BUZZ
Haverford College, a small, private institution in Philadelphia, “indefinitely” banned two individuals from its campus last week after one of them used a bullhorn to disrupt a Jewish journalist’s guest talk.
Neither was a student or employee of the college, Director of Campus Safety Jerry Fayette stated in a message to the campus Wednesday. He did not name the individuals.
“We have gathered sufficient evidence to identify both the individual who used a bullhorn and the audience member who initiated physical contact with them,” Fayette stated.
Both are banned from the college “indefinitely,” he stated. “If they are found to be on Haverford’s campus, their presence will be considered trespassing, and the College will contact local police.”
The college took action after a crowd of masked anti-Israel protesters showed up at a guest talk by The Times of Israel journalist Haviv Rettig Gur on Feb. 1.
Gur’s topic was “Roots, Return & Reality: Jews, Israel, and the myth of settler colonialism.” The college’s Chabad chapter sponsored the event.
Writing Sunday at The Free Press, Gur said the protester disrupted him about 25 minutes into his speech, yelling “Free Palestine,” “death to the IDF,” and “put another soldier in the ground.” A video on X also shows the protester yelling “shame!” while leaving the room.
He described what happened next:
As the violent disrupter continued, she was unsatisfied that events weren’t tilting toward the performative rage in the way she wanted, so she stomped around screaming for a few minutes. She pushed a couple of audience members. She got pushed back. She was finally dragged out, and then she reappeared on the other side of a different door to the lecture hall—a locked door (did administrators know what to expect?)—and banged violently on the door until she was dragged away again. The video is online.
Gur said the protester was young and appeared to be a student. He expressed doubt about the college’s statement that the individual was not a Haverford student.
The Bi-College News, the student newspaper at Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges, described the situation somewhat differently, reporting:
The protester was violently interrupted when an unidentified man from the audience shoved and yelled at them. Their megaphone was confiscated and both the protester and audience member were removed from the auditorium by Haverford College Campus Safety officers. The protester attempted to reenter the lecture hall through a secondary entrance but was stopped by more Campus Safety officers, instead banging on the door and continuing to chant, “shame on you.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the campus free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression praised the college’s leaders for handling the situation well.
“Wonder why you haven’t seen headlines about a would-be shout down at Haverford College? Because they did the hard part well: they named the policy violations, explained the free expression values at stake, and updated on the outcome,” FIRE’s Connor Murnane wrote on X. “Specific, principled, and transparent leadership matters.”
Prior to the disruption, Gur engaged with the protesters, delaying his speech by half an hour to let them talk and ask questions, according to his Free Press article.
He said he did ask the protesters to take off their masks or leave, and he also called them “ignorant children whose professors had failed to inculcate in them a love of real learning.”
Many of them stayed for the whole talk, he wrote, concluding:
I did not encounter a great and powerful political movement at Haverford last week. I met intellectually and emotionally neglected children surrounded by adults who were paid a fortune not to challenge them, not to teach them, not to inculcate the great gifts of substance, grit, and nuance.
In the end, we managed to have an honest exchange of ideas, but it felt as though we had to buck everything their campus culture had taught them in order to reach that point. I met a real hunger for depth and understanding among young people who’d been told in a hundred different ways that their unexamined emotions were wisdom enough.
This week, the Haverford student government is planning a “discussion space” for students to talk about the event together, according to the student newspaper.
Students’ Council Co-Presidents Ben Fligelman and Sarah Weill-Jones also issued a statement last week that condemned the violence.
They wrote that “every student has the right to engage in expressive freedom activities on this campus” and that “violence in response to speech is unacceptable,” according to the report.
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