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Pro-Palestine student activists dispute disciplinary action at UW-Madison

Student activists at UW-Madison pitched tents on Library Mall for nearly two weeks last semester in solidarity with Palestine. The university ultimately reached an agreement with the protesters, but then pursued disciplinary action this summer against almost forty students. Two students are now disputing those charges with help from a nonprofit advocacy group, Palestine Legal. Dahlia Saba, a second-year grad student at UW-Madison and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, is one of them. She tells WORT News Producer Faye Parks that the university’s actions are discriminatory and create a chilling effect on students’ free speech. Image courtesy: Faye Parks / WORT News.

Broadcast on:: 25 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

- All right, I have Dalia Saba on the line. Thank you for joining me. - Yeah, thanks for talking to me. - So I'd like to start with talking about an op-ed that you and another student at UW, Vignesh Ramachandran, published last spring in The Cap Times. What exactly did you write? - Yeah, so we wrote an op-ed basically in support of the demands of the student encampment. As members of the movement, we also believe that we have a responsibility to fight for justice for Palestinians. And specifically when it comes to being students at this university, we have a responsibility to end our own complicity in this ongoing genocide by calling on our university to divest from companies that are profiting off of it, such as weapons manufacturers and surveillance technology companies. - So following last semester's protests on campus, the university brought disciplinary charges against several dozen students, including yourself and Vignesh. So where are you at in these proceedings? - In my case, and new and significant cases, the university in response to this op-ed brought student conduct allegations against the two of us. I want to note that they provided no evidence about New Year Vignesh's individual conduct apart from us writing this op-ed, and that was the only basis for these investigations. So if they opened the investigations, they notified us that we were being investigated in July of this summer. And then they scheduled investigation meetings with us after which the university investigator recommended that we both be found responsible for violating policy. Again, I want to emphasize that they have no evidence of us actually violating any policy. The only evidence used was the fact that we wrote an op-ed that was publicly critical of the university and publicly Yep for Palestinian rights. After the result of the investigators findings, we have both chosen to dispute these findings as being false and discriminatory. And we are moving forward with a university hearing. So we both have hearings scheduled for next week. Recently, we have both been in contact with the law office Palestine legal, which speaks up for the rights of students who are advocating in solidarity with Palestine. And last week, this office sent out a letter to the university, notifying them that these cases are unconstitutional. They threatened our first amendment rights as students at a public university. And they're also discriminatory. They are expressly discriminating based on pro-Palestinian viewpoints. And we have seen that across these investigations, the university has targeted students of color. We have seen that Palestinian students in other investigations have been recommended to harsher punishments than other students with no real basis or justification for why. For your case specifically, if your dispute is unsuccessful, what kind of consequences would you face both academically and then just for your life in general? So the recommended sanction from the investigator was a written reprimand, which on its own, it just lives on your internal record. However, the reason that this is significant is that it essentially acts as like an albatross from the neck of a student who has it, in that if the student ever faces an sort of student conduct investigations in the future, the presence of a written reprimand on that student's record gives the university the ability and the right to start providing much more harsh punishments for that student for any future act that they deem to be a violation of student conduct. And we've seen that given this pattern of the university going after pro-Palestinian speech that should be protected the violation of student conduct, we see this attempt to give as many students as possible written reprimands as an attempt to silence students and prevent further activism in solidarity with Palestine. - Have these proceedings had a chilling effect on you personally? Do you plan to organize more this semester in solidarity with Palestine? - I think that we cannot let these university attacks to try to silence students when the genocide of Gaza is ongoing. We have seen that more and more people are being killed every day in Gaza, but now the war has escalated to Lebanon and we have seen hundreds of people be killed by the Israeli government with US arms that our university is investing in. And so I think the work cannot be done just because the university is cracking down. In fact, we have seen at this campus and at other campuses that when the university tries to repress us, we only fight back stronger because we cannot accept the fact that our activism will be used to take our way our rights entirely. - So I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but I was at the Harris campaign rally last Friday and I thought I saw you there as well. Were you one of the protesters? - Yes, I was there. - I think I might have witnessed you actually have an encounter with volunteers there. They sort of tugged a banner out of your hands. Are you willing to speak on that enough? - Yeah, yeah. - So me and along with some others went to the Kamala Harris rally on Friday to again, communicate to her our demand that she endorsed an arms embargo that she stopped sending weapons to Israel to be used in Gaza and in Lebanon. And she did not acknowledge our demands. We saw staffers come pull a banner out of our hands and confiscate it. We did not get that banner back. Also, we're mentioning that there were other banners in the audience, one that said freedom, one that said joy, that nobody tugged out of their holders hands. We were escorted out of the Coliseum and we were threatened for the rest if we did not leave. Personally, I have been very disappointed in Kamala Harris' refusal to acknowledge the basic humanity of Palestinians, much less acknowledge the bare minimum of action that it would take to protect Palestinian life. - So we touched on the disciplinary proceedings at UW Madison and then your experience at the Harris rally on Friday. Do you feel that institutions of power are just less willing to engage with folks who are in solidarity with Palestine? - I think that's true. And I think that we have seen a decade long campaign in this country to dehumanize Palestinian systematically in our news, in our fiction, in our film and television. And this isn't hurt because the US is a global hudgemon. It is the center of an empire that is built on controlling resources and people across the globe and to support Palestinian rights, which is supporting a decolonial struggle is in many ways to impose the US imperial interests globally. Our institutions have not been exempt from the speakingization of Palestinians. Our universities continue to silence for Palestinian speech explicitly more so than other forms of speech. Our political candidates refuse to even have Palestinian speakers at the Democratic National Convention. And we see that there's this inherent contradiction of institutions which claim to care about free speech to value free speech. And then we'll start passing policies that prohibit expressive activity altogether in areas of campus when it comes to Palestinian protests. And I think that this goes against so many of the institutions' stated values. This is the school that like made the phrase "fisting and winnowing" famous to talk about how we need to allow for viewpoints that people disagree with. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me, Dalia. Yeah, thanks so much, babe. That was Dalia Saba, a second-year graduate student at UW Madison and a member of Students for Justice