Pro-Palestinian students are suing New York’s Fordham University claiming a dean took the unprecedented step of banning their club fearing it would create chaos on campus.
“As a Palestinian on campus, I was denied the opportunity to advocate for freedom for my people,” said Ahmad Awad, a Fordham senior and lead plaintiff in the new Manhattan lawsuit.
“Instead of encouraging our human rights advocacy, the university sided with those trying to silence our voices,” Awad said.
He started his bid for official university recognition of a local chapter of the international organization Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) in 2015.
The group’s goal is to educate people about Palestine and “to raise critical awareness and inquiry around a range of internationally recognized human rights violations committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians,” the suit says.
Awad — grandson of both a Polish survivor of a Nazi concentration camps and of Palestinians — first met with university officials to ease concerns that the club would spark “polarization” on campus. The university officials also consulted Jewish faculty and students, the suit says.
Awad finally secured approval from the student government board last fall.
Then Dean of Students Keith Eldredge stepped in and overruled the student government’s vote for the first time in the Jesuit university’s history, the suit says.
He refused to approve the club saying its sole purpose is “advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country,” according to court papers.
“There is perhaps no more complex topic than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is a topic that often leads to polarization rather than dialogue,” Eldredge wrote, according to the students’ suit.
“The purpose of the organization as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward that polarization. Specifically, the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel presents a barrier to open dialogue,” Edredge wrote.
Awad and his co-plaintiffs — Sofia Dadap, Sapphira Lurie and Julie Norris– disagree.
They argue that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel movement “like other current efforts to divest universities from fossil fuel companies and private prisons, have generated widespread conversations among students and about their universities’ roles in perpetuating injustice.”
The students say the university’s stance violates their free speech rights and the Fordham’s own mission of promoting “the open exchange of ideas.”
A Fordham spokesman said the university decided not to register a local SJP based on news reports that members of the broader organization have committed acts of violence, intimidation and anti-Semitism. University officials have said the students can form the club if they disassociate themselves from other SJP chapters.