At the end of the summer, Occidental students received a routine email that should have been startling to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the 20th century. The contents of the email were updates on changes to college policy. Although emails announcing bureaucratic tweaks and changes are to be expected at the beginning of any school year, one change was deeply significant: the Occidental administration joins the likes of other schools, including but not limited to Columbia University and the University of California system, in instituting a mask ban. It is not a total ban, or so the policy claims; it is instead simply a ban for unspecified demonstrators, except, of course, pro-Palestine demonstrators associated with Students for Justice in Palestine. In the same clause, the administration also manages to squeeze a quarry-sized exception for the Constitutional malpractitioners at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Whether this decision was made out of convenience, under external pressure or a combination of both, the administration’s decision is short-sighted and ham-fisted. It is leading Occidental down a possibly catastrophic path, threatening to erode the culture of student dissent and the free circulation of ideas that form the basis of university education.
It is first important to note that the college’s policy is neither novel nor exceptional. Initially, mask bans were prompted by concerns about a potential post-pandemic surge in crime, leading to some bans in several municipalities and even some states. The pandemic did see an increase in some crimes, notably carjacking, petty theft and some forms of violent crime; overall, crime remained within historical lows.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has cultivated himself as a rough-and-tumble crime fighter. In June, Adams stated that he was a “strong supporter of the decision of stopping of masks on our subway system, masks in protest and masks in other areas where it’s not health related,” and directly insinuated that criminals wear masks to commit crimes. Not surprisingly, there is little evidence to suggest this.
The renewed push for mask bans on university campuses shares a similar logic: namely, that mask prohibitions operate from a politics of fear, and often, those advocating for them equate crime and political “disorder.” It is a simple formula, tried and true in US politics: paranoia begets paranoia, which ultimately leads to a state crackdown in the name of law and order and further disenfranchisement of society’s most vulnerable. Nearly an identical politics of fear, this time targeting Palestinian solidarity on college campuses, is being exacted before our very eyes.
Back in October 2023, the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center circulated a letter to university and college presidents, accusing Students for Justice in Palestine, including Occidental’s chapter, of violating 18 USC 2339A and B. This direct invocation of the so-called “material support provision,” which targets terrorist financial networks, was a calculated means to condemn SJP and arrest students for the crime of supporting Palestinian freedom.
During the Columbia protests, Adams spoke of “outsider agitators” seeking to “radicalize our children,” dealing in the same fearmongering as the ADL. Famously, during the federal siege of Hind’s Hall in May 2024, the NYPD played second fiddle to these deceitful accusations, with one officer holding up a blow-up image of an Oxford explainer – which could be found in pretty much any bookstore – to illustrate a supposed plot masterminded by dark and ob
Ironically, Adams, the ADL, and the NYPD are correct – just in the wrong way. Student protests are a threat to an established order and a way of doing politics, one that privileges repression and violence over democracy and the right to be hostile. In an essay published early this year, Alex Gourvevitch describes how the university exploited “hostile environment” discourse to crush dissent and increase surveillance. As he points out, more often than not, such reasoning is underpinned by subjective feelings from pro-Israel students. However, he points out, “feelings of unease would never suffice to meet the legal standard of a ‘hostile environment’”.
The mask ban, in Gourvevitch’s words, is nothing but one of the “specious rationales for their extraordinary repression of pro-Palestinian protest.” Legal protections, such as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have been instrumentalized by Zionist groups, donors and now the state to crush not only the student movement but also the system of university education itself. We’ve seen this so far at the Ivy Leagues and Columbia, where an entire department is currently under federal receivership.
Like Adams, Zionist groups often make this flimsy point about mask-wearing, arguing that mask-wearing is a means to “evade accountability,” to quote the new policy. In 2024, the group StandwithUS, in a press release, likened anti-genocide students at Columbia to that of the Ku Klux Klan, admonishing that students’ conduct was parallel to that of the Ku Klux Klan, calling for the anti–Klan laws passed during Reconstruction. In this fun-house reality, anti-genocide demonstrations are comparable to the Klan’s century-long campagin of racial terror that annihilated the promise of emancipation for Black men, women and children after the Civil War.
In fact, Israel’s political system resembles more that of the Jim Crow South than anything that the students or Palestinians are proposing, with the hallmarks of separation based on ethnic categories, unequal access to services and staggering dehumanization of Palestinians. For all the waving of the bloody flag that groups like StandWithUS have done for pro-Israel students, they don’t offer much else in moral clarification; StandWithUS celebrated Occidental’s decision to continue its investments in weapons manufacturing directly linked to Israel’s occupation.
If it weren’t so absurd, perhaps we could have a gallows-laugh about it. However, ironically, there does exist a hostile environment, albeit for the wrong set of students: those who express any sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.
Groups like Canary Mission and Betar US are infamous for their campaigns of harassment and intimidation through doxxing and submitting lists to the U.S. government. Canary Mission, backed by large individual donors and major Jewish foundations, publicly exposes the personal information of pro-Palestine students, especially those of color, leaving them vulnerable to intimidation, loss of economic opportunity, or even, in some cases, violence.
As Occidental’s policy book continues to grow thicker, the threats to students and the university itself become more real and tangible. Thus, masks, to quote the late James C. Scott, are one of the few weapons of the weak that students have to protest and organize against not only the Israeli war machine, but also the far-right and corporate forces seeking to undo our deeply imperfect democracy. As Gaza starves and the West Bank is diced into little pieces, Occidental College faces a grave moral choice: either to do good or to do bad; to further stain itself in the trial of history and the world to come, or choose to do the right thing.
If anything, the mask ban fails at what it aims (at least as stated) to do. It gives outside bad actors enormous control over the personal lives of students through the tools of suffocating digital surveillance; it places students, especially students of color, with prior medical conditions and disabilities, in harm’s way, whether through additional scrutiny or shaming them out of masking. And, ultimately, it contributes to the politics of fear that ensures the authoritarian, semi-fascistic machinations of Donald Trump and his legion succeed, whose goals include the end of university education as we know it, freedom of expression, and Palestinian existence as a whole. As the midnight of the century approaches, we must not but surrender to the agony of dusk; for a preview of what’s to come, one needs to take a look at the remains of Donetsk, the Dhufar, and Rafah.
Matthew Vickers, Class of 2025
Diplomacy and World Affairs
