Dear Chancellor Larive and EVC Kletzer,
In light of recent police use of excessive force and violence across college campuses nationwide, the SCFA Executive Board calls on UCSC campus leadership to reject pressure to criminalize student-led protests of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and to refrain from using police to suppress those protests. As we have witnessed again and again these past few weeks, the use of police has only escalated conflict. At UCLA, police deployed stun grenades against faculty, staff, and students and shot them with rubber bullets. At the University of Virginia, police, some of them heavily armed with assault rifles, sprayed faculty and students with chemical irritants. At Dartmouth, police violently threw a 65-year-old faculty member to the ground, twice, then zip-tied and arrested her. A member of the NYPD fired his gun inside a building at Columbia. And hundreds of faculty, staff, and students, demonstrating peacefully, serving as mediators, and documenting these acts of violence, have been arrested.
To invite police into this situation is to open the door to police violence on our campus. Doing so puts faculty, staff, and students at risk for their physical safety. It also tears apart the fabric of the community and erodes trust across the university. UCSC, of all places, surely knows this, after the devastating consequences – still painfully fresh in our minds – of campus leadership’s use of armed police to suppress a graduate student labor action in 2020. Campus leadership must also recognize that investing in a police presence during a time of fiscal austerity is a misguided and wasteful use of precious resources. As well, allowing police to suppress lawful and peaceful protest would undermine the commitments UCSC has made to dissent and free speech. For UCSC’s slogan “The Real Change is Us” to remain credible, campus leadership must actively avoid the shutdown of student protests.
We therefore call on you, as campus leadership, to fulfill your responsibility to our campus community by defending protest and upholding academic freedom and the freedom of assembly in the encampment and related demonstrations. The continuing uncertainty of whether campus leadership will resort to police action has heightened tensions across campus and created an unsettling work environment for faculty, staff, and students. We call on you to publicly state that campus leaders will opt for dialogue and engagement rather than repression and discipline.
We also reiterate the statement made by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA):
CUCFA affirms that University of California administrators are responsible for protecting the free speech rights of students, faculty, and staff. CUCFA affirms that campus protests and demonstrations fall under that set of rights. We demand:
- No disciplinary actions, no retaliation. Do not suspend students who participate in protest, and do not retaliate against UC graduate students, lecturers, staff, or Senate faculty who participate in protest.
- No arrests, no declarations of peaceful demonstrations as unauthorized. Do not mark student demonstrations as targets for vigilante or police violence.
- No police actions against students, graduate students, lecturers, staff, or faculty who are engaged in their first amendment right to demonstrate and protest.
- Recognize the condition and empathize with all students, including those with direct ties to Gaza and Palestine, and others in the Middle East, and the many Jewish students and faculty who are allied with the protestors’ demands for a ceasefire.
- Listen to the demands of student demonstrators, and engage them in sincere talks.
Sincerely,
The SCFA Executive Board