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BU professor enters 9th day of hunger strike over free speech, detained students
The professor continues to wrestle with the school's administration over political sign policies.
Boston University Professor Nathan Phillips entered the ninth day of his hunger strike Wednesday, protesting what he calls threats to free speech on campus and standing in solidarity with detained students and others whose visas the federal government revoked.
Phillips says the university repeatedly removed political signs supporting detained students from his office window overlooking Commonwealth Avenue. After the seventh removal last Tuesday, he says, he reached a breaking point and began his hunger strike.
After some back-and-forth with the school’s administration, Phillips on Wednesday said BU has not budged.
Phillips, in an email to Boston.com Wednesday, said the school “selectively enforced their sign policy based on the content of the message. They are punishing some forms of speech and not others.”
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He noted that other signs remain hanging on campus.
Boston University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The incident isn’t the first time the university has wrestled with students and faculty over their choice of signs.
In the mid-1980s, a student named Yosef Abramowitz, who was campaigning for BU to divest itself of its South African stocks, hung a sign from his dormitory window with just one word on it: “Divest.” University workers removed the sign three times before he received a letter stating the school would evict him if he continued to display it.
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The 1986 case is outlined in an essay by Howard Zinn, called “The Yellow Rubber Chicken,” after witnesses in the case testified about the things they had hung from their windows, including a yellow rubber chicken, without complaint from the administration.
The US Supreme Court ruling (Abramowitz v. Boston University) supported the student’s right to hang an antiapartheid banner from his dormitory window.
Now, Phillips is echoing those sentiments by calling on the school to let him exercise his free speech by allowing him to post his political signs.
Those signs, he says, are calling for the immediate release of Rumeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Mahmoud Khalil.
Öztürk is a Tufts graduate student who ICE arrested after writing an op-ed piece in support of Palestine. Mahdawi, a Palestinian student protest leader from Columbia University, was arrested at a Vermont immigration office. Khalil, a Columbia graduate, was detained by federal agents in March and is now fighting deportation in court.
His concerns also extend to the unnamed students at BU and on college campuses nationwide who have had their visas revoked. BU has announced that some students had their visas terminated, but did not say how many.
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Besides the release of the three students mentioned above, Phillips says he’s calling for “HANDS OFF OUR STUDENTS.”
Phillips also noted that he has a great medical team and a supportive community backing him in his hunger strike.
He remains “in good spirits and good shape in body and mind.”
“I feel connected to a very important struggle for our basic constitutional rights and treating all on this land with basic human decency,” he wrote.
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