Opinion: Campus protests expose flaws in higher education diversity initiatives

In a column for Middle East Eye, academic Nancy A Khalil argues that universities across the US have paid lip service to diversity, equity and inclusion, while suppressing calls for Palestinian liberation.

She writes: "I have been stunned by the response of most higher education institutions to the encampments on their campuses.

Colleges are imagined to be sites of free speech and expression, intellectual inquiry, and encountering differences. For many, they form a bridge towards independence as adults. Most colleges have spent the better part of the new millennium ramping up their investments in DEI work.

But today, at a moment when students have united to erect encampments that have organically achieved - even amid their internal disagreements - pluralistic communities that welcome people from myriad backgrounds, universities are not embracing them, but rather treating them as a threat.

Instead of joining the encampment communities and trying to learn from their students about how to foster a culture of liberation, most university administrations have at best kept them at arm’s length, or worse, violently dismantled them."

You can read the full column below.