Northeastern U. Reinstates Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter
A member of Students for Justice in Palestine protests in Washington, D.C. Image by Getty Images
Northeastern University has provisionally reinstated the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on campus.
The SJP chapter will remain on probation through January 2015, according to a notification letter from Dr. Laura A. Wankel, the university’s vice president for student affairs.
Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended from campus on March 7 for at least a year, and its current executive board members were barred from serving on future boards in the organization, after the group distributed mock eviction notices in student residences to protest Israeli policies against the Palestinians.
Wankel’s letter said that she found the original decision to suspend the chapter “appropriate.”
Conditions for the chapter’s provisional reinstatement include: electing a new executive board, creating new organizational and leadership development plans, and developing a proposed program plan for the fall semester.
“Of course, we disagree with the administration’s statement that the earlier decision to suspend SJP was appropriate and we believe this is largely a face-saving statement,” SJP leader Tori Porell said in a statement emailed Wednesday. “SJP is happy to work cooperatively with Associate Dean Bob Jose, one of the conditions the university is imposing – and, frankly, we were insisting upon – to plan our upcoming programs addressing important social justice issues.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
