The true instigators of hate, intolerance, and violence are those who hide behind their protest against the perceived curbing of “academic freedom of speech” (or is it the academic freedom to incite?). They are unstoppable. I am at a complete loss as to how this can be countered—their academic titles and tenures make them nearly invincible. They skillfully wield academic jargon, all in the name of “justice.” The worst part is their manipulation and brainwashing of their students.
BY ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here.
On Monday morning, October 21, 2024, Jewish Voice for Peace UCLA and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) erected a Gaza solidarity sukkah on UCLA’s Dickson Plaza to commemorate the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. A sukkah is a makeshift shelter or hut symbolizing the Jewish exodus from slavery, when the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Gaza solidarity sukkahs went up on college campuses across the country, both to bring attention to Palestinians killed, maimed, and uprooted by Israel’s genocidal war and to call on university administrators and trustees to divest from weapons and surveillance system manufacturers that do business with Israel. Days before Sukkot began, nineteen-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, a software engineering student in Gaza, was killed in an Israeli air strike on al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah along with his mother and two siblings. He had erected a makeshift shelter on the grounds of the hospital where he was being treated for an injury to his head.
Around noon on October 21, a staff member from student affairs informed the organizers that the sukkah violated the university’s new “time, place, and manner” (TPM) policies, while UCLA Fire Marshal Ricardo Barboza claimed it violated the city’s fire code. Chabad at UCLA had also erected a sukkah but faced no such charges. The organizers initially ignored orders to remove the Gaza solidarity sukkah since they knew they had been singled out for their Palestine advocacy. Instead, they pitched tents and prepared to remain.
Meanwhile, Betar US, a self-identified Zionist organization, took to social media to incite violence against the sukkah encampment. In one post on X evoking Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah members, they wrote “we have free beepers for all SJP members nationally. . . . Let us know next time you want an encampment we'll join you!!” They called on police to “remove these thugs” and offered to pay legal fees for any Jews willing to “make it uncomfortable” for those inside the sukkah encampment. When the co-chairs of UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism (of which I am a member) urgently informed the administration of these threats, we were sent a link to the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion page on how to file an incident report, along with assurances from Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt that our concerns will be forwarded to the head of the Office of Campus Security, Rick Braziel. Braziel’s office did act but not to protect the students. Instead, it dispatched security guards subcontracted by the university and some fifty UC Police Department (UCPD) officers decked out in riot gear to shut down the protest and dismantle the sukkah encampment. In what organizers regarded as a desecration, security guards threw the posters and remnants of the sukkah into the bed of a pickup truck.
The Gaza Solidarity Sukkot gathering was the first significant test of UCLA’s new TPM policies. Like so many other universities, our administration spent the summer rewriting the rules governing political engagement and free speech in a concerted effort to stifle Palestine advocacy and graduate student labor organizing. (Recall that several University of California campuses had begun revising the rules or inventing new ones in response to the 2022 UC-wide graduate workers’ strike.)
Besides a UC-wide ban on all encampments, the new regulations severely limit areas zoned for public expression to less than 2 percent of the campus: Bruin Walk—the thoroughfare linking central campus to the dorms—and outside of Murphy Hall, the central administration building. Anywhere else requires administration approval ten days in advance. Students as well as outside groups do not need permission to access “areas for public expression” so long as they arrive before 6:00 AM and vacate by midnight—a veritable invitation for counterprotesters across the city. “Temporary structures” and the distribution of “commercial literature” (that is, political literature) are banned without preapproval. There are now new restrictions on food distribution and the use of amplified sound (megaphones, bullhorns, and drums are banned unless approved by the administration), and hanging banners, flags, posters, or signs and using paint, ink, or chalk on university property are strictly prohibited. And despite the ongoing risk of COVID-19 infection, especially for disabled and immunocompromised members of our community, the new rules include a selective ban on masks by prohibiting any and all means to “conceal one’s identity . . . in the commission of violations of University of UCLA policies.” In other words, anyone participating in a rally, demonstration, or peaceful protest not authorized by the administration must be unmasked.
The new rules have met intense opposition from students and faculty. UCLA’s Undergraduate Student Association Council passed a sharply worded resolution indicting the policies not only for chilling free speech and student activism but also because “they place unchecked power in the hands of university administrators and law enforcement to determine the ‘appropriateness’ of student protests, which increases the risk of suppression of dissenting or politically sensitive viewpoints.”
But behind the TPM policies lay the very crux of the problem: the expansion of police power and the militarization of campus. Last spring, the University of California spent a whopping $29.1 million to suppress the antiwar protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank. UCLA alone accounted for $12.3 million or 41 percent of the entire UC-wide cost. Nearly all of the money ($11,781,917) was used on security and law enforcement. And we recently learned that our campus UCPD has significantly increased its annual budget request for more sponge and foam bullets, pepper balls, projectile launchers, and drones.
How did we get here? In the wake of the vicious assault on UCLA’s student encampment last spring, first by a mob of self-identified Neo-Nazis and Zionists, outgoing Chancellor Gene Block unilaterally created the Office of Campus Safety and appointed former Sacramento police chief Rick Braziel to lead it. Overnight, Braziel became associate vice-chancellor for campus safety, earning a salary of $52,000 a month, without a search, a vetting process, faculty or staff input, or consideration that his appointment might be temporary or interim. The university is currently overrun with employees from at least three different private security companies in addition to the UCPD, draining precious financial resources without making our community any safer. (Braziel’s problematic record, both before and after his UCLA appointment, overwhelming evidence of police violating its own protocols, and the administration’s decision to commission the pro–law enforcement consulting group, 21st Century Policing Solutions, LLC, to “investigate” violence surrounding the encampment are detailed in the latest report by UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, available here.)
In response to the unchecked violence, the unwarranted arrests of student and faculty protesters, and the administration’s refusal to drop the charges, United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811, representing graduate workers across the UC; UC-AFT; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; and the UCLA Faculty Association filed unfair labor practice complaints against the university, arguing that mob and police violence created an unsafe workplace for academic workers. UAW 4811 also organized a limited strike across multiple campuses, but a superior court judge in Orange County issued a temporary restraining order against the strike, despite the fact that the Public Employee Relations Board had twice denied the university’s request for an injunction. The administration then turned to weaponizing the code of conduct to punish students as well as faculty who attempted to protect students when the administration’s actions put them in harm’s way.
Colleagues are still facing charges of disrupting authorized university functions, “incitement of others to disobey University rules,” and even “forcible detention, threats of physical harm to, or harassment of another member of the University community.” Ironically, it was faculty who warned of the escalating mob violence directed at the encampment and pleaded with the administration to take steps to secure their safety. Our administration seemed unaware that the Faculty Code of Conduct’s prohibition against “threats of physical harm to, or harassment of another member of the University community” can infer a duty to protect a member of our community from harm and harassment. Likewise, six years ago the California Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Superior Court of Los Angeles County that “universities owe a duty to protect students from foreseeable violence during curricular activities.”
In the end, we are witnessing a dangerous trend in higher education that extends beyond the question of academic freedom. The combination of severely limiting campus protest and dramatically increasing the police presence is turning universities into miniature police states. This is already happening at UCLA. The militarization of our campus; the persistent attacks on students, faculty, and staff for supporting ceasefire, divestment and disclosure; and the punitive measures deployed by the administration toward anyone even mildly critical of Israeli policies have made UCLA even less safe for everyone.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is also a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, the UCLA Faculty Association, and UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism
I support your open-minded approach in your writing, but Ilana, this one is painful to read.