Texas Tribune
Israel-Hamas war raises free speech concerns at Texas universities
by William Melhado and Julius Shieh, The Texas Tribune – 2023-12-08 06:00:00
SUMMARY: Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune's newsletter summarizing essential Texas news. Two teaching assistants, Callie Kennedy and Parham Daghighi, were dismissed from their UT-Austin positions after sending a class message condemning the university's silence on student suffering due to the Israel-Hamas war. This reflects the broader challenge Texas universities face in balancing free speech with political sensitivities. Amid a backdrop of legislative pressures, campuses are navigating a fine line between encouraging discussion and stifling expression, with incidents at UT-Austin and UT-Arlington illustrating the tension. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has stoked student protests and administrative clampdowns, sparking debates over academic freedom and political expression.
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When a University of Texas at Austin student approached teaching assistant Callie Kennedy earlier this semester and asked her to speak with a professor about how the Israel-Hamas war — and the reverberations in Texas — were impacting students' mental health, Kennedy and her colleague Parham Daghighi crafted a response.
With the course professor's approval, Daghighi and Kennedy sent a message to the class that included mental health resources and a condemnation of the university's “silence around the suffering many of our students, staff, and faculty are experiencing on campus.”
Six days later, university administrators told Daghighi and Kennedy the message was “inappropriate” and “unprompted” in a letter letting them know they had been removed from their positions.
The latest war between Israel and Hamas, newly reignited two months ago, has tested the limits of colleges' commitment to free speech on campuses across the country. Faced with student protests, heated discussions and pro-Palestine and pro-Israel advocates demanding universities take a stand, school leaders are wrestling with striking the right balance between their roles as moderators and facilitators of intellectual debate on campus.
This has proved particularly difficult in Texas, where a series of isolated incidents across University of Texas System campuses has resulted in reactions from administrators that students and faculty say limit their freedom of expression. The pressure of responding to tensions stemming from the conflict also comes at a politically fraught time, when Texas lawmakers have sought to further regulate the operation of public universities — most recently by eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion offices and attempting to limit tenure for faculty. Critics say the result has been knee-jerk or lukewarm responses from colleges.
“We're not interested in blank statements about freedom of speech that don't actually address freedom of speech protections for marginalized groups, such as Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students,” Kennedy said the week after she and her colleague were dismissed.
Responding to students
In the week after violence engulfed parts of the Middle East, following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, UT-Austin students said they were upset with university leaders' silence over the conflict.
On Oct. 12, students with the Palestine Solidarity Committee held an event on UT-Austin's campus to discuss the history and context of the war. Roughly an hour into the event three men, who appeared to be unaffiliated with the university, disrupted the meeting and began intimidating students, calling them “fucking terrorists.”
The students, shaken by the event, called on the university to condemn the harassment. The university stayed silent, which students said felt particularly deafening after President Jay Hartzell sent a message to the UT-Austin community the next day announcing increased security for Jewish groups on campus.
Shortly after, a student approached Daghighi and Kennedy, who were working as teaching assistants in a course titled “Women and Madness,” asking if they could address the mental health needs of Palestinian and Arab students on campus. The two worked with course professor Lauren Gulbas on the letter and sent it to students on Nov. 16.
“The message fully aligned with the scope of the course and our responsibility as teaching assistants,” Kennedy said.
The letter addressed the Oct. 12 harassment incident and concluded by declaring that “we firmly support the rights and autonomy of Palestinians, Indigenous people, and displaced peoples across the globe.”
One day later, Gulbas informed Daghighi and Kennedy that a student in the class had filed a grievance with School of Social Work Dean Allan Cole regarding the statement. The three met, but before they had an opportunity to address the class, Cole dismissed Daghighi and Kennedy from their positions with pay. Cole said they would not be reinstated as teaching assistants the following semester.
Daghighi and Kennedy said the university violated its own policies by failing to dismiss them with due process.
“I've had many positive and close professional working relationships with other faculty,” Kennedy said. “I did not fear any sort of retribution … perhaps that was naive.”
Neither Gulbas nor UT-Austin officials responded to multiple requests for comment.
Kennedy told The Texas Tribune that Cole contacted her and Daghighi earlier this week and offered them research assistant positions for the following semester. But for the graduate students, their dismissal still amounts to punishment for their message.
“These are supposed to be places for free speech and free expression,” Daghighi said. “But ultimately this [retaliation] has created a very tense environment of psychological harm and fear of retribution.”
A divisive political issue
The surprise invasion by Hamas militants in October resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people in Israel. In response, the Israeli Defense Forces' airstrike campaign led to the deaths of more than 16,000 people, according to the Hamas-led Ministry of Health. Israeli authorities confirmed two thirds of the deaths in Gaza are civilians.
The months of violence have spurred protests across Texas campuses and messages of solidarity, for both sides of the conflict. Incidents of antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate have drawn attention to universities' response to these events.
“Any divisive political issue raises free speech concerns,” said Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “And universities, instead of trying to control the debate … they should be encouraging it. This is where students learn how to be citizens of our democratic society.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a hot-button issue on college campuses for decades, Greenberg said. Now, he added, the recent escalation has prompted such strong reactions from students because of how it connects to other pressure points in the United States, such as race, ethnicity and disputed land.
On the University of Texas at Arlington's campus, intense debate over the issue spilled over an event organized by faculty intended to answer student questions about the latest war between Israel and Hamas.
On Oct. 18, professor Morgan Marietta, who was then chair of the university's political science department, organized a discussion in which students could ask questions about the 75-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At the beginning of the talk, Marietta described Hamas as a terrorist group, echoing President Joe Biden's description of the group. Some students took issue with the characterization and interrupted the discussion, shouting over Marietta.
In response, Elizabeth Newman, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said that Marietta mismanaged the event and established a new policy requiring her approval for all future talks organized by his department.
Marietta resigned as the department chair the next day. He remains a professor at UT-Arlington.
“It's a complete violation of the standards of American universities of how things should operate. We don't ask permission of deans to speak and we don't beg for the ability to get their clearance,” Marietta told the Tribune.
Joe Carpenter, chief communications officer for UT-Arlington, said Marietta was provided with guidance on how to plan future events to ensure students can learn and engage in spirited debate. Carpenter said the university did not issue content or topic restrictions.
“If any recent characterizations or events made unclear our institution's stance on free speech or academic freedom, I am here to unequivocally reaffirm our unwavering commitment to these vital principles,” UT-Arlington President Jennifer Cowley wrote on Nov. 3.
For Marietta, the administration sent a clear message. By issuing the new guidance to the political science department, he said university leaders effectively told other professors who might discuss controversial subjects to “cut it out.”
“People know, when they're being told, ‘you're being watched, you're being criticized,'” Marietta said. “Assistant professors want to be tenured, and the tenured professors want to be promoted to be a full professor eventually, and everybody wants grants, and nobody wants to upset their dean. So the chilling effect is real.”
While Marietta was attempting to hold a discussion on the Middle East conflict, students 30 miles northeast of Arlington were engaging in a different form of political expression.
Over the past 15 years, students at the University of Texas at Dallas had painted three large boulders situated on campus with event announcements and political messages. The Spirit Rocks, as they were known on campus, have not exclusively been used for political messages, but in the month after the war broke out various student groups painted the rocks with pro-Israel and pro-Palestine messages, alternating between the two and sometimes painting the two flags on the same boulder.
But on Nov. 20, when students headed out to paint the boulders in honor of Transgender Day of Remembrance — which memorializes transgender people who have been murdered because of their identity — they found the rocks were missing.
The university explained, in a statement sent to the school community later that day, that the Spirit Rocks were “not intended to be a display for extended political discourse.” The painted messages had negatively affected people on and off the campus, so the university removed them, officials said.
“There's definitely a chilling effect by the university making the choice that they made and explaining it in the way that they did,” said Student Government President Srivani Edupuganti.
Edupuganti said student expression has visibly decreased in the weeks since the rocks' removal.
“Students are going to think that it is censorship because we haven't been told anything else,” Edupuganti said.
A representative from UT-Dallas said the university had no further comment on the issue.
Private schools have also had to deal with tensions. At Rice University in Houston, parents of Jewish students asked the university president to denounce pro-Palestininan speech that they said spread hate toward Israel. Meanwhile, supporters of Palestine have been critical of the administration's response, which they said didn't address the concerns of Arab and Muslim students.
Vocal students, vocal politicians
Even before the most recent hostilities, Texas Republican lawmakers have maintained unwavering support for Israel and worked to stem boycotts and divestments against the U.S. ally.
“Texas stands ready to offer our complete and total support to Israel in their fight against brutal terrorist organizations like Hamas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement during a visit to Israel last month.
In 2019, legal groups successfully argued that a 2017 law barring state contractors from boycotting Israel over its treatment of Palestinian civilians violates citizens' First Amendment rights. Later that year, Texas narrowed that legislation to only apply to a limited range of contracts.
During this year's regular legislative session, lawmakers passed another law prohibiting boycotts, this time aimed at academic institutions. Senate Bill 1517 bars public universities from boycotting foreign countries if that decision would prevent students or faculty from visiting, researching or interacting with that country. The law followed the first study on antisemitism from the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, which requested lawmakers to consider such a ban.
Texas Republicans have also hurried — and sometimes fumbled — to reiterate their support for Israel and the Jewish community after the Tribune reported that the leader of a conservative political action committee had met with a prominent white nationalist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in October announced he was purchasing $3 million in Israel bonds, the same amount that he received from Defend Texas Liberty, a major GOP donor. Last week, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas voted against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.
Texas' public university leaders, who depend on lawmakers for funding, are keeping an eye on both politicians' opinions and students' vocal protests about the war.
Kristen Shahverdian, the senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, a nonprofit that works to protect First Amendment rights, said polarization in the country has turned universities into pressure cookers. And when difficult topics, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerge, some universities react by trying to tamp down, rather than encourage, more dialogue.
Referring to the removal of the spirit rocks, Shahverdian said: “If campuses have these spaces for freedom of expression, that's a moment where they can really lean in and say … ‘Some speech we're not going to like but we're going to protect all speech because that's what our mission is.'”
Disclosure: Rice University, University of Texas – Arlington, University of Texas – Dallas and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Texas Tribune
These Texans aren’t taking buyouts despite repeated floods
by By Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-20 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Recent floods in Harris County, Texas, have devastated homes along the San Jacinto River. Tom Madigan, who owns multiple properties, quickly started repairs without knowing the Harris County Flood Control District aims to buy out such flood-prone properties. The region has a longstanding buyout program to remove homes from high-risk flood areas, with about 800 out of 2,400 targeted properties purchased. However, buyouts are voluntary and often insufficient for low-income residents. Despite the program, many choose to stay due to affordability and community ties, while others like Madigan remain skeptical of receiving a fair offer.
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HARRIS COUNTY — After the floodwaters earlier this month just about swallowed two of the six homes that 60-year-old Tom Madigan owns on the San Jacinto River, he didn't think twice about whether to fix them. He hired people to help, and they got to work stripping the walls, pulling up flooring and throwing out water-logged furniture.
What Madigan didn't know: The Harris County Flood Control District wants to buy his properties as part of an effort to get people out of dangerously flood-prone areas.
Back-to-back storms drenched southeast Texas in late April and early May, causing flash flooding and pushing rivers out of their banks and into low-lying neighborhoods. Officials across the region urged people in vulnerable areas to evacuate.
Like Madigan's, some places that were inundated along the San Jacinto in Harris County have flooded repeatedly. And for nearly 30 years, the flood control district has been trying to clear out homes around the river by paying property owners to move, then returning the lots to nature.
The recent floods show why buyout programs can be important. These spots typically flood first and worse. Gov. Greg Abbott reported that hundreds of rescues took place in the state while the floods destroyed homes. A man drowned and a child was swept away into the floods. One Harris County resident described climbing on top of his motor home as the water rose before first responders rescued him.
But the disaster and its aftermath also illustrate why buyouts are complicated to carry out even in Harris County, home to Houston, which has one of the most robust buyout programs in the country. The flood control district has identified roughly 2,400 properties as current buyout candidates around the San Jacinto; the district and county have bought about 800 of them.
Nearly all of the district's buyouts are voluntary. If an owner doesn't want to sell, the district can't force them out.
Buyouts make sense for some people who can't be protected from floods, said Alessandra Jerolleman, director of research for the Center on Environment, Land and Law at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
But buyouts might not provide lower-income people enough money to get somewhere safer, she said, and they could lose important support like child care from nearby family or neighbors.
“It's not as though it's a guarantee of reducing risks to that family,” Jerolleman said.
People who live near the river and who have endured repeated floods explained that they've stayed because it's affordable and, most of the time, peaceful. Where else would they be able to buy anything like it? Some said they didn't think the government would offer them what they consider a fair price to sell their land. Some didn't know the buyout program existed.
Madigan started buying homes more than 15 years ago in the unincorporated River Terrace neighborhood because they were cheap. On Tuesday, the Houston firefighter drank a Heineken and grilled hamburgers for his work crew outside his most damaged house, which he rents to his brother. Sodden rugs baked in the sun on the driveway.
Madigan said he might have taken a buyout if it was a reasonable offer — but he doubted it would be. He said he needed to get the properties ready again for his renters. “I can't wait,” he said.
Two blocks away, water had swept through a yellow house Madigan rents to a family with a teenage son. One of the workers fixing the property, 21-year-old Omar Reyna, watched the family throw out pretty much everything they had. Piecing together new laminate flooring with his dad, Reyna kept thinking about a trash bag of Teddy bears and stuffed toys he tossed out for them.
He wondered if the parents had been saving the toys for another kid they might have in the future.
“The faster we get it done, the faster they can come back in here,” Reyna said.
Some people choose to live with the risk of flooding
The San Jacinto is the largest river in the state's most populous county. For years before Harris County's first floodplain maps were drawn up in the mid-1980s, people built homes near its banks. Even today, people can still build in the vast floodplain if the houses are high enough and have enough stormwater detention.
The flood control district tries to buy out homes in pockets of the floodplain that are deepest, said James Wade, manager for the district's property acquisition department. Those are places where engineers can't easily fix flooding problems.
Buyouts are meant to get people out of flood zones before their property floods again, not to help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The process is slow: In some cases, it can take 18 months or longer to approve a buyout application, Wade said. The district pays owners the market value or pre-flood value for their house, determined by a third-party appraiser, plus moving expenses and a supplement to help them get into a house out of the floodplain, Wade said.
“It's a very equitable, fair program,” Wade said — but still some people don't want to leave.
Those who stay learn to adapt. They build homes on stilts. They monitor the river level and watch for releases of water from the Lake Conroe dam upstream. Some know intimately the routine of rebuilding: gut the house, clean it, put it back together.
The floor of 49-year-old Sean Vincent's house in the Forest Cove neighborhood in northeast Houston is 15 feet above the ground. Three feet of water flooded it when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. This month, the floods reached five feet high on Vincent's property. He cleaned out his waterlogged ground-level shed with help from church members. On Tuesday, he was building new shelves for it.
But most of the time Vincent, who works in railroad traffic control, said he enjoys the space surrounded by tall trees with room for his three kids.
“It's just really not a major part of our life,” Vincent said of the flooding. “Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, it's now happened to us twice in seven years … It's sort of a trade-off for us. And it is lovely out here.”
“Where are you going to go?”
Then there are those who stay because they don't see anywhere else to go.
Jack St. John, 67, a retired long-haul truck driver, moved to Northshore 43 years ago and has had to clean up after two floods. He worries any time flooding threatens, but the neighborhood's advantages keep him there: He has no water bill because he has a well. His taxes are reasonable. The neighborhood has a fish fry in the spring and a barbecue in the fall.
“You know, when you leave, where are you going to go?” he said. “What's it going to cost to buy into another place?”
Farther northeast, in the Idle Wild and Idle Glen neighborhoods, the floods forced some residents to sleep under tarps. On one largely forested street, boats were turned sideways or flipped upside down. A small building was lodged in the trees. A car was in the ditch.
For several years, Elvia Bethea, 68, has driven from her home in Humble to check on people and pets here, and pick up stray animals. On Tuesday, she and other volunteers gave John Gray, 50, bamboo yard torches to fight the many mosquitoes, plus two trays of chocolate-covered strawberries.
Gray said he couldn't afford to fix up his destroyed house. He earns a living printing labor law posters for businesses. His printers at home were destroyed.
Gray said he had never heard of the buyout program but would consider taking one.
“Who do I call?” Gray asked. “I don't have a clue.”
From the back of a white SUV, Bethea handed some hot dogs to Jose Tabores, 68, who lives on Gray's land in a trailer now filled with mud.
“I'm coming for dinner, remember!” Bethea teased him.
Nearby, 51-year-old Veronika Scheid had been sleeping in a wet tent. The flood washed the shipping crate she lived in down the road and into the trees — along with her and her neighbors' belongings.
At a low point, when Scheid was crying over all she lost, she found a pink-and-white beaded necklace with stitching in the shape of a “V,” like her name. At the end was a charm shaped like a house.
She was grateful the person who owned the land where she stayed hadn't taken a buyout. Otherwise she would have nowhere to go.
“At least we have this,” Scheid said.
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Trump, Abbott speak at Dallas NRA convention
by By Annie Xia, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-18 19:24:41
SUMMARY:
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DALLAS— At the National Rifle Association's annual convention on Saturday, Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged the thousands gathered to vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election as a way to ensure their Second Amendment rights.
“The NRA has stood with me from the very beginning, and with your vote, I will stand strong for your rights and liberties,” Trump said. “I heard it a few weeks ago that if gun owners voted, we would swamp them at levels that nobody's ever seen before. I think you're a rebellious bunch, but let's be rebellious and vote this time.”
Trump and Abbott spoke to a room packed with NRA members, some of which sported supportive attire from the standard-fare red caps to a dress covered with photos of the former president.
During the convention, the NRA released its endorsement for the 45th president, and the Trump political campaign announced the launch for the “Gun Owners for Trump” coalition.
Abbott touted his track record on gun rights by pointing to Texas laws passed last year, such as House Bill 3137 which prohibits local governments from requiring firearm owners to buy liability insurance. To energetic applause, he said the law ensured people would not be forced to pay to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Abbott also described the state's successful crackdown on the recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, in which protesters are demanding the schools divest from from companies tied to Israel or weapons manufacturing amid the Israel-Hamas War.
“When they tried to pull that stunt in Texas, our Department of Public Safety cleared the area, arrested the protesters and put them in jail,” Abbott said. “Unlike some of these radical leftist universities like Columbia, UCLA and far too many others, in Texas we don't tolerate paid protesters who tried to hijack our college campuses.”
Almost to the day, the NRA convention takes place two years after the Uvalde school shooting, where an 18-year-old gunned down an elementary school with a legally purchased assault rifle. The shooter killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers with an AR-15 style rifle.
During the 2023 legislative session, Uvalde families unsuccessfully pressed Texas policymakers to pass a raise-the-age law, which would have upped the minimum age for buying semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21.
“Donald Trump and Texas Republicans made the gun violence epidemic worse, especially in our state, where we have seen nine mass shootings just in the last 15 years,” said a statement by Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party Chair, on Friday. “Even after Uvalde parents pleaded with Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz for commonsense gun safety laws, they decided, like Trump “ that the NRA and gun lobby was more important.”
Instead the legislature approved a school safety bill that established preventative measures toward school shootings. The law included a mandate that every school must hire an armed security officer and the creation of a department within the Texas Education Agency that can compel districts to adhere to active-shooter protocols.
During his speech, Trump endorsed four Republican candidates who are fighting in late May runoffs to be their party's nominee: Alan Schoolcraft, David Covey, Helen Kerwin and Brett Hagenbuch. Each of them has already received endorsements by Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton or both. Schoolcraft, Covey and Kerwin are running against Republican incumbents in the Texas House who impeded Abbott's signature school voucher bill or voted for Paxton's impeachment based on accusations of corruption.
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Photos: Texas storms cause widespread damage in Houston area
by By Marie D. De Jesús and Antranik Tavitian, Houston Landing, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-17 14:45:42
SUMMARY: Severe storms hit the Houston area on Thursday evening, resulting in widespread damage, four fatalities, and power outages affecting nearly 900,000 homes and businesses. The Houston Office of Emergency Management is beginning recovery efforts, while officials discourage unnecessary travel. Reports from Houston Landing detail the extent of the destruction, which includes knocked-down power lines and damaged buildings, such as the Wells Fargo Plaza and the CenterPoint Energy Plaza. Photos provided by Antranik Tavitian and Marie D. De Jesús illustrate the damage seen across the region.
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Severe storms tore through the Houston area Thursday evening, causing widespread damage, killing at least four people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power.
Gale force winds up to 100 mph knocked over power lines, blew out windows and toppled trees throughout the region. Houston Office of Emergency Management spokesperson Brent Taylor said officials will begin the recovery process once debris and damage are cleared. In the meantime, Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo urged residents to avoid all unnecessary travel.
The storm ravaged Harris County — from transmission towers crushed in suburban Cypress to stricken oak trees blockading traffic to high-rise windows shattered throughout downtown Houston.
Here's a look at some of the damage wrought, reported by Houston Landing:
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