| As the Trump regime continues its crackdown on free speech, U.S. university administrators remain all too eager to take any opportunity to shut down political protest on their campuses. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, students peacefully and mostly silently protesting Lockheed Martin’s complicity in Israeli genocide were slapped with interim sanctions, including suspensions, that even the university describes as “extraordinary.” Some lost their housing as a result. Email CU Boulder administrators now to demand that students be cleared of these trumped-up charges — and to call on them to uphold, not dispose of, the rights to free speech and political protest. |
| Lockheed Martin is the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. But CU Boulder’s leadership has decided that the bigger threat to its values as an educational institution is not complicity in genocide, but its own students hoping to hold it to those very values. The students’ protest was directed at Lockheed Martin’s presence at a campus career fair, calling out its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Their protest was largely silent, and included around five minutes of chanting, none of which disturbed the rest of the career fair from taking place. But it doesn’t matter how calmly and quietly students protest Israeli genocide. Despite the fact that U.S. universities frequently tout opportunities for activism and political engagement as selling points of their schools, university administrators have jumped at the chance to crush their students’ freedom to protest. CU Boulder, like many other universities, has been systematically repressing students in solidarity with Palestine over the last two years. Two of its students are even suing over this conduct. This wave of repression on university campuses has served as the first line in the Trump administration’s overall fascist crackdown on free speech, but this hasn’t deterred university leadership. Email now to demand students are fully cleared and CU Boulder end its repression of students protesting genocide. In solidarity, Jason Farbman Digital Director |
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 