Northwestern University got caught in a world of trouble. It's attack on pro-Palestinian students is just the latest.
NU was forced to drop the charges it filed against two Black students for publishing a parody newspaper.
Northwestern University has been forced to drop charges they filed against two Black students who published a great parody of The Northwestern Daily, the official campus newspaper.
The newspaper parody was a scathing exposure of Northwestern’s complicity with Palestinian genocide.
Northwestern, a Big Ten private university on the north shore, has had a world of bad lately.
It pushed ahead with constructing a new stadium in the face of community opposition.
NU is located in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. The Evanston city council split evenly over allowing the university to build a new football venue with the deciding vote in favor provided by my old “friend”, now Evanston mayor, Dan Biss.
Biss, you may recall, was a chief sponsor of pension theft when he was a state senator.
Then the NU athletic department got itself involved in a scandal involving sexual assaults, resulting in the firing of a bunch coaches and staff.
The latest news coming out of Evanston is their buffoonery involving the newspaper parody.
Following days of backlash, prosecutors have decided to drop the criminal case against two Northwestern University students who created a parody version of the school’s student newspaper attacking Northwestern’s stance on the war in Gaza.
Police brought the misdemeanor charges after the company behind the university’s student paper, Students Publishing Company, or SPC, announced that it had “engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible.” The mock front page featured fake quotes from school officials, accusations of Israeli war crimes, and a fake ad for Birthright Israel — the travel abroad program that sends young American Jews to Israel — with the tagline “One man’s home is another man’s former home!”
But on Wednesday, following a report by The Intercept and Responsible Statecraft, SPC announced that it would actively seek for the charges to be dropped, and prosecutors agreed to close the case.
On October 25th the parody appeared on campus featuring charges against the university of complicity with genocide.
The mock front page featured fake quotes from school officials, accusations of Israeli war crimes, and a fake ad for Birthright Israel — the travel abroad program that sends young American Jews to Israel — with the tagline “One man’s home is another man’s former home!” Overnight, someone had pinned the mock papers on bulletin boards, spread them on desks in lecture halls, and even wrapped the false front pages around roughly 300 copies of the Daily Northwestern itself.
Seventy student organizations announced they would boycott The Northwestern Daily and 5,000 students signed a petition protesting the university’s actions against the students who published the parody.
But parody is constitutionally protected, as the university’s own law school could have probably told the administration.
In this case, not only should the students not been arrested.
They should have received extra credit.