UCLA Professor Hannah Appel has accused the school of human rights violations amounting to “torture” in the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters. The reason is the denial of water and food from being brought into a building being unlawfully occupied by protesters, even though the students were free to leave at any time.
Appel teaches in the anthropology department in the areas of “transnational capitalism and finance,” “the economic imagination,” and “anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements.” She is also a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA.The Daily Bruin reports that a brief sit-in protest was held at the campus’s Dodd Hall. The students were soon cleared from the building. In the interim, Appel made her accusation of torture tactics. In a video posted on X, Appel is seen declaring “even if this is unlawful which, of course, I don’t think it is […] you cannot deny people to send in water in an effort to get them to do something against their will.” While the students were free to leave at any time, Appel objected that “you cannot use a mechanism of torture” to force people to leave.In another video Appel objects that she and other faculty were not allowed to bring food and water to the encampment demonstrators.Notably, Appel repeats a threat from faculty at various schools that they may withhold their grades in protest to pressure schools to drop any charges or allegations against protesters: “When the university sees that folks are withholding grades, they get scared. They’re scared because we’re flexing our collective power, and optimally, that fear drives them to the bargaining table, and then we win.”
Such threats have already worked as universities have caved to demands at schools like Northwestern or dropped charges against students. Yet, these professors are using the grades of students to coerce universities. It is grossly unfair to students who were not involved in the protests or may oppose these protests. They have right to their grades and these professors have a contractual obligation to supply them. They should not be a tool for faculty protests.
Professors were free to join these students in occupying university buildings so long as they were willing to bear the consequences for their actions. To withhold grades to achieve political ends should be treated as a serious violation of faculty rules of conduct.
As for the torture allegation, Appel is dead wrong. There was no denial of food or water. The students had access to both outside of the building. Unlawful occupation of a building does not create an obligation on the part of the university to support the occupiers. To call this a human rights violation is to belittle the deprivations of true victims of torture and other abuses.
Apparently, you can’t lead a student to water, nor can you make them think.
@Field Guide
You would have had to have graduated beyond kindergarten to be considered a ‘student’. None of these tools did. In our current system, they just get passed along no matter their deficiencies, and they are many. Their parents are the worst culprits of all.
In other news, “After UCLA caves and brings food and water to sit ins, students outraged food not ‘Vegan, organic, gluten free, fair-trade, and was culturally appropriated.”
Campus police later changed tactics. A shift in the wind brought the building downwind from a nearby McDonand’s. An officer quietly opened a window and, under the pretext of each student claiming to need to use the bathroom, one by one they snuck out and ordered Big Macs and double quarter pounders. Police then simply locked the doors to the building and went about their business.
Though they were all inside McDonalds and betraying their cause, each student truly believed they themselves were the only one who had left the campus…too mesmerized and immersed in their smart phones to notice.
I actually like Appel’s “can’t pay, won’t pay” approach to debt. Although, she could accomplish the same thing by working to reform bankruptcy laws. But overall, she is a nut – a typical leftist Democrat insane person, who lives in a la la land bubble of fantasy. Hopefully, she is not married and has no children to screw up. Somebody like her was probably the mother of most of the shills here.
I always get a kick out of children that hold their breath until they get their way.
I always get a kick out of protesters that go on hunger strikes.
I always get a kick out of these nut jobs that super glue their hands to the wall.
The simple solution is to just ignore them and see what happens.
If they committed any crimes along the way, then arrest them and then try them.
Knew it was an unhinged hysterical female before I clicked.
I clicked on a link to this persons website at UCLA. Her photo says it all.
The left created this Frankenstein and now they can’t control it.
They should have stayed with creating bearded communists.
Now Islam will lynch them in public.
We need to stop coddling these rabble rousers. A (seemingly) adult professor who knowingly signed an employment contract and then willingly violates that contract should see the contract voided. The school should immediately revoke tenure and terminate the Professor for breach of contract.
All of these universities strongly supported the racist terrorist movement BLM. They kneeled with it, flew its flag, and taught classes in support of it. 600 Jewish groups took out a full-page ad in the NYT, loudly supporting Black Lives Matter, when it spewed racial hatred against White people.
But now that some students have said some things that some Jews don’t want said…. oh NOW the hammer comes crashing down. This movement must be destroyed, they shriek. Yes, the same folks who supported terrorists against White people, now demand that saying things Jews don’t want said must be stopped.
Such a double-standard.. As a man said: “to find out who rules over you, find out who you cannot criticize.”
They need to gathered together and shipped to a country far far away and given the task of helping those who or less fortunate. For instance, in the Philippines, there is a village of 60,000 people who live in the dump and live in squalid and desperate poverty. Maybe a few months of this would do them good.
I spent over a year in India in the 1970s, saw the crushing poverty including the Mumbai slums. It changes a person forever. You cannot unsee something like that.
What I see are a bunch of spoiled brat narcissistic students who are easily led and willing to follow hardened left wing (non student) activists and do their bidding.
Once again, leftists display how they take reality and bend it to fit their narrative.
What it is, is a reflection of leftists mentality.
And it seems to be spreading.
On my list of things I care about, this ranks right behind…nope. I got nothing.
I would rather redistribute her accumulated assets to homeless veterans and give her a 1 way ticket to Iran.
It is time to take our country and our schools back!
I think too many of us miss the point of these faculties and universities These are, in the best of times, Insane Asylums. The faculties are overtly delusional, as characterized by the many statements reproduced here, and in many other articles I have read and/or experienced. I would agree with the determination that the faculties are terminally irredeemable and therefore very little in the way of resources should be expended in trying to bring them into the light of reason and coherence.
This might be a time to rehabilitate the old central state hospitals and move the faculties there with appropriate gardening tools available (but all blunt edges and points, so they don’t harm themselves) and many acres of arable land for the faculties to grow their crops and raise some chickens, but of course no pigs, cows, sheep, or other mammals. I’m certain the faculties are likely vegan or near vegan. And then kept there permanently. The could be released after 5-10 years if the parole board of of economists deem them worthy, or not.
The students (hopefully not fully lost to rationality) should be moved to community outreach facilities with dorms, planned activities, strict diet and exercise periods so they have plenty of time to read The Wealth of Nations and other works by Adam Smith , Milton Friedman, Peter Navarro, Alfred Marshall, Ludwig Von Mises, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill. They would also be slowly reintroduced to civil society and the concept of work, payment for work, budgeting their time and resources based on their earned income.
I would suggest a grant request to the NIH for mental health modification with multiple blinded assignments of students to various tracks and then publication of results after 15-20 years of observation.
“UCLA Professor Hannah Appel has accused the school of human rights violations amounting to ‘torture’ . . .”
There’s the hallmark of modern academics: My consciousness is reality. And if you disagree with me, you’re a [insert slur here].
The level of stupidity is getting to the point where it is actually aggravating. Imagine that schools hire morons, let the morons teach their garbage ideological inanities, give the parasitic morons leeway to destroy their host and then cower when the leeches eat away at the schools very reason for existing.
Ask this “professor” what she would do if a group invaded her home, stayed in her home and demanded that she bring them food and water.
We have gone from people like Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein and Mortimer Adler walking the halls of our universities to having these little girls holding Barbie parties dressed up as b*tch sessions in place of real classes.
I just read Prof. Appel’s bio on the university website. She is a biased anti-capitalist and, by her own statement, abolitionist, that is she supports movements to simply not pay debt on loans you voluntarily took, because of these bad capitalist banks. Can’t pay, won’t pay, she calls it. I doubt that her research has any value due to lack of objectivity and a biased starting point. She is simple another extreme lefty at the university of which we have thirteen in a dozen already. Another person who would be unable to find a job outside academia. Appel does not believe that people should accept the consequences of their own actions. When you sign a contract for a loan, you have to pay principal and interest; if you illegally occupy a building, you may be expelled from school. Faculty become more and more a class of activists and administrators lack the backbone to push back. If faculty withholds grades, the university should withhold their pay (wanna bet how long their ‘protest’ will last?). The students all get an A which with the current grade inflation is probably close to accurate, and then they can graduate anyway. Next, faculty gets an official warning in writing: next time you withhold grades, you will be fired for cause.
Of course, Appel does not know what torture is. Everything that hurts the feelings of the snowflakes is torture in their little minds. They have no sense of reality and will never develop one as long as there are no consequences.
Some of these schools needed to be closed and turned into theme parks on the dangers of totalitarianism. Let’s start with Harvard.
How does anyone as stupid as this “professor” get employment, much less notoriety? What’s left (in both meanings, direction and remainder) of the American academy seems to have attained the status of lowest common denominator group think as a membership requirement. The high status accorded to a “college education and degree” after World War II has been squandered by the privileged descendants of those who fought that war.
correction. The childfen of WW2 vets were purged from thr population during Vietnam. This made way for the children of non combatants and lefties who jever contributed anything at all.
Who cares? How many more columns do we need to read about a bunch of adult toddlers who refuse to get potty trained? I don’t care. This is the state America is in today and it’s in this state because of the left. There is an Italian proverb which goes: “You wanted the bicycle, now pedal!” How about a column about Derek Chauvin who is sitting in jail waiting to get shanked again for a crime he didn’t commit? Is his case unworthy of commentary?