We thought the days of spying on students went out with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, we’ve been reading stories all week about the New York Police Department practice of spying on Muslim students for no other reason than their affiliation with Muslim student organizations.
The AP reported in October that undercover agents were active on eight New York college campuses, but a new report says that they went far beyond that, spying on students on more far-flung campuses, such as Yale and Princeton.
In 2007 — and perhaps more recently than that — the NYPD was actually monitoring the websites of Muslim Student Associations. In the most bizarre incident we know of so far, students on a whitewater rafting trip were observed by an officer who noted, among other things, how often these sinister agents of un-American influence (gasp!) prayed.
“Being Muslim is apparently the new probably cause,” proclaimed an editorial in the Washington Square News, the student newspaper of New York University.
Indeed.
We must not allow paranoid government interference to make unsafe the expression of radical ideas on campus, even when those ideas — and the people who express them — make us uncomfortable.
David Fine (a friend of New Voices and the editor of Columbia’s undergraduate Jewish journal, the Current) recalled an MSA event he attended in an op-ed for the Columbia Spectator. Some opinions expressed at the event made him squirm. Nevertheless, he wrote, “I would have been more appalled if that student had left her ideas unexpressed for fear of being filed away as a potential threat by the NYPD.”
The Spec reported that Columbia President Lee Bollinger put it this way: “We are deeply concerned about any government activity that would chill the freedom of thought or intrude upon student privacy, both of which are so essential to our academic community.”
But it goes beyond simple privacy, beyond the smooth functioning of academic communities.
As we move into a second decade of a national epidemic of Islamophobia, MSAs continue to be an important outlet for our Muslim peers, who may often feel maligned and sidelined by their fellow Americans.
Let us not forget that we Jews were once treated like this. Decades ago when elite universities like those affected by the NYPD’s scheme were hostile environments for Jews, quotas were used to keep Jewish enrollment in check. In those days, academia itself was the discriminator.
America’s fierce attachment to openness and pluralism corrected that detour, but this nation’s equally fiery tendency toward the grim embrace of paranoia and insularity has taken hold of the NYPD. While the universities allow Muslim students in, the NYPD jerks them around and eyes them with suspicion when they arrive.
We applaud our colleagues in the student-run media of these schools for going berserk. They have featured wall-to-wall coverage of the situation all week and they’ve published a number of appropriately fiery editorials and op-eds.
More than that, we are thrilled to find that university officials, like Bollinger and Yale President Richard Levin, have taken an unapologetic stance against the NYPD’s Islamophobic penchant for eavesdropping. We applaud these university leaders for having the courage of their convictions and for their strong condemnations of the NYPD’s un-American tactics.
That’s right, we said un-American.
New Voices editorials reflect the opinion of the New Voices editorial board.
