censored 1Yes, it’s true. Censorship at Stanford. (Read update here about the exhibit title and photo captions that were the source of the controversy, not the photos by themselves.)

After only 2 days, in response to complaints (which have not been made public), Stanford University removed photographs on April 9 by Lisa Nessan, a young Jewish photographer and peace activist who has spent a great deal of time in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

The campus group Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI) writes that it was “part of their “Women Under Fire” series that highlighted Jewish resistance to Israeli apartheid,” and that:

… the administration of Stanford’s “Old Union” building removed our display on Wednesday, April 9th, without successfully reaching any SCAI student to notify them of the decision to remove the photos.

Before being displayed, the exhibit was presented to the Old Union administration and approved to be exhibited April 7-April 21. Despite this approval, the exhibit was removed as mentioned earlier.

In a recent meeting with the Director of Old Union, she explicitly stated while she has the authority to re-instate the exhibit, she has no intention of Old Union being a place of free political speech for students; and while she could not present any policy to this end, she claims that “controversial political exhibits” have no place in the building. This comes just several weeks after another student organization put up a photo display illuminating “acts of intolerance” at Stanford.

We’ve posted 4 of the offending 10 photographs, though we do not have the captions that were used. See the rest here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25736662@N07/

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Students ask supporters to send e-mails of complaint to the Old Union Administration at jsmith-laws-at-stanford.edu. CC your comments to ahianan-at-gmail.com.

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