BY ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
This put up is a part of a weblog collection, organized by Annelise Orleck, that may deal with current crackdowns on protests at US faculty and college campuses in opposition to Israel’s warfare on Gaza. You’ll be able to learn the primary put up and an introduction to the collection right here.
On Monday morning, October 21, 2024, Jewish Voice for Peace UCLA and Graduate College students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) erected a Gaza solidarity sukkah on UCLA’s Dickson Plaza to commemorate the week-long Jewish pageant of Sukkot. A sukkah is a makeshift shelter or hut symbolizing the Jewish exodus from slavery, when the Israelites wandered within the desert for forty years. Gaza solidarity sukkahs went up on faculty campuses throughout the nation, each to deliver consideration to Palestinians killed, maimed, and uprooted by Israel’s genocidal warfare and to name on college directors and trustees to divest from weapons and surveillance system producers that do enterprise with Israel. Days earlier than Sukkot started, nineteen-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, a software program engineering scholar in Gaza, was killed in an Israeli air strike on al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah alongside along with his mom and two siblings. He had erected a makeshift shelter on the grounds of the hospital the place he was being handled for an damage to his head.
Round midday on October 21, a employees member from scholar affairs knowledgeable the organizers that the sukkah violated the college’s new “time, place, and method” (TPM) insurance policies, whereas UCLA Hearth Marshal Ricardo Barboza claimed it violated town’s fireplace code. Chabad at UCLA had additionally erected a sukkah however confronted no such fees. The organizers initially ignored orders to take away the Gaza solidarity sukkah since they knew they’d been singled out for his or her Palestine advocacy. As an alternative, they pitched tents and ready to stay.
In the meantime, Betar US, a self-identified Zionist group, took to social media to incite violence in opposition to the sukkah encampment. In a single put up on X evoking Israel’s pager assault on Hezbollah members, they wrote “we’ve free beepers for all SJP members nationally. . . . Tell us subsequent time you need an encampment we’ll be part of you!!” They known as on police to “take away these thugs” and supplied to pay authorized charges for any Jews prepared to “make it uncomfortable” for these contained in the sukkah encampment. When the co-chairs of UCLA’s Process Power on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism (of which I’m a member) urgently knowledgeable the administration of those threats, we have been despatched a hyperlink to the Workplace of Fairness, Range, and Inclusion web page on how one can file an incident report, together with assurances from Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt that our issues will likely be forwarded to the pinnacle of the Workplace of Campus Safety, Rick Braziel. Braziel’s workplace did act however to not shield the scholars. As an alternative, it dispatched safety guards subcontracted by the college and a few fifty UC Police Division (UCPD) officers decked out in riot gear to close down the protest and dismantle the sukkah encampment. In what organizers considered a desecration, safety guards threw the posters and remnants of the sukkah into the mattress of a pickup truck.
The Gaza Solidarity Sukkot gathering was the primary important check of UCLA’s new TPM insurance policies. Like so many different universities, our administration spent the summer season rewriting the principles governing political engagement and free speech in a concerted effort to stifle Palestine advocacy and graduate scholar labor organizing. (Recall that a number of College of California campuses had begun revising the principles or inventing new ones in response to the 2022 UC-wide graduate employees’ strike.)
In addition to a UC-wide ban on all encampments, the brand new rules severely restrict areas zoned for public expression to lower than 2 p.c of the campus: Bruin Stroll—the thoroughfare linking central campus to the dorms—and outdoors of Murphy Corridor, the central administration constructing. Anyplace else requires administration approval ten days upfront. College students in addition to exterior teams don’t want permission to entry “areas for public expression” as long as they arrive earlier than 6:00 AM and vacate by midnight—a veritable invitation for counterprotesters throughout town. “Short-term constructions” and the distribution of “industrial literature” (that’s, political literature) are banned with out preapproval. There are actually new restrictions on meals distribution and the usage of amplified sound (megaphones, bullhorns, and drums are banned except authorized by the administration), and hanging banners, flags, posters, or indicators and utilizing paint, ink, or chalk on college property are strictly prohibited. And regardless of the continuing danger of COVID-19 an infection, particularly for disabled and immunocompromised members of our neighborhood, the brand new guidelines embody a selective ban on masks by prohibiting any and all means to “conceal one’s identification . . . within the fee of violations of College of UCLA insurance policies.” In different phrases, anybody taking part in a rally, demonstration, or peaceable protest not approved by the administration have to be unmasked.
The brand new guidelines have met intense opposition from college students and school. UCLA’s Undergraduate Pupil Affiliation Council handed a sharply worded decision indicting the insurance policies not just for chilling free speech and scholar activism but additionally as a result of “they place unchecked energy within the arms of college directors and regulation enforcement to find out the ‘appropriateness’ of scholar protests, which will increase the danger of suppression of dissenting or politically delicate viewpoints.”
However behind the TPM insurance policies lay the very crux of the issue: the enlargement of police energy and the militarization of campus. Final spring, the College of California spent a whopping $29.1 million to suppress the antiwar protests in opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Financial institution. UCLA alone accounted for $12.3 million or 41 p.c of all the UC-wide value. Almost all the cash ($11,781,917) was used on safety and regulation enforcement. And we lately discovered that our campus UCPD has considerably elevated its annual finances request for extra sponge and foam bullets, pepper balls, projectile launchers, and drones.
How did we get right here? Within the wake of the vicious assault on UCLA’s scholar encampment final spring, first by a mob of self-identified Neo-Nazis and Zionists, outgoing Chancellor Gene Block unilaterally created the Workplace of Campus Security and appointed former Sacramento police chief Rick Braziel to guide it. In a single day, Braziel turned affiliate vice-chancellor for campus security, incomes a wage of $52,000 a month, and not using a search, a vetting course of, college or employees enter, or consideration that his appointment is perhaps short-term or interim. The college is at present overrun with staff from no less than three totally different personal safety firms along with the UCPD, draining treasured monetary assets with out making our neighborhood any safer. (Braziel’s problematic report, each earlier than and after his UCLA appointment, overwhelming proof of police violating its personal protocols, and the administration’s choice to fee the professional–regulation enforcement consulting group, twenty first Century Policing Options, LLC, to “examine” violence surrounding the encampment are detailed within the newest report by UCLA’s Process Power on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, out there right here.)
In response to the unchecked violence, the unwarranted arrests of scholar and school protesters, and the administration’s refusal to drop the costs, United Auto Employees (UAW) 4811, representing graduate employees throughout the UC; UC-AFT; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers; and the UCLA School Affiliation filed unfair labor observe complaints in opposition to the college, arguing that mob and police violence created an unsafe office for tutorial employees. UAW 4811 additionally organized a restricted strike throughout a number of campuses, however a superior court docket choose in Orange County issued a brief restraining order in opposition to the strike, even if the Public Worker Relations Board had twice denied the college’s request for an injunction. The administration then turned to weaponizing the code of conduct to punish college students in addition to college who tried to guard college students when the administration’s actions put them in hurt’s means.
Colleagues are nonetheless going through fees of disrupting approved college capabilities, “incitement of others to disobey College guidelines,” and even “forcible detention, threats of bodily hurt to, or harassment of one other member of the College neighborhood.” Paradoxically, it was college who warned of the escalating mob violence directed on the encampment and pleaded with the administration to take steps to safe their security. Our administration appeared unaware that the School Code of Conduct’s prohibition in opposition to “threats of bodily hurt to, or harassment of one other member of the College neighborhood” can infer an obligation to guard a member of our neighborhood from hurt and harassment. Likewise, six years in the past the California Supreme Court docket dominated in Regents of the College of California v. Superior Court docket of Los Angeles County that “universities owe a responsibility to guard college students from foreseeable violence throughout curricular actions.”
In the long run, we’re witnessing a harmful development in increased schooling that extends past the query of educational freedom. The mixture of severely limiting campus protest and dramatically growing the police presence is popping universities into miniature police states. That is already occurring at UCLA. The militarization of our campus; the persistent assaults on college students, college, and employees for supporting ceasefire, divestment and disclosure; and the punitive measures deployed by the administration towards anybody even mildly vital of Israeli insurance policies have made UCLA even much less secure for everybody.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. Historical past at UCLA. He’s additionally a member of School for Justice in Palestine, the UCLA School Affiliation, and UCLA’s Process Power on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism
