Media coverage depicts Palestinian students' attending and protesting a university event as an attack on professor's private residence.
During a dinner for students that the dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school held in his house’s backyard earlier this month, a woman wearing a hijab and checkered Palestinian scarf suddenly stood up with a microphone and amplifier. What followed lasted only a couple of minutes, but has led to a fierce debate about the limits of free speech, drawn death threats for those involved, and created a “media firestorm”, as the dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, has put it.
Some short and chaotic viral videos illustrate part of what happened. One of them shows the woman, Malak Afaneh, as she gives a Ramadan greeting; she is accompanied by a small group of other student protesters. As Afaneh begins reading a speech about the Israel-Gaza war, Chemerinsky and his wife, the law professor Catherine Fisk, quickly cut her off.
“This is not your house,” Fisk says, putting her arm around Afaneh’s shoulder and trying to grab the microphone. “This is my house.”
For a pair of law professors, and from the point of view of
conducting university business from one's home, for the duration of the event,
the home is no longer private home. The rules of the University apply to the
event that is part of the university events.
The known facts are as follows: the pair of law professors used their home for a University event. For them to claim privacy after they invited
the students home, and then telling them what to do and what not to do or say during such a university event amounts to discrimination.
If the dean and his wife, also a law professor, did not want students protesting in their home
they should not, freely and willingly, make their home an extension of the
University of California.
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