Here are plaintiff's factual allegations, as reported in Monday's decision by Judge Jacquelyn Scott Corley (N.D. Cal.). in Loggins v. Leland Stanford Jr. Univ.:
Dr. [Ameer Hasan] Loggins is a "black, African American, Muslim male[.]" He earned his doctorate degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 2019. Stanford hired him as a lecturer in August 2023.
On October 10, 2023, Dr. Loggins led two Stanford class discussions on settler colonialism and sought "to have a difficult dialogue" about "dehumanization, Israel, and Palestine." He "wanted the focus to be on the Palestinian civilians. [Dr. Loggins] also wanted to complicate the ways in which many frame the Israel and Palestine 'conflict,' which is through the frame of Jewish people vs. Muslim people." So, Dr. Loggins "asked whether any Jewish students were present in the classroom, in an effort to speak to the diversity within the Jewish diaspora and to demonstrate to the students that the Jewish diaspora is not one with a monolithic politic."
Dr. Loggins then led an "exercise to create a scene within a scripted space" wherein he selected two students "(one white/Jewish male and one woman of Asian descent)" in each class section based on their seat and "physical size to illustrate a power differential between the large and the small, the oppressed and the oppressor." After the selected students agreed to participate in the exercise, Dr. Loggins took their backpacks and computers and directed them to stand facing the classroom window. Dr. Loggins told the participating students they could come from facing the window if they could produce identification. The purpose of the exercise was to illustrate "profiling and policing within a scripted space." Dr. Loggins asserts Gaza "is an extreme version of a scripted space."
