It was over quickly. The campus police made four arrests. They took the signs with the photos of the dead children. They did not take the Israeli flags. That was Wednesday, August 28, Day 3 of the “Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement” at the University of Michigan.
There is something deeply unsettling about watching a gang of armed, heavily padded officers charge into a group of young people, grab a protester, drag them to the side, march them off. It seems so deeply dishonorable. A show of overwhelming force, directed, on that day, at a 16-year-old child, among others. On a video of the confrontation, you can hear someone calling out, “That is a little girl!” Someone tells me that the kid weighed all of 100 pounds, others that the parents were told to pick up their child either at the police station or at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, the officer wasn’t sure which. It was the hospital, it turned out.
You won’t find such details in the university’s official accounts of the events of that day. Not in The University Record, the official news organ of the Michigan system, nor in the quotes our spokespeople gave to the press, nor in the emails sent by Michigan’s president. Those are crafty documents, carefully phrased to avoid outright lies. But they are not the truth.
I was there. It was the day of “Festifall,” when roughly a thousand student clubs line up their tables on campus to recruit new members. Campus was bustling; it was difficult to get through. It was a sunny day. The atmosphere was lively. It was the kind of thing universities love to picture in their recruitment brochures.
If you made it past Phi Sigma Rho, the Solar Car club, or the Campus Advocates for Resilience, Empowerment, and Safety, you would reach the Diag, our public square, where the mood was somber and you could pass more easily. About 50 people quietly sat or lay on the ground, surrounded by white sheets splattered with red paint, holding up images of dead Palestinians affixed to short wooden handles. A woman was reading the names of dead 1-year olds. A small group responded to each name with a quiet “Rest in peace.” Another small student group, holding a U.S. flag and two Israeli flags, stood on a bench to the side, pointing and jeering.
A die-in is the most peaceful form of protest, a public act of mourning the dead. This one was denied a permit, its sadness unauthorized. The protesters came anyway.
Several of us faculty members attended to observe and document the event. The university had announced it would enforce its new policies, which were quietly written into our Standard Practice Guide in a summer meeting of our regents, without discussion or consultation. Many of the changes codify elements of a “Disruptive Activity Policy” the University had proposed earlier this year, which met with widespread scorn. They also revised the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities — without consulting student or faculty-governance groups, as had been the norm before. “In light of the need for more efficient student disciplinary processes,” to quote President Santa J. Ono, our students have markedly fewer rights now.
Just another day in American higher education under the Palestinian exception, you might say. No university leader will admit on the record that the slew of new rules and regulations are intended to curb the wave of pro-Palestinian activism on campus. But everybody knows this.
The morning after posting some of my photographs of the protest and its suppression on Twitter, I got a direct message from a university leader proclaiming that “none of our students were arrested yesterday. All four people arrested were outsiders.” A spokeswoman told the Detroit Free Press that “none of the people who were arrested were students. Three were unaffiliated with the university, and the fourth is a temporary employee.” The University Record repeats the claim in an account that gets hammered for inaccuracies in the comment section, which, to their credit, administrators have not closed.
President Ono’s email to the entire university community, titled “Upholding our values and our policies” (I appreciate the implied distinction here), is more craftily worded: “None of the individuals arrested were U-M students, faculty or full-time, permanent staff.” The ears of any connoisseur of propaganda will perk up at the hyper-specificity of that formulation. It is technically true, but what is also true is that one of them is the 16-year-old child of Michigan employees, two are alumni, one of the alumni is employed by the university on a temporary basis, and only the fourth is truly unaffiliated with the university. Two are Black, one of them featured regularly in our PR publications when he was still someone the university wanted to boast about.
There is something troubling enough about the implication that we arrest only “outsiders” on this nicely landscaped campus of ours — we are a public university, after all, and our public lands are open to everybody. But of course, the email is meant to mislead those who were not there. The protesters, it is implied, are outside agitators. Their entire cause is foreign to the campus, an intrusion that needs to be violently expelled. Never mind that the protest was organized by the TAHRIR coalition, which describes itself as “90+ student organizations united for the TAHRIR (liberation) of Palestine at the University of Michigan.”
The distortions do not stop there. Ono and his administration’s email is an object lesson in spin, the kind of prose Harry Frankfurt would have called bullshit rather than lies. Constructed to obscure rather than explain what happened, we are led to believe — though not openly told — that a group of unruly outsiders invaded campus to disrupt our lovely Festifall, saved only by the decisive action of our police force.
It is true that the demonstration was unauthorized and thereby “did not adhere to university policies” — though it is also true, as a Twitter user pointed out, that such demonstrations have always been part of university life until the wrong people protested on behalf of the wrong people. It is patently false that the protest presented a “continued disruption” in any meaningful sense — nothing was disrupted and nobody was impeded until the campus police disturbed the peace. When the protesters were told they had to get off the ground, they quickly did so and started walking and chanting instead.
Perhaps the most galling sentence is this: “Counterprotesters were also told to disperse and did comply.” I witnessed two groups of counterprotesters: One was a group of students who were holding Israeli and U.S. flags and mocking the participants in the die-in. Another small group was unaffiliated with the university (at least that is what they told me) and chanted antisemitic slogans as provocations. The Faculty Senate chair, Rebekah Modrak, tells me they were the last people there. Again, technically, the official account is correct: They were told to disperse but only long after the arrests were done and most protesters had left, and only after a woman repeatedly implored the police to intervene. In the video, you can hear a police officer — who had just arrested four people for sitting, lying down, and walking — say, “But they’re just standing there.”
I took a photograph of a young woman, a police officer’s fingers digging into her arm, which is bent behind her back, a student triumphantly waving an Israeli flag as he watches her arrest. He is not “dispersing,” he is gloating.
One assumes that if a protest is unauthorized, its counterprotest is as well — but none of the pro-Israel protesters were arrested. That is a good thing — like the first group, they did not do anything to warrant arrest. It is not illegal to mock those grieving the deaths of children.
I have shared my recollections with several faculty members who were there as well to make sure I remember the events accurately. We all agree that the protest was entirely peaceful until the campus police disrupted it, that it was easy to walk around, and that even during the die-in, Festifall was unaffected, a happily gregarious affair. And we all remember that no officers approached the counterprotesters until someone repeatedly insisted they do so — and that the officers were visibly reluctant. Several of us have written to the president and to our official spokespeople seeking to set the record straight, to no avail.
We will never be able to agree on the right response to the atrocities taking place in Gaza, or on how to commemorate the victims of Hamas’s horrendous terror attack on October 7, or on how to ensure the hostages’ release. For one brief moment on Wednesday, after the cops had broken up the die-in, some students chanted, “Free, free Palestine” while others chanted “Bring them home.” They co-existed peacefully, and though they were antagonists, their messages seemed entirely compatible to me. But that is not the point. The point is that my university is now violating the central, non-negotiable covenant that should unite us: a shared obligation to telling the truth. The truth is not what you can get away with without technically lying. It requires an honest account of what happened and why. It is shameful when a university decides it is no longer bound by this obligation.
