
A first-generation, low-income undergraduate, Fatima told me she feels she has been specifically targeted as a Arab Muslim student in a vulnerable economic circumstance. She said that many of the students facing disciplinary charges for their involvement in SJP are Black and brown.
“Swarthmore College is deeply committed to freedom of expression, including the freedom to protest and dissent peacefully,” said Alisa Giardinelli, the assistant vice president for communications at the college. “While we do not publicly discuss specific student conduct cases, I can confirm for you that in May, the college issued charge letters to students alleged to have violated a number of campus policies in the fall and early spring.”
The students, and the faculty defending them, attributed an uptick in disciplinary charges to a “Palestine exception” to free speech.
“According to our last recorded statistics, the college averaged 4.5 disciplinary charges a year — a figure that includes alcohol and substance use charges,” said three Swarthmore associate professors, Sangina Patnaik, Lara Cohen, and Ahmad Shokr, who are working as case managers for the students facing charges, in a statement. “This year the college is disciplining 25 pro-Palestine student activists. Twenty of them are students of color, and many are first-generation, low-income students.”
Giardinelli said both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel students had faced disciplinary charges. “To be clear,” she added, “neither race, socioeconomic standing, nor any other individual identity or status played a role in determining code of conduct violations.”
Along with nine of the other students, Fatima will attend a hearing on Wednesday over the assault charge and other charges including disorderly conduct and intimidation. The charges stemmed from a small protest last December: Ten students interrupted an on-campus dinner held for the college’s board of managers.
The students carried posters, including photographs commemorating Palestinians recently slaughtered by Israel; they had one bullhorn among them, which some of the students used to call out their divestment demands. The dinner attendees responded to the protest by leaving, driven away in a shuttle bus as demonstrators followed them out and continued a small rally outside.
Another student also faces assault charges for using a bullhorn at a separate pro-divestment protest outside the school’s dining center in February.
The charges are all internal to the school, not criminal, but could lead to sanctions including expulsion.
“The Same Tactics”
Swarthmore is not an outlier. For a year, universities around the country have been treating the most archetypal of free speech — protest activity — as a threat to community safety, worthy of grave sanctions, and, in many cases, aggressive police involvement too.
The bullhorn-related assault charges are the latest example of the absurd lengths school administrators will now go to paint pro-Palestinian activism as harmful and violent, no matter how unremarkable the protest actions in question.
“And at no point did I think that I was jeopardizing my education, because of the long history of social justice protest at Swarthmore,” said another student facing bullhorn-related assault and other disciplinary charges for their participation in the December protest.
The student requested The Intercept not to disclose their name due to concerns of retaliation from the college.
“The South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, organizing for survivors, the Black Lives Matter movement, all of these movements, all of these movements used the same tactics that we did,” said the student. “Sit-ins, occupying administrative offices, interrupting meetings and board of managers, and using bullhorns inside and outside. And to my knowledge, none of these groups and none of the individuals in these groups have ever faced disciplinary charges like we have.”
After the disruption of the board of managers dinner in December, the students were informed that attendees at the dinner experienced ear pain and hearing loss, with one person seeking medical attention due to the noise from the bullhorn.
“We asked for the medical records of this specific person who alleges that they had to seek medical attention. They did not give it to us,” Fatima told me. (Students are not allowed to have legal representation at their disciplinary hearings.)
Giardinelli, the Swarthmore spokesperson, stated, “The cases that fall under alleged major misconduct violations include instances in which community members had to seek medical attention as a result of the actions of some students. Due to privacy concerns, I’m unable to say more about that.”
Swarthmore hired an external law firm, Montgomery McCracken, to investigate the incident. However, none of the students facing disciplinary charges were interviewed by the law firm for their investigation, which relied on the school’s CCTV footage, testimony from dinner attendees, and reports from the school’s Public Safety staff.
“The College has previously hired outside investigators and external professionals with higher education and student conduct experience to investigate and review issues related to student conduct,” said Giardinelli. “We also used an outside investigator after student protests in the spring of 2019.” (Montgomery McCracken did not respond to a request for comment.)
Fatima claimed that the school’s provost, Tomoko Sakomura, grabbed her arm at the dinner protest in an attempt to take the bullhorn from her.
The school’s code of conduct includes actions under “assault” that may put oneself or others at risk of bodily harm, even if the harm is not realized. The students facing charges cited higher decibel levels at parties hosted on campus as per their research.
According to the students and faculty case managers supporting them, they checked the decibel levels of the bullhorns used against Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines once they learned of the assault claim.
The students argue that even if the bullhorn was used at its highest volume setting indoors, OSHA guidelines suggest that workers can be safely exposed to that level of noise for up to an hour per day. The indoor dinner protest lasted less than 30 minutes.
“For my case, the main thing I would say is that the assault allegation is especially egregious because the only evidence they are using against me is public safety testimony,” said Adi, a sophomore SJP organizer who requested to withhold his last name for fear of online harassment. Adi is facing assault charges for directing a bullhorn at a public safety officer at a February protest. The officer reportedly sought medical attention for ringing ears in the following days.
Swarthmore, like other colleges across the country, has been revising student and faculty conduct guidelines, with critics alleging that the changes are aimed at silencing pro-Palestine action and baselessly demonizing anti-Israel protest as anti-Semitic.
Patnaik, Cohen, and Shokr, the Swarthmore faculty members supporting the students, mentioned that among the new policies was a ban on “among other things, musical instruments and ‘loud chanting’ indoors.”
“The Student Handbook and Student Code of Conduct is updated each year,” Giardinelli, the Swarthmore spokesperson, said. The 2024-25 updates have been enhanced to include examples aimed at helping students better understand behavior that is considered prohibited when it disrupts campus and community operations, classes, or activities.
The professors expressed their concerns, stating that the implementation of these stricter measures indicates that colleges and universities are willing to sacrifice fundamental principles of higher education – such as truth-seeking, intellectual inquiry, and free speech – in order to suppress pro-Palestine activism for the foreseeable future.
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