#University of Massachusetts

[xtruss]

“KILL ALL ARABS”: The Feds Are Investigating UMass Amherst For Anti-Palestinian Bias

The Department Of Education Is Probing Claims That The School Discriminated Against Palestinian And Arab Students Amid “Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, Illegal Regime, Illegal Occupier of ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’, Zionist 🐖 Isra-hell’s War” On Gaza.

— Prem Thakker | April 24 2024 | The Intercept

Students march across campus following a walkout at University of Massachusetts Amherst on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The Department Of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst in response to a complaint that alleges that the school took months to address the harassment of Palestinian and Arab students.

In the previously unreported civil rights complaint, 18 students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.” The result, the students said, was a hostile environment for all Arab and Palestinian students, those perceived to be Palestinian, and their allies on campus. Among the most chilling allegations involves a student yelling “kill all Arabs” at fellow students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.

The complaint, which was filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, charges that despite repeated communication to over a dozen administrators and Title IX officials, the school “was extremely slow to take action” and that its stonewalling exacerbated the hostile environment.

The Education Department’s civil rights division, known as OCR, opened its inquiry on April 16, less than two weeks after the legal advocacy group Palestine Legal filed the complaint on behalf of the students. The office will ultimately determine whether or not the school’s handling of the harassment complaints and disciplining of students involved in on-campus protests violated federal civil rights law.

“When you have a complaint that so clearly, and in such detail, lays out the severity of the hostile environment … I think that led OCR to really swiftly open it,” said Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. “It’s an ongoing environment too.”

The Department of Education declined to comment on the pending investigation, and the university did not respond to a request for comment on the probe or the allegations.

Over the past six months, students across the country have conducted protests, sit-ins, and other demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and for their institutions to divest from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. While universities have largely responded with an iron fist, the Department of Education has been increasingly brought in to investigate civil rights claims. Since October 7, Palestine Legal has filed five complaints with the OCR, including against Northwestern Law and the University of North Carolina. Conversely, pro-Israel groups have used the civil rights law to target students speaking out in support of Palestinian rights.

Tariq Habash, a former political appointee in the Department of Education who resigned in January in protest of President Joe Biden’s policies on the Gaza war, said that universities’ widespread crackdowns against anti-war protests is connected to the discrimination students have complained of.

“This is not how you prevent discrimination. This is how you enable it and how you make it normalized.”

“The condemnation has been so swift against largely peaceful, non-violent anti-war protests that are calling for an end to an ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” Habash said. “They’re arresting faculty who are trying to protect students who are in the middle of prayers. They are suspending students. They are kicking them out of their dorms and throwing their belongings into alleyways — this is not how you create safe, inclusive environments. This is not how you prevent discrimination. This is how you enable it and how you make it normalized.”

Targeted Harassment

The 49-page complaint lays out allegations of harassment going as far back as the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. The complaint alleges that a student began appearing at Students for Justice in Palestine and other related off-campus protests, “shouting threats such as ‘Kill all Arabs,’ playing a speaker with a recording of the sounds of bombs and other explosions and attempting to ram student protestors with an electric scooter.”

The student, whose name is redacted in the copy of the complaint reviewed by The Intercept, also allegedly attempted to intimidate an elderly woman among other people, “while also being extremely racist towards Arabs and Palestinians, stating ‘level Gaza’ and ‘Kill all Arabs.’”

The complainants also report receiving vicious messages and threats online, also allegedly by a student and student-run accounts with names like “@amherstzionwarroom, @UMass_amherst_sjp_watch, @UMass_amherst_zionists and @UMass_zionists.”

Some of the posts called the students “classic Islamic barbarism supporters [who] love raping and killing,” and “genocidal barbarian baby decapitator supporters.” One account, named “palisranimals,” reportedly targeted two students, making comments like “where is the best beach in Gaza to build a house next to?! I’ve heard Pali bones make great foundation!” and “every ‘Palestinian’ child in Gaza is actually a terrorist.”

“These accounts would target SJP students and comment on their meeting times, eventually bragged about the doxing on Canary Mission,” reads the complaint, referring to a website that targets and doxxes students and professors who criticize the Israeli government.

The school’s Equal Opportunity and Access Office determined in February that a student was running the accounts, according to the complaint.

Over a matter of weeks, into months, the targeted students and their parents would email administrators asking for support, at the very least a public expression from the university that it cared for its Arab and Palestinian students and would not accept hate toward them. Sometimes they would not hear back for days, sometimes not at all.

As administrators began to engage with individual complaints, the complaint states, they did not enact broader measures to “effectively put an end to the hostile environment as a whole,” nor issue any statement explicitly condemning anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab behavior.

“We spent our senior year just compiling evidence against our own school.”

“We spent our senior year just compiling evidence against our own school,” said Emmanuelle Sussman, one of the student complainants. “OCR was like a second full-time job. … It’s insane the degree to which this has been our time spent, plus everything else that’s going on.”

Meanwhile, university leadership took strides to express solidarity with Israel. In October, UMass President Marty Meehan co-founded a broad coalition of more than 100 institutions of higher education standing “with Israel and against Hamas.” And in November, according to the complaint, university administrators “appear to have participated in at least two events” with the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that has been criticized for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and that has given the school an “F” rating in its “Campus Antisemitism Report Card.” The complaint cites an email sent to members of the administration, including Meehan, that states that one of those events would be focused on “making it clear that Anti-Zionism is in fact antisemitism.”

A member of the University of Massachusetts Police Department asks a protester to stand up and walk with him out of the building as students who staged a sit-in outside of the chancellor’s office are arrested on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Mass Arrests

In October, the university arrested 57 demonstrators conducting a sit-in protest on campus, calling on the school to cut ties with weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The complaint notes that the day after the October protest, Chancellor Javier Reyes and his assistant Mike Malone met with four student protesters to discuss the arrests and their demands. At the meeting, according to the complaint, the chancellor assured the students that the school would not press disciplinary charges against them and that they would not suffer any consequences other than those stemming from the criminal trespassing charges brought by the UMass Police Department.

Two weeks later, however, all 57 arrested students received notice that the university was in fact pursuing disciplinary charges against them for trespassing. The students went through code of conduct hearings amid final exams, right before the winter holiday, and none of them succeeded in appealing their sanctions, regardless of their records or references from professors and employers. The rush with which the school arrested and disciplined the students was a departure from its handling of previous protests, according to the complaint.

Meanwhile, three students were barred from studying abroad the following semester because of the disciplinary sanctions. The complaint notes that when parents and students attempted to appeal that decision, they were informed that it came from Kalpen Trivedi, vice provost for global affairs and International Programs Office director. The complaint includes a purported screenshot of Trivedi’s Facebook page, in which he suggests doctors at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the media were complicit with Hamas. (At the time, the Israeli military had laid siege to the hospital while claiming, without credible evidence, that it was a command and control center for Hamas.)

“They are all Hamas. All grotesquely evil,” reads the screenshot. Trivedi could not be reached for comment.

The complaint also charges that the UMass Police Department published the home addresses of the arrested students, many of whom were already facing harassment. In response to repeated requests by parents to remove the addresses from its website, according to the complaint, the police department claimed it was required to publish the addresses by state law. In fact, state law requires the agency only to make addresses available as a public record, not to post them online.

The police department eventually removed the students’ home addresses from its website several weeks later, on December 5. The department did not respond to a request for comment.

“We were fighting like tooth and nail to get them to remove our private addresses off the internet.”

“While we were experiencing this crazy level of harassment and deeply, deeply concerning threats of violence, we also were fighting our own police department that we were reporting these incidents to,” Maysoun Batley, one of the students who filed the complaint, told The Intercept. “We were fighting like tooth and nail to get them to remove our private addresses off the internet.”

“Hundreds of Emails”

The complaint also lays out various interactions the students or their parents had with university administrators that left the complainants frustrated by what they felt was an inept response.

In late November, when three Palestinian college students were shot in nearby Vermont, one frustrated parent wrote to Reyes, Meehan, and Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief of Police Tyrone Parham.

“Three Palestinian undergraduate students were shot in Vermont last night!! Three young men were shot! Instead of protecting our children in this current political climate, you are exposing them to risk. This is dangerous and irresponsible. You need to take ACTIVE STEPS to protect our children. I expect a call. I expect an email to the ‘UMass community.’ I expect action beyond the empty words that you have offered so far!”

The university brass did not respond, according to the complaint.

In December, the students said, they were invited to two Zoom meetings with administrators and faculty who apparently were seeking to understand how to make the students feel safer. Instead, the students told The Intercept that they walked away feeling less than fully embraced, citing one professor who apparently criticized their protests.

“This reminds me less of what my dad told me about sit-ins in 1962 in Kentucky, and sounds more like Nazi students shouting down Jewish professors in 1932 in Berlin,” a professor said, according to the students. The professor reportedly suggested that the students “turn down the volume.”

In face of lackluster institutional support, the students took it upon themselves to seek out protections like anti-harassment or no-contact orders.

While the school’s Title IX coordinator granted a mutual no-contact directive to one student against another student accused of harassment on November 29, according to the complaint, it was not until January 30 that other students received similar protections. And it was not until March 28 that the complainants received court-sanctioned harassment prevention orders against other students harassing them, which went into effect the next day.

“Hundreds of emails toward them proving all the harassment since mid-October, and it took them until March 29,” said Ruya Hazeyen, another one of the students who filed the complaint. “And all of them are still allowed on campus, even though we have proof of some of them assaulting our members, threatening our members, doxxing our members. They’re still all right now on campus.”

[garadinervi]

«No More Cages» – A Bi-monthly Women's Prison Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 1, November-December 1981, Women Free Women in Prison Collective, Brooklyn, NY (pdf here) [Cynthia Miller Papers, 1973-1995, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections and University Archives, Digital Commonwealth, Worcester, MA]

[the-hog-trough]

saw amherst.

not good.

[petsincollections]

Pigs, 1957. University Photograph Collection (RG 110-176). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

University Photograph Collection

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"STUDENTS BURN AMERICAN FLAG," Kingston Whig Standard. June 02, 1933. Page . --- Young Self-styled Communists Caused Uprising at Amherst College ---- AMHERST, Mass., June 2 - The burning of the United States flag by a group of self-styled young Communists today brought about an investigation of student activities at Amherst College. The meeting of the self-styled radicals was broken up last night by a larger group of students. Three of the "Communists" were injured during the ensuing fight, but none required hospital treatment. Twenty Amherst freshmen held forth on Communism for an hour before about 100 classmates put them to flight. The 'Radicals" burned a small American flag to 'show their internationalism" during the meeting and sang the Internationale, the Communist anthem.

[richelcarlus]

Richel Carlus is a knowledgeable petrophysical engineer and a reliable and experienced Chemical Engineer. His reputable technical backgrounds in both fields have boosted his expertise in data analysis, well-stimulation, seismic processing, and interpretations and well-log. Richel Carlus has a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Chemical Engineering and an MS in Petrophysics.

[loudlylovingreview]

Christian Appy: UMass Arrests | What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do?

I am quite sure he would have been, as I am, deeply inspired by the passion of these young students. I have been a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for 20 years. On May 7, I was one of a handful of faculty members arrested for standing in support of hundreds of students who were engaged in nonviolent protest of university complicity in the ongoing slaughter and…

[dlyarchitecture]

[garadinervi]

«No More Cages» – Women's Prison Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 5, Winter 1984, Women Free Women in Prison Collective, Brooklyn, NY (pdf here) [Cynthia Miller Papers, 1973-1995, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections and University Archives, Digital Commonwealth, Worcester, MA]

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Pixies - Where Is My Mind? 1988

"Where Is My Mind?" is a song by the American alternative rockband Pixies from their 1988 debut album Surfer Rosa. It is one of the band's signature songs and has inspired a multitude of covers.

The song was written by frontman Black Francis while he attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, inspired by his experiences while scuba diving in the Caribbean. Guitarist Joey Santiago composed the song's guitar line. He recalled of his part, "This was actually the first thing I tried. A lazy arpeggio that instantly sounded strong and hooky."

After being featured in the 1999 film Fight Club, in which the song plays over the final scene, the song gained an even wider audience. It's been used in a multitude of movies and tv series, including Sucker Punch, Criminal Minds, The Tick, and The Leftovers. The 2009 film Mr. Nobody (one of my personal favourites) also featured the song. Maxence Cyrin's cover of the song has been featured on Mr. Robot and It's Kind of a Funny Story.

On April 13, 2004, NASA used "Where Is My Mind?" to wake up the team working on the Mars rover, Spirit, in honor of its software transplant.

In 2023, it was revealed that Francis' remark of the word "stop" at the beginning of the song triggered certain Google phones to switch off their alarms.

"Where Is My Mind?" received a total of 80,5% yes votes!

[mariacallous]

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.

It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that collect research data. It could clear the way for researchers to release add-ons that aid research into how the algorithms on social platforms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.

The suit was filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. It attempts to take a federal law that has generally shielded social networks and use it as a tool forcing transparency.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to evade legal liability for content on their platforms. Zuckerman’s suit argues that one of its subsections gives users the right to control how they access the internet, and the tools they use to do so.

“Section 230 (c) (2) (b) is quite explicit about libraries, parents, and others having the ability to control obscene or other unwanted content on the internet,” says Zuckerman. “I actually think that anticipates having control over a social network like Facebook, having this ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’”

Zuckerman’s suit is aimed at preventing Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook that he is working on called Unfollow Everything 2.0. It would allow users to easily “unfollow” friends, groups, and pages on the service, meaning that updates from them no longer appear in the user’s newsfeed.

Zuckerman says that this would provide users the power to tune or effectively disable Facebook’s engagement-driven feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.

There’s good reason to think Meta might make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after it is released. He says he won’t launch it without a ruling on his suit. In 2020, the company argued that the browser Friendly, which had let users search and reorder their Facebook news feeds as well as block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta permanently banned Louis Barclay, a British developer who had created a tool called Unfollow Everything, which Zuckerman’s add-on is named after.

“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.”

The same year, Meta kicked off from its platform some New York University researchers who had created a tool that monitored the political ads people saw on Facebook. Zuckerman is adding a feature to Unfollow Everything 2.0 that allows people to donate data from their use of the tool to his research project. He hopes to use the data to investigate whether users of his add-on who cleanse their feeds end up, like Barclay, using Facebook less.

Sophia Cope, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says that the core parts of Section 230 related to platforms’ liability for content posted by users have been clarified through potentially thousands of cases. But few have specifically dealt with the part of the law Zuckerman’s suit seeks to leverage.

“There isn’t that much case law on that section of the law, so it will be interesting to see how a judge breaks it down,” says Cope. Zuckerman is a member of the EFF’s board of advisers.

John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open development of the internet, says that, to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “hasn’t been used before, in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users,” noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously.

Meta has previously suggested that allowing add-ons that modify how people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, says that Zuckerman’s tool may be able to fairly push back on such an accusation.“The main problem with tools that give users more control over content moderation on existing platforms often has to do with privacy,” she says. “But if all this does is unfollow specified accounts, I would not expect that problem to arise here."

Even if a tool like Unfollow Everything 2.0 didn’t compromise users’ privacy, Meta might still be able to argue that it violates the company’s terms of service, as it did in Barclay’s case.

“Given Meta’s history, I could see why he would want a preemptive judgment,” says Cope. “He’d be immunized against any civil claim brought against him by Meta.”

And though Zuckerman says he would not be surprised if it takes years for his case to wind its way through the courts, he believes it’s important. “This feels like a particularly compelling case to do at a moment where people are really concerned about the power of algorithms,” he says.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

1. ‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

Greetings, readers! Welcome to our weekly dose of positivity and good vibes. In this edition, I've gathered a collection of uplifting stories that will surely bring a smile to your face. From scientific breakthroughs to environmental initiatives and heartwarming achievements, I've got it all covered.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. They’ve come a long way since then. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm across.

One of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

2. Empty Office Buildings Are Being Turned Into Vertical Farms

Empty office buildings are being repurposed into vertical farms, such as Area 2 Farms in Arlington, Virginia. With the decline in office usage due to the Covid-19 pandemic, municipalities are seeking ways to fill vacant spaces.

Vertical farming systems like Silo and AgriPlay's modular growth systems offer efficient and adaptable solutions for converting office buildings into agricultural spaces. These initiatives not only address food insecurity but also provide economic opportunities, green jobs, and fresh produce to local communities, transforming urban centers in the process.

3. Biden-Harris Administration to Provide 804,000 Borrowers with $39 Billion in Automatic Loan Forgiveness as a Result of Fixes to Income Driven Repayment Plans

The Department of Education in the United States has announced that over 804,000 borrowers will have $39 billion in Federal student loans automatically discharged. This is part of the Biden-Harris Administration's efforts to fix historical failures in the administration of the student loan program and ensure accurate counting of monthly payments towards loan forgiveness.

The Department aims to correct the system and provide borrowers with the forgiveness they deserve, leveling the playing field in higher education. This announcement adds to the Administration's efforts, which have already approved over $116.6 billion in student loan forgiveness for more than 3.4 million borrowers.

4. F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill

The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States, a milestone that could significantly expand access to contraception. The medication, called Opill, will become the most effective birth control method available over the counter

5. AIDS can be ended by 2030 with investments in prevention and treatment, UN says

It is possible to end AIDS by 2030 if countries demonstrate the political will to invest in prevention and treatment and adopt non-discriminatory laws, the United Nations said on Thursday.

In 2022, an estimated 39 million people around the world were living with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS program. HIV can progress to AIDS if left untreated.

6. Conjoined twins released from Texas Children’s Hospital after successfully separated in complex surgery

Conjoined twins are finally going home after the pair was safely separated during a complex surgery at Texas Children’s Hospital in June.

Ella Grace and Eliza Faith Fuller were in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for over four months after their birth on March 1. A large team of healthcare workers took six hours to complete the surgery on June 14. Seven surgeons, four anesthesiologists, four surgical nurses and two surgical technicians assisted with the procedure.

7. From villains to valued: Canadians show overwhelming support for wolves

Despite their record in popular culture, according to a recent survey, seven in 10 Canadians say they have a “very positive” view of the iconic predators. 

Here's a fascinating video about how wolves changed Yellowstone nat'l park:

----

That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

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Also don’t forget to reblog.

[scienceisdope]

Scientists Made An Artificial "Cloud" That Pulls Electricity From Air.

The secret is tiny holes.

Taking a hint from the magician’s playbook, scientists have devised a way to pull electricity from thin air. A new study out today suggests a method in which any material can offer a steady supply of electricity from the humidity in the air.

All that’s required? A pair of electrodes and a special material engineered to have teeny tiny holes that are less than 100 nanometers in diameter. That’s less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

Here’s how it works: The itty-bitty holes allow water molecules to pass through and generate electricity from the buildup of charge carried by the water molecules, according to a new paper published in the journal Advanced Materials.

The process essentially mimics how clouds make the electricity that they release in lightning bolts.

Because humidity lingers in the air perpetually, this electricity harvester could run at any time of day regardless of weather conditions — unlike somewhat unreliable renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar.

“The technology may lead to truly ‘ubiquitous powering’ to electronics,” senior study author Jun Yao, an electrical engineer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tells Inverse.

Source bit.ly/43SmPds

[smokefalls]

The modern question of pronoun usages is not just a conversation about self-actualization, it’s a battle about who gets to define language. And, in our contemporary times, if English is meant to maintain its function as a “universal” language, it will have to adapt to function in the more equitable world we are building, not just the colonial one it forged.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir