Repress U by MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY [from the January 28, 2008 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/gould-wartofsky
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new
security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the
homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest
watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned
their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism
prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives
bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional
hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to
heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the
campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in
the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice
organizations.
From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the
Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a
secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct
"potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In
2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at
least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the
United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups
at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New
York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State
University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now
double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law
Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint
Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked
on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the
University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born
professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work.
Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones,"
which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside
them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the
University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students
at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out
antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into
heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from
Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles.
Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the
"war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror."
Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--
adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice
Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the
province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles
(similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas
campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of
semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering
plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve
officer corps."
Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less
lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets
increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the
ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of
torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in
November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American
student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A
University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking
pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea
"Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.
[snip]
"The university is the last remaining platform for national dissent." ~Dr. Leon Eisenberg
Physician - 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award for Psychiatric Research
Maude and Lillian Presley Professor Department of Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus Harvard Medical School Dept. of Social Medicine, Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research
- A leader for over 40 years, spanning pharmacological trials, neurological and psychological theories of autism and social medicine - from research to teaching and social policy. [Pioneers]
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