Nearly a year after Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel and a little more than five months after the University of Virginia called in state police to break up a pro-Palestine protest on Grounds, faculty members organized a virtual meeting to keep the spotlight trained on the events of May 4 and the fallout since.
While elsewhere vigils were being planned honoring the victims of the Oct. 7 attack, members of the UVa community joined a Zoom call to discuss their experiences closer to home on May 4 and condemn the university’s response to the student-led protest and the restrictions UVa has since imposed on student expression.
“It should be a basic principle for any university leadership that you do not bring guns on campus to suppress unarmed protests, let alone a phalanx of men with assault rifles trained on unarmed students,” assistant professor Noah Salomon said on the call. “I think we can all agree that university authorities have failed in their duty to keep us safe when they bring in officers … pepper-spraying and slamming students and concerned community members to the ground.”
Salomon was one of nearly a dozen people to speak during the 90-minute call, and one of 27 people — most of the others students — arrested on May 4 for trespassing on UVa Grounds. All of those individuals have had their charges dropped, except for four who intend to take their cases to trial, arguing their First Amendment rights were violated.
While some have applauded UVa’s decision to break up the dayslong protest encampment, others have criticized the university and state police for what they have said was at outsize reaction to a protest that paled in size and aggression to those seen at other schools, such as Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
The series of speakers on Sunday, organized by the UVa chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said UVa used state violence to dismantle the protest, deploying pepper spray on protesters, onlookers and the press alike.
One of those arrested on May 4 was fourth-year student Danya Khreshi, who said police smiled while pepper-spraying students and stomped on water bottles so that those sprayed could not wash out their eyes.
“But we never saw Jim Ryan as he hid in a bunker calling the shots,” Khreshi said. UVa President Jim Ryan has acknowledged that he and other administrators were not on the front lines that day, but were monitoring the situation from a university command post.
UVa has given several justifications for its decision to request Virginia State Police break up the protest on May 4, which was in its fifth day on a parcel of land between the University Chapel and the school’s iconic Rotunda.
In explaining their decision, Ryan and other administrators have said the protest was a security issue, claiming that outside agitators infiltrated the group on the night of May 3. Students, faculty and other witnesses dispute that, and the university has declined to provide any evidence to back up its claim.
UVa also pointed to its tent policy, saying such structures are prohibited on Grounds. There were no tents most of the week, with protesters choosing to sit on blankets instead. But when it began to rain the night of May 3, more than a dozen tents were erected and stayed up until they were torn down by police on May 4.
There was confusion during that week about the university’s tent policy, a policy which appeared to contradict itself. Protesters noted that the policy listed on UVa’s website included a link to a separate UVa document, which said recreational tents were allowed on Grounds.
There will be no confusion going forward. Days before the start of the fall semester, the university quietly updated 11 policies to limit the time, place and manner of protest on Grounds. In addition to further restricting structures such as tents, anyone wearing a mask on Grounds can now be asked to identify themselves or face repercussions.
Critics say those policies violate free speech and that their implementation violated a long-standing tradition of shared governance between administration and faculty: The policies did not undergo the typical 30-day review period and members of faculty say they were not consulted.
UVa says that the review process was expedited because it wanted the policies implemented before the start of the semester. Additionally, it said that while some members of the Faculty Senate were consulted, a UVa president does not have to consult faculty before changing policies.
“What we witnessed in August was probably the most significant series of policy changes that I in 28 years at the University of Virginia have experienced,” professor Walt Heinecke said in Sunday’s meeting. “They make the penalties for violations of these policies more harsh, including termination and expulsion for what were previously noninfractions or minor infractions.”
Similar policies were implemented at other Virginia universities this summer with the backing of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration. In an Aug. 8 letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Youngkin’s Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera wrote to the governing board of the University of Mary Washington asking that institutions update their codes of conduct to address “unlawful masking” and “erection of encampments/tents.”
“I cannot overemphasize the critical importance of completing this necessary work within the next couple of weeks before students return to campus,” wrote Guidera, who bolded that text in her letter.
Younkin also made clear in the spring that he did not want to see tents on university campuses.
The Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee held a hearing on Sept. 17, during which senators learned about the new policies at state universities and heard from people who witnessed state police breaking up the encampments during the spring semester.
Gabriel Stein, a Jewish student at the College of William & Mary told the committee that pro-Palestine protesters “spewed antisemitic slogans” at his school.
“It is our hope that our students are not threatened and not treated as second-class citizens,” Stein said.
A Jewish UVa student, Eli Weinger, who is among those who want to see the school cut financial ties with Israel, denies the UVa protest was antisemitic.
“The only time I felt unsafe as a Jewish student at the University of Virginia is when President Ryan used my identity and my culture as a cudgel with which to oppress constitutionally protected speech,” Weinger told the senators.
The hearing became heated as Republican members objected to the format. They were upset that senators were unable to ask questions and claimed that law enforcement witnesses should have been called but were excluded from testifying.
A House select committee was supposed to meet at UVa for a hearing the following week, but it was postponed and has not yet been rescheduled. That committee intends to learn about the free speech policies at Virginia’s public colleges and the role local and state police play in campus security. According to the committee’s website, it hopes to “improve state policies in order to mitigate the incidents of unrest and arrest that we have witnessed this spring.”
Sunday’s meeting was a reminder that May 4 still looms large for many in the UVa community.
Members of the Faculty Senate want an independent investigation into the events of that day. Protesters still want UVa to cut financial ties with Israel, which the university has insisted it will not do. The speakers on Sunday said the university is limiting free speech through its policy changes and may further limit speech by updating faculty disciplinary policies.
Some believe the university has not been hard enough on the student protesters or on the faculty aligned with them.
While it’s unclear if protests will be organized this academic year, a press release said the Sunday meeting was meant in part to “chart a path forward for pro-Palestinian activism at UVA.”
“We will continue to teach this administration what it means to lead with moral clarity and to tell them what truth is despite any repression that we are facing,” said assistant professor Laura Goldblatt
Source: www.dailyprogress.com