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Faculty Letter Calls on College Presidents to Protect Nonviolent Public Protest

November 21, 2011, 5:58 pm

An open letter assailing the violence against campus protesters this fall has been signed by hundreds of college and university faculty members across the country, according to Matthew N. Smith, an associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, who wrote the letter and has been publicizing it since Sunday.

Citing this month’s crackdowns on peaceful faculty and student protesters at the University of California’s Berkeley and Davis campuses, the letter condemns the “astonishing escalation of the violence” and threats of violence to stifle dissent. It declares that academe’s tradition of peaceful protest “is being threatened by the use of violence by university officials against their own students and faculty.”

And the letter calls on college presidents to state publicly that their campuses are “Safe Protest Zones, where nonviolent, public political dissent and protest will be protected by university police and will never be attacked by the university police.”

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  • Guest

    I have read the open letter and find myself in a conflicted position. I absolutely support the idea of moving the Occupy USA camps from Wall Street to elite college campuses, since I think the 1%/99% distinction is actually meaningful in the context of higher education. ABout 1% of America goes to colleges that charge more than $50,000 a year in tuition, whereas the income/wealth disparity figures do not point to such a clear demarcation between 1% and 99%. The protesters have good reason to protest and I support their grievances.

    The problem here is that they are infringing on other people’s property and arrogating to themselves the control and flow of public space. Sometimes such incivility is necessary and justified. But so too is the response of the police in attempting to regain control of the physical space. The police actions in Berkeley and Davis are the natural results of a movement calling itself an “occupation,” a word evoking the notion of invasion and control of someone’s land without permission, legal precedent, or inherent right to it. 

    I cannot condemn the universities that have called in the police nor the police. Nor do I think it is reasonable to ask colleges to declare themselves “free protest zones” when the protesters who prompted this open letter are calling their work “occupation.” The universities would effectively be surrendering control of property for which they have fiduciary responsibilities, to another group of people throwing its weight around. 

    I want the Occupy Colleges people to continue their protesting and activism but they should reconsider the notion of occupation. If they do want to displace control of physical spaces and property, then they cannot condemn the police for pushing back against them. In a word, grow up. Kick a hornet’s nest and you will get stung; don’t start crying when it hurts.

  • http://www.levityisland.com/ Lawrence Wang

    Policemen aren’t hornets. 

    Do you really think that it’s responsible, civilized, and just to pepper-spray someone because he’s sitting on the ground, blocking your way? Especially if this person is a self-identified nonviolent protestor, and therefore unlikely to resist being arrested even if you don’t use excessive force?

    Have we fallen so far as to think that our increasingly militarized police forces justify their own existence? That if a weapon is non-lethal, then it ought to be used at the first opportunity?

  • stuaff

    There is a difference between “non-violent” and “disobedient.” Once told to leave an area by law enforcement, what happens next is as much the responsibility of the disobedient as it is the law enforcement. I can support “non-violent.” I disagree with “disobedient” in this context. Protesting in a non-violent and smart way is fine. Challenging law enforcement is, frankly, stupid and usually a “no-win” for the disobedient. Lets add, an arrest record, with today’s databases, stands forever.

  • micahshow

    There is a difference between “non-violence” and “disobedience”…unless one is referring to “non-violent civil disobedience.”

  • katisumas

    I agree with you except for the “blocking your way”.  The videos show that the police were stepping over the seated protesters over and over again.  They were not blocking their way.  Actually there was plenty of room to walk around them as well!

    Next to the protest scene there was a campus road and people were freely circulating on it.  Take a look at the longest video.  The first pepper sprayer, after stepping over the small row of seated protesters kept on spraying them over and over again, walking back and forth, till he ran out of spray.  His colleague stepped over the kids (or walked around them, I can’t remember) and then pepper sprayed them some more. 

    AS the police retreated under the shouts of “shame on you” you could see that some were restraining others who seemed ready to fire rubber bullets and one who collected two pepper spray cans and seemed ready to use them.

    Many police members do not indulge in violence for its own sake.  The giving free rein to those individuals police members who do is an offense that should not only call for resignation but for criminal inquiry for breaking freedom of speech and assembly laws and causing several students to end up in the hospital (one shot of pepper spray wouldn’t have caused this damage. It was the repetition of it over and over again that did.  Also some witnesses say that some of the protesters’ mouths were forced opened and sprayed down their throat.  This is not visible on the video but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened because of the way the pepper spray was used, not to control but to inflict harm.

    And what on earth is so frightening about a few tents on a univeristy quad?  And what is so frightening about 15 or so students seated on the ground, arms linked with their heads down that it would justify pepper spraying over and over again as if indeed they were vermin, as it was stated and noted by many observers and is clearly evident in the videos.

  • salchaktoka

    It’s perversely refreshing to see someone defend the use of violence against nonviolent protesters.  Pretty much sums up the attitude of academic “leadership” these days.  It’s no longer (just) about using students as sexual prey!

  • dale1

    Here is a 10+ minute video from multiple angles from the UC-Davis protest.  Unbelievable, though the video is quite clear as to what happened: http://waxy.org/2011/11/viewing_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying_from_multiple_angles/

  • IkeRoberts

    I hope “obedience” isn’t the lesson university students should learn. To the contrary, it’s appropriate to learn that obeying the oppressor when witnessing injustice is wrong. In this case, the UC Davis police were not enforcing law. They were in blatant violation of 4th amendment rights, and the DA has been asked by the university to consider criminal charges against the police.

  • http://twitter.com/jvward John Ward

    I just want confirmation that the next time some right-wing students hold one of those “affirmative action bake sales” and the campus police are brought in to tell those students that they are violating some nebulous campus policy and must break down their booth and call it a day, all of the good progressives who issued this letter and those who support the aims of the letter will be on the side of the right-wing students should they choose to look the police chief in the eye and say, “We are engaged in nonviolent political protest and therefore we are not going anywhere.”  This is the way it ought to work, right, even if it chaps the hide of the Office of Student Affairs or the Dean of Multicultural This-and-That?

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