Divisions over the war in Gaza, questions about race as it relates to how the law is enforced, and what free speech means on campus are part of a controversy at Northwestern University and its student paper after two Black students were charged criminally for distributing a parody of the publication.
Nearly 90 Northwestern students, professors and community members criticized the response to the incident late last week, calling it part of an effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices that disproportionately affect people of color.
The two students, who are Black, were accused of distributing a parody of The Daily Northwestern and charged in October, a consequence many students and faculty call an overstep and a “symptom of the over-policing of Black students” on campus.
The men, 20 and 22, were cited in December with theft of advertising services, a class A misdemeanor, according to Cook County court records. The records say they were released on the scene, but the charge is still pending.
The men were the subject of the letter that identified them as Northwestern students who allegedly created an imitation front page of the campus newspaper that critiqued the university’s actions in connection to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
An attorney representing the men declined to comment. They are scheduled to appear in court again Feb. 29 in the Skokie branch court.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx also declined to respond to messages seeking comment.
“I think the approach to these two students was extremely aggressive and unnecessary,” said Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern, who signed the letter. “This strikes me as very much in line with a country that has no other way to manage behavior other than criminalizing it.”
On Oct. 25, students on campus could find a single-page flyer that looked similar to the popular student-run newspaper with the headline “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians” printed across its lower third.
A court filing accuses the two men of attaching “an unauthorized replica of the Daily Northwestern Newspaper” to a previously distributed edition and placing copies in the newspaper stand.
The charges say they did so “without a contractual agreement between the publisher and an advertiser.” Listed as the complainant is Stacia Campbell, general manager of Student Publishing Co.
In a Monday statement, Student Publishing, parent company of The Daily Northwestern, said it reported the fake front page to campus police, which resulted in charges filed by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
It noted that as a private entity, it does not have the ability to file or dismiss charges.
“The content of the fake front page had no bearing on this decision,” the statement read.. “This is not an issue of speech or parody. A fake newspaper distributed on its own, apart from The Daily Northwestern, would cause no concern. But tampering with the distribution of a student newspaper is impermissible conduct.”
Evgeny Stolyarov, a second-year student of Middle East and North African studies, said when he first saw copies of the parody newspaper in his biology lecture hall on Oct. 25, he thought the move was “genius.”
“I don’t think a single person who saw those thought it was the real ‘Daily Northwestern,’” Stolyarov said. “First of all, it was not called the ‘Daily Northwestern,’ but the ‘Northwestern Daily.’ The reaction wasn’t as big at the moment, and I don’t think anyone expected that it would be a Class A misdemeanor.”
Stolyarov noted that the authentic newspaper’s print cycle is Mondays and Thursdays, and the parody was distributed on a Wednesday.
“So no one was looking for the new copy and walked into this thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve been fooled!’” he said. “So to say that somehow this infringed on the rights of the journalists – who also released a statement saying that the charges should be dropped – I just think that all across the board, the arguments don’t add up.”
In an editorial posted Feb. 5, The Daily Northwestern Editorial Board said they don’t support the criminal prosecution of the students responsible for the parody paper.
“Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetrating harm against the communities we aim to serve,” the editorial stated.
“Our university and community — along with the American policing and justice system as a whole — has a long history of placing people of color in harm’s way. As a publication that strives to unearth these injustices through our reporting, we remain wholeheartedly opposed to any course of action that would entwine our publication with this harmful legacy.”
Pattillo said, unfortunately, the approach taken doesn’t surprise her. The conflict has stirred controversy at elite universities across the country.
“I think campuses are always forever challenged with how to approach the energies of their students,” she said. “In this moment where we might think about other approaches like restorative justice or, on a college campus, one might think of more dialogue – instead, this escalated to the criminal legal system.”
Pattillo noted that this type of policing is what Black students organized against last year after the university announced it would use private security to remove them from campus buildings at night when Northwestern University Community Not Cops’ (NUCNC) protests to invest in Black students were met with pepper spray and arrests.
“I think given that students of color are especially at the forefront of this particular social movement, and at the forefront of many social movements, it is the students who represent groups who experience oppression who rise up and protest,” Pattillo said.
According to Pattillo, students of color facing a greater extent of the law is an issue seen on college campuses near and far.
In November, a Palestinian American student at the University of Illinois at Chicago was handcuffed and arrested in a classroom and charged with criminal defacement for marking up property with messages supporting Palestine around campus.
Though the charge was dismissed, students said the consequences were an overreach by the university.
“We’ve had so many instances where UICPD has been aggressive to Muslim students for no reason,” said Celine Taki, a Syrian American junior at UIC, who was at a January rally calling for the firing of the campus police officers who carried out the arrest. “That girl was arrested just because she wrote Free Palestine on the wall. There’s been over 130 cases of vandalism on this campus, but only that one resulted in an arrest where she was detained.”
According to the latest available UIC police records, the Palestinian American student is the only person to have been arrested for criminal defacement on campus.
“On university campuses, it is always important to remember that we’re talking about 18- to 22-year-olds, sometimes 17- to 22-year-olds – think the most important approach is to think of the university as one large classroom and to treat all students as students and that this is their learning journey, and to approach them as learners and as teachers as well,” Pattillo added. “I do think that their activism is also instructive for their colleagues and for their faculty members and staff and administrators. That is the kind of approach that should be taken in these very, very tense and difficult moments.”
Northwestern community members who penned the North by Northwestern letter are asking others to show support by adding their names to a Change.org petition demanding the charges be dropped.
“The vast majority of the student body, whether it’s groups that are directly connected to Palestine or groups that have nothing to do with the movement, all agree that this will have a chilling effect on free speech,” said Stolyarov, who is a member of Jewish Wildcats for Ceasefire. “It’s nothing new that the university uses police brutality, especially against black students, so it was both shock and a sense that we’ve seen this before.”
Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union Illinois, said the charges feel like “a misuse of the statute” the pair was cited under.
“These are college students that were engaging in a political protest, one might even describe it as a stunt to make a political point,” Yohnka said. “No one was meaningfully harmed as a result of this.”
Yohnka noted that criminal charges could follow and potentially harm individuals for years and said the use of the statute in this instance raises concerns that criminal charges could be levied unequally based on the type of speech in question.
“This is where the prosecutorial power that is going to be used feels a little off the mark in a use of taxpayer dollars,” he said.
