An oppressive silence fills classrooms when students bring up topics surrounding Palestine and the encampment to almost any UCLA educator, dancing around the topic anytime it is mentioned in relation to what we are learning in class, which has left me puzzled as this is a glaring contradiction.
On Sept. 5 UCLA outlined a “Four Point Plan for a Safer, Stronger UCLA” that claims to focus on “enhancing community safety and well being, fostering a culture of engagement, learning and dialogue across difference, prompting freedom expression in line with University of California policies, and continuing to evaluate how to support our diverse community.” Through these four points, UCLA admin is further repressing students’ freedom of expression by regulating how one expresses themselves under the guise of creating a “safer campus environment.” Even within UCLA’s mission statement they claim to want to “ensure freedom of expression and dialogue, in a respectful and civil manner, on the spectrum of views held by our varied and diverse campus communities” and to have an “open and inclusive environment that nurtures the growth and development of all faculty, students, administration and staff” through debate and critical inquiry.
The hypocrisy of the facade that UCLA puts on for admitted students who are eagerly awaiting to attend a university to have fulfilling discussions and debates on current topics in comparison to the reality of silencing their student population is jarring.
How is it that Palestine is a central part of the current global political discourse, yet this is rarely talked about in the classes of the Amerikkka’s “#1 public university”? In emails regarding the encampment, why is it that the former Chancellor Gene Block dedicated only a measly sentence about the immense suffering of Palestinians but claims to not take a side?
Students are being punished for exercising what they have learned at this school, including ideas surrounding how social norms can be challenged to gain more rights for marginalized people, with courses relaying acts of resistance throughout history via both physical and online spaces. The absence and censorship of educational safe spaces for conversations surrounding Palestine disallows for any growth or learning for students.
Monitoring and censoring what is being said in classrooms won’t stop student’s ideas and hunger for change, but only further highlights UCLA’s compliance with the mass killings in Palestine.
UCLA admin cannot continue to ignore the pleas of their students. Cries against the oppressive system of white supremacy that UCLA benefits from are drowned out in favor of maintaining the UC’s tidy and rule-following facade. If this school wants to truly comply with their mission statement, they would need to allow for students to express themselves in and out of the classroom.
At the bare minimum, discussion and dialogue around Palestine is essential in educational spaces, and banning this exchange just shows what UCLA stands for, whether they explicitly say it or not. However, a conversation alone is not enough to elicit true change against an oppressive system. Continuous resistance against the status quo and forcing the administration and government to hear our voices must be practiced as a collective community.
