Max Annunziata | A right to mourn

Penn has taken an authoritarian turn in how it deals with dissent. To anyone paying attention, that will not be a controversial statement. 

College Green, the center of campus life, could be the set for a Hollywood heist blockbuster. Massive surveillance cameras stick out of every feasible surface. The occupants of library-adjacent benches are more likely to be carrying guns than books, and I’m treated to some new arrangement of metal barricades every time I pass the ARCH building at 36th Street and Locust Walk. 

Combine these physical measures with last semester’s suspension of activists and our new “temporary guidelines” on open expression — whose prohibitions on amplified sound, encampments, and demonstrating without a permit stand not-so-temporarily engraved on metal plaques around College Green — and you’ve got the complete, autocrat-approved toolbox for stifling dissent. 

So, yes: Penn has pretty clearly chosen the authoritarian route. Admittedly, this decision was informed by real, complex occurrences; as much as I dislike the turn we’ve taken, I won’t demand that you join me in that opinion (although opinion columnist Niheer Patel might convince you). Rather, I want to add my voice to a more urgent message, one that should be uncontroversial: It is wrong, just wrong, to apply these authoritarian tactics to mourners and their vigils. 

On Sept. 27, a handful of mourners tried to congregate at the LOVE statue near College Green. Finding the area blocked by the aforementioned barricades, they stood in a circle near the Split Button, reciting poetry. An administrator photographed each participant’s face; another tried to prevent them from passing amongst themselves, flowers adorned with the names of Palestinians killed during the last 12 months of fighting. Within a half hour, officers equipped with zip ties had blocked off both sides of Locust Walk, and mourners dispersed. 

A similar response met last Monday’s “Indigenous Peoples Day Palestine Solidarity Vigil” — a peaceful gathering described to the Daily Pennsylvanian by one passerby as “unassuming.” This time, Penn completely barricaded Locust Walk between 34th to 36th streets, causing all sorts of inconvenience for students and library-goers, and sent four PennAlerts, which are typically employed to notify the community of violent crimes occurring nearby.

There are plenty of reasons to hate this over-the-top response. It shatters any image of campus as a democratic forum for dialogue. It’s infantilizing — Penn seems to think we can’t handle discomfort — and is understandably interpreted as intolerant: One observer, speaking to the DP, described how Penn’s police response to the Indigenous People’s Day vigil had attached a sense of violence and danger to “an entire racial and ethnic group or their supporters.” 

Moreover, if the goal is to preserve a sense of normalcy, Penn’s efforts are plainly counterproductive. Another student told the DP that they would have “barely noticed” Monday’s vigil, had it not been for the police presence. There’s even an economic argument: We’re all going to wince when someone gets around to calculating how many financial aid packages could have been funded with the money that’s gone toward Penn Police Department overtime. 

And the hypocrisy of the response is almost funny. Days after tents first went up on College Green in the spring, Interim President Jameson sent an email decrying encampments “that disrupt the access of others to spaces and facilities.” The 6-ft-tall fences which quarantined the center of campus this summer may be gone, but the administration's willingness to disrupt our access to spaces and facilities has not. 

So, yes: I find these heavy-handed tactics deplorable. But you might not. It’s not hard to understand why Jewish students felt threatened by an encampment which chanted that Israelis are “pigs” and cheered for the killing of IDF soldiers. And Penn Students Against the Occupation of Palestine, which has had a hand in organizing both recent vigils, doesn’t seem particularly interested in dialogue. They signed onto a press release this week calling the Oct. 7th massacres a “necessary step” — a statement as senseless as it is inflammatory. 

We can agree to disagree, then, about the broader rectitude of Penn’s crackdown on protests. But I’d like to think that our community has the heart to unite around a condemnation of administrators’ aggressive suppression of peaceful vigils. 

Students with connections to the region are suffering and mourning. This is true on both sides. One group, however, feels disempowered and unrecognized by the powers that be, and lacks the institutional structures to facilitate that mourning. So, they’ve organized peaceful vigils in public places. 

Yes, these vigils double as protest: “We stand here today, not only in mourning, but in defiance of the cruelty of those that wanted to erase them,” said a speaker at last Monday’s vigil. Palestinian mourners and their allies are demanding that we bear witness to their grief; this may feel uncomfortable, and, especially this month, offensive. 

But they aren’t hurting anyone. And so I’d hope that we can see in their vigils, and maybe even in their angry press releases, the suffering of a group whose friends and relatives are dying, who feel that their existence is threatened. And I’d hope we can, at the very least, stop trying to intercept the flowers they pass one another. 

MAX ANNUNZIATA is a College junior studying economics from San Francisco. His email is annunziata@thedp.com.