St. John's University drops the HOPE conference in an example of cowardly compliance-in-advance with Trump

I've recently been attending HOPE for the past few years and it is a great event, one that is very clear about what it is and what it is doing. This year's keynote guest was the creator of ICE Block, as noted in 404's coverage of this.

A lot of the discussion has focused on the due process issues, the contradictory nature of the decision after a long history of great collaboration between the conference and HOPE, and the beneficial nature of HOPE. All of these points are great. We should look at this as ludicrous and cowardly on the basis of that alone.

I'd go even one step further though. We've been talking about academia as important sites of freedom of speech for a long time now. That includes the freedom to criticize the police. Even if the HOPE conference had been subtitled "ACAB" that is not really a justifiable reason to eject it from a university campus. By the way, it really isn't. If you've ever been to a hacker conference you'd know it is a pretty wide mix of opinions on law enforcement generally. But none of that should matter. Can we not criticize cops anymore? They deserve it.

What we're told - and what we find rather hard to believe - is that all of this came about because a single person thought we were promoting an anti-police agenda. They had spotted pamphlets on a table which an attendee had apparently brought to HOPE that espoused that view. Instead of bringing this to our attention, they went to the president's office at St. John's after the conference had ended. That office held an investigation which we had no knowledge of and reached its decision earlier this month. The lack of due process on its own is extremely disturbing.

The intent of the person behind this appears clear: shut down events like ours and make no attempt to actually communicate or resolve the issue. If it wasn't this pamphlet, it would have been something else. In this day and age where academic institutions live in fear of offending the same authorities we've been challenging for decades, this isn't entirely surprising. It is, however, greatly disappointing, as we truly believed St. John's valued the freedom that we have always stood for. We know the people there who we've worked with understand this and it's unfortunate that those in charge see fit to cut off that invaluable connection.