(The Center Square) – On the day remaining Israeli hostages were released by Hamas and reunited with their families and friends after more than two years, much of the free world celebrated the peace deal between the Jewish state and the terrorist organization.
But on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, a pro-Palestinian group continues to press for the reinstatement of more than 20 students who took part in a major vandalism incident in May, earning their subsequent suspension.
The vandalism resulted in a federal review.
“It was about protesting the fact that the University of Washington actually suspended those students, the ones [who] did the million dollars of damage to the engineering building. And so, the protests were to get the university to let them off, basically,” said Cliff Mass, UW professor of Atmospheric Sciences.
Mass, who is Jewish, has been an outspoken critic of UW leaders allowing a takeover of campus areas for pro-Palestinian protests, rampant vandalism, threats, and assaults on Jewish students going back to just after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
“What they did [to] a relatively new engineering building was [have it] savaged by these students because Boeing contributed money to the engineering building, and so they blame Boeing for having supported Israel,” Mass told The Center Square on Friday. “So, they felt it was okay to take over the building and destroy all kinds of equipment.”
As reported by The Daily, UW’s student newspaper, the conduct hearings for the suspended students began on Thursday, inspiring a same-day rally organized by Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return UW, known as Super UW.
“Many of the suspended students remain barred from campus, have lost university jobs or housing, and say they have been denied due process,” reported The Daily.
UW spokesperson Victor Balta tells The Center Square decisions on individual students could take some time.
“Student conduct hearings can typically last a day to a couple of weeks, and it typically takes an additional several weeks to reach a decision,” he emailed The Center Square. “The conduct proceedings have been consolidated into a collective hearing process because of the common witnesses and common evidence across all of them; however, each student will receive their own decision based upon the evidence provided and considered.”
Mass said the intimidation of Jewish faculty and students has been unceasing.
“They were disrupting classes through the day, and they took over sections of the campus, especially the quad with their encampments,” he explained. “They did tremendous damage to the university. And we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars by spray painting very odious things all over campus. They were also attacking Jewish students physically. It was really quite bad here.”
Only time will tell, Mass said, if the destructive protests fade into history or continue.
“Obviously, the encampments are gone, you know, but we still have these protests now to defend the students that did all this damage,” Mass noted.
The professor said that beyond the last two years of protests, destruction and tolerance of anti-Semitism on campus, other issues continued to plague the university.
“Things were going downhill here way before what happened two years ago on October 7. I mean, there’s been a politicization of the campus that’s been going on for a while, and a skew towards one political viewpoint,” Mass lamented. “So, this is just another symptom of the change here that’s happened on campus. This place is not a friendly place for those who have a moderate or more conservative viewpoint. The problems are much deeper than what’s going on with Israel.”
