60+ Students occupy Behavioral Sciences Building, demand divestment after professor leaks student names to Israeli government, violates FERPA
“A student writes on the wall and she’s given a felony, but Floros breaks federal law and nothing happens!”
Sunny Jeong-Eimer
April 9, 2024
On March 28th, 2024, around 60 students and faculty rallied and occupied the Behavioral Sciences Building outside the political science department, demanding that the University of Illinois system divest from Israeli weapons manufacturers, institutions and speakers. March 28th also marked the 169th day of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, in which Israeli armed forces have killed over 32,000 Palestinians with full political and financial backing from the U.S. government and many of its major institutions.
Among these institutions are universities like the University of Illinois, which holds partnerships, multimillion-dollar investments, and career fairs with major weapons manufacturers that create the bombs raining down death and destruction in Palestine and around the world. These investments are reflected in UIC hosting zionist speakers; just hours after the rally, UIC Chabad hosted IDF reservist Major Ezzy Morgenstern, who, according to the event flyer, “served over 120 days with his unit fighting in northern Gaza” after October 7th and manages MEM Engineering, a company that develops “real estate projects” (Israeli settlements) in Palestine.
SJP organizer Soha said at the rally, “From the Political Science department to Chabad, students are here to say ‘no more inviting Israeli war criminals to campus!’ … Students are angry, angry that professors have gotten away with sending the names of SJP-affiliated students to the Israeli government. A student writes on the wall and she’s given a felony, but Floros breaks federal law and nothing happens! UICPD grabs my friend by her hijab while professors Tomer Kanan and Joshua Miller watch and laugh and nothing happens! Fuck that!”
Soha was referencing a FOIA detailing communications between Political Science Professor Katharine Floros, the UIC Police Department, and the Israeli Consulate regarding an event on April 4, 2023, when Professor Floros invited Israeli Deputy Consul General Daniel Aschheim to speak to students in her US Foreign Policy class. Leading up to the event, Floros arranged for “two plain-clothes police officers,” both armed, to sit in the class. On top of UICPD, the Israeli consulate sent Aschheim with a security team. These men, according to SJP testimony, “were taking pictures and filming students” who had been peacefully protesting outside the class, “…winking at them and looking at them up and down.”
Despite not being a member of SJP, one student was assumed SJP-affiliated solely for questioning Floros about inviting the Israeli Deputy Consul to class. An email from March 30, 2023 (published with permission from SJP below) reveals the Chief Security Officer of the Chicago Israeli Consulate asking Floros to share the names of students in the class who are SJP-affiliated.
Professor Floros complied with this request, responding the same day:
After consulting lawyers with Palestine Legal, SJP organizers confirmed that Professor Floros’ disclosure of SJP-affiliated names violated FERPA. FERPA refers to the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which requires all faculty to maintain the privacy of student records and limits the release of records to third parties (in this case, the Israeli government) without the written consent of the student. Professor Floros did not attempt to obtain written consent to share the names of students on the roster, particularly not the student highlighted as SJP-affiliated. Aside from the FERPA violation, SJP noted that releasing these names to the Israeli government puts Palestinian students in the U.S. and family members in Palestine at greater risk of being targeted.
When asked for comment on the events of April 2023, Professor Floros shared her statement on these events, expressing regret about having shared the student’s name with the Israeli Consulate. Floros apologized for poor judgment and encouraged others to “be clear about the harm they have experienced and possible remedies.”
Listening to students from the March 28 protest, which follows a string of other protests highlighting past anti-Palestinian abuses at UIC (with chants like “UICPD IOF KKK / They’re all the same!), it is clear that the ‘remedy’ is divestment.
“When we say ‘UIC Divest,’ this includes the connections UIC has with Israeli and zionist academic institutions. Israeli academic institutions exist to erase the Palestinian identity and our cause,” wrote SJP organizer Jenin in response to Bonfire’s request for comment. “There is no space for racism and Zionism on our campus, and we will make it clear to UIC professors that Israeli and zionist academics or speakers are not welcome here.”
After a year, UIC has done nothing to address the FERPA violation or move toward divestment despite sustained student outcry.
SJP testimony in the FOIA also highlighted that Aschheim dismissed student questions regarding the occupation and openly denied that Palestinians in Jerusalem faced attacks by the IOF during the holy month of Ramadan in 2023. It’s worth questioning the common refrain that universities should continue inviting zionist speakers for the sake of academic freedom when every invitation involves heavily policing/surveilling student dissent, spreading misinformation to justify the occupation, and threatening Palestinian diasporic students’ safety in the classroom/university as a whole.
Any serious arguments for academic freedom must reckon with defending such freedom on an international scale. Most urgently, they must confront the systematic destruction of education known as scholasticide. While UIC hosts zionist speakers in the name of academic freedom, Israel continues to mass murder Palestinian journalists, bomb Palestinian universities, libraries and schools to rubble, and brutally escalate its history of incarcerating Palestinian students.
On April 1st, student organizers made Pitzer College the first university to cut ties with an Israeli study abroad program after a six-year-long fight, marking a major win for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions academic boycott movement. Meanwhile, UIC remains embroiled in a lawsuit with Palestine Legal after blocking Arab-sounding names from joining a Zoom information session about UIC’s Israel study abroad program. The names were suspected to be Palestinian students, thus possible voices of dissent or incriminating questions that might speak truth to power. Is this academic freedom? For who? To what end?
Defending academic freedom means standing with the students and scholars of the world, especially those in Palestine, while they are under siege. It means thinking critically about freedom beyond the self-interested, narrow borders of U.S. imperial universities. Published eight days after October 7th, this open letter from Birzeit University in Palestine to international academic institutions makes our duty clear:
“Birzeit University calls upon the international academic community, unions, and students to fulfill their intellectual and academic duty of seeking truth, maintaining a critical distance from state-sponsored propaganda, and to hold the perpetrators of genocide and those complicit with them accountable.
We also hold Israeli universities responsible as they have been indispensable to the regime of settler colonial oppression and apartheid, complicit in grave violations of human rights including developing weaponry, military doctrines, and legal justification for the indiscriminate, mass targeting of Palestinians. These academic institutions must be shunned by the international academic community.”
