The University of Michigan Turns Into A Surveillance Nightmare
My alma mater, aided by Michigan AG Dana Nessel, treated student activists abominably. There must be accountability.
Friday morning, The Guardian came out with a blockbuster exclusive about the private surveillance enacted by the University of Michigan Board of Regents and then-University President Santa Ono against student activists. As with so very many things these days, the motivating factor behind their actions were protests against the slaughter in Gaza.
The report included accounts, backed by video evidence, in which private thugs hired by the university stalked students all over campus. Some of the ridiculous actions included:
following a black student leader around with multiple thugs, and when he caught them on video, these (of course) white men accused him of trying to mug them.
faking a disability when confronted by students they were following
installing security cameras in both public and private spaces around the campus
flying drones overhead constantly to surveil students at length
one security thug attempting to run over a student he was following with his car
There is a history at U-M going back to the period after 9/11, where student groups attempted to get the university to divest itself of investments in Israel, a forerunner of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. I wrote an article for a student publication at the time covering those actions. The divestment protests were particularly driven by the students at the university’s Dearborn campus, which included a substantial Mideast population and many of whom received visits and letters from the FBI after 9/11. Some of them strongly felt that Israel was taking advantage of the situation to further remove Palestinians from their lands, and put their energies into reversing that pressure.
By now, the university should be well acquainted with these ideas and protests. The protests took on a more fervent energy over the last twenty months, because of the horrific conditions in Gaza, culminating in the election of a student government more activist than any Ann Arbor has seen since the height of the Vietnam War. Some of the actions that the new SG took were, in my eyes, less than prudent, but their hearts were in the right place. They saw a way to pressure the university into ending what they perceived to be a strong pro-Israel lean with its investments and policies. What I find so contemptible is that the Regents and the President, who are supposed to be the quintessential “adults in the room,” reacted with excessive and disproportionate force. They did so in a way that displayed contempt for the students whose tuition fees pay their salaries and ensure the continued operation of the university.
The response that took place at nearly every university from these protests was not to engage the students, but rather to talk down to them. There was a consistent refusal by administrations from Columbia to Michigan to UCLA to treat student requests as reasonable, or even worthy of a meeting. Those of us who have been privileged to attend a top-tier university know that it is constantly stressed to think about beliefs different than our own, to engage with ideas that aren’t our own. And yet, when it comes to these student activists, administrators and elected officials suddenly won’t play by their own rules. They won’t engage with ideas other than their own.
Instead, they spent close to a million dollars on private surveillance to harass the students. They made students, whose futures they are supposed to help guide, feel unsafe and unwelcome at a university where they pay thousands of dollars in tuition each semester to attend. But the students did not quit.
Enter our state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.
I have spent years defending Nessel’s performance and personal decisions. She was remarkably unfiltered without being a boor, a balance hard to strike for those in the public eye. Starting last year, though, her decisions to prosecute activists—including staging raids of their off-campus homes with militarized law enforcement—were the antithesis of everything she’d claimed to represent. They flew in the face of the progressive values she’d long claimed. It was just as insane an overreaction as the university, which became blindingly obvious when she recently dropped the charges against all of the students. Why in the hell was the state’s top law enforcement official using her power to squash student protestors? These were students arrested by campus police during protests on the Diag. They hadn’t committed assault.
As it turns out, the university believed Nessel, a Jewish alumni of the school, would be tougher on the students than the county prosecutor, Eli Savit (who’s also Jewish, which makes the school’s belief preposterous). Savit had declined to prosecute. Nessel received campaign contributions from 3/4 of the Board of Regents, and used one of the regent’s law firms to handle special prosecutions. It answered the question. It doesn’t excuse or justify what she did, or what the school did.
I am ashamed of the way the university has acted over the past year. I’ve been a proud alumni for twenty years, and all of this—the overreach, the squalid backroom political actions, the intent on cleansing the campus of opinions administrators found inconvenient and unwanted—makes me far less proud these days. For damn sure, they can lose my address when asking for donations until they make this right. A public apology to the students and some sort of compensation for the hell they put them through over the last year would be a good start. Changing the bylaws so this can never happen again would be even better.