A San Jose State professor who was seen on video placing a hand on a protester during a confrontation around a guest speaker’s appearance has been put on leave by the university.
University officials did not name the professor but confirmed that an altercation broke out Monday in the campus’ Sweeney Hall between protesters, students and a member of the SJSU faculty outside the classroom where the guest speaker was giving his lecture.
“A SJSU employee involved in the altercation has been placed on administrative leave, pending additional review pursuant to campus protocols,” SJSU President Dr. Cynthia Teniente-Matson said in a statement. “A review of the circumstances surrounding (Monday’s) incident is ongoing and other members of the SJSU community may also face administrative action based on reported activities that do not align with campus policy.”
A spokesperson for Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger, an endowed chair in Jewish studies and professor of history at Cal State Long Beach confirmed that Blutinger was the speaker. The speech discussed achieving peace in the Middle East, which has seen decades of conflict involving the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.
Tensions have been extremely high since Hamas launched a massive attack against Israel’s western border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 Israelis. The Israeli military response against targets in the Gaza Strip has killed some 29,000 people since.
Blutinger, an expert of Middle East relations, originally was slated to speak to all-comers in the campus library, but the speech later was moved to Sweeney Hall for security reasons and open only to members of a class on the Middle East.
“That was a unique experience,” Blutinger said by phone Friday morning. “I never was in a police car before. I was in one three times on Monday. I’d never had police protection for a talk. I’d never been prevented from giving a talk. So this was all very, very new.”
Blutinger said that as he spoke, the doors to the classroom would fly open and the noise and discontent from the outside could be heard.
“The protesters kept trying to come in and they kept getting pushed back,” he said, adding that eventually, “an officer came up to me and said they were evacuating me from the classroom. We went out a side door. I had an officer on each side of me, one in front of me, and one behind me.”
On Tuesday, the Bay Area’s Council on American-Islamic Relations said that its San Francisco office welcomed the news of the professor’s placement on leave. The organization is the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.
They said that the professor “grabbed and twisted the arm of a Palestinian student who placed her hand in front of his cell phone camera. Such an action is not only inexcusable but also a violation of the rights and safety of students.”
Video purporting to be of the incident shows an older man, surrounded by chanting protesters in a hallway; uniformed police officers can be seen moving around within the group. The man pulls out a phone and appears to be filming; a person standing in front of him moves to block the man’s camera with their hand. The man reaches out and grabs the person’s hand, pushing their forearm down briefly, then releasing their hand while the crowd’s shouting intensifies.
“I wasn’t scared at the time or afterward,” Blutinger said. “I didn’t like being taken out of the classroom. It wasn’t so much the protesters but that there was faculty among them. Faculty from SJSU were denying not just me my academic freedom but students a chance to learn. It’s a denial of the basic purpose of the university.”
Blutinger said the protests “denied my ability to get the message out” that he had intended to share. The professor is a supporter of a two-state situation instead of the elimination of Israel.
“I’m basically advocating for peace instead of advocating for the elimination of Israel,” he said. “I never saw a time when advocating for peace caused so much commotion and anger.”
Teniente-Matson, in her statement, said the university will not tolerate physical altercations or threatening behavior.
“Our campus values the right to free speech and respects the academic freedom of our faculty and students,” she said. “At the same time, we also value the right of everyone in our community to learn in a safe environment that privileges dialogue and engagement.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com