A student-led film screening of “Gaza Fights for Freedom,” hosted by a service learning class last Friday was met with confusion as sponsors began to remove their support. The professor whose class organized the event said the school’s administration asked the sponsors to remove their support. The school, in essence, said it was just a matter of bad timing, as last week was the Jewish celebration of Passover.
Professor Tyler Gidney’s service and social justice class organized the event as its final project aimed to promote awareness about the ongoing war in Gaza. The film screening was planned to be sponsored by organizations such as Associated Students (AS), El Centro, the Service Learning Institute and the Otter Cross Cultural Center. According to university spokesperson Walter Ryce, these organizations had not been aware of the scheduling conflict.
According to Gidney, “the students put out the flyers [for the event] and almost immediately, the groups that we had listed as sponsors started getting calls from admin and told they couldn’t do it.”
Gidney added later in an email to the Lutrinae that “none of the administrators or anyone with concerns ever spoke to me, not one time.”
According to Ryce, “The film screening was scheduled by a service learning class during Passover on a Friday evening, which is a time that did not accommodate some members of our university community and could be viewed as specifically excluding them. Some of the original sponsoring organizations withdrew their sponsorship for that reason.”
Ryce later added “individual faculty members can show films within their courses, but to host a university-wide event, they must have a sponsoring organization. So in this case, discussions about the timing of the event were held with the director of the Service Learning Institute, not directly with the faculty member as the Service Learning Institute was the sponsoring organization.”
This screening comes as college students across the nation, as well as Europe and Australia, demonstrate pro-Palestinian support. These protests have been met with resistance from school administrations on many campuses, such as at Columbia University where recently over 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested as reported by the Associated Press.
“Recently there’s been a lot of suppression of student voices,” said Robin Fishman, president of CSUMB’s Interclub Council and author of an AS resolution “condemning human rights violations, a call for an immediate permanent ceasefire, and reaffirming student freedom of expression” which passed with a unanimous 5-0 vote at the AS Senate Meeting on April 22.
Though Friday’s film screening was otherwise peaceful, after the event ended, University Police were called by one participant in response to an unrelated disagreement with another attendee.