Above photo: Students at Columbia University protest for divestment during the encampment for Gaza, April 2024. Hoda Sherif.
Attacks on Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard at the UC Irvine reflect the repression facing the Palestine campus movement across the country.
But like other liberation movements before, activists remain strong and need our support.
This December and January, 50 protestors are facing arraignment for their May 15, 2024 arrests at a University of California Irvine (UCI) protest opposing the Gaza genocide. The hushed arraignments of student protestors and their supporters is just one node in the network of quiet repression spindling across university campuses this past fall, which includes banning students from campus and using punishments to chill student speech.
One of those set to be arraigned is Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, who was arrested while supporting student protests, effectively nullifying her university-required de-escalation training by the violent force of her arrest. As a global studies scholar of comparative racializations in North America and South Africa, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is well-versed in the trajectories of liberatory movements. Known for her award-winning scholarship and beloved for her dedicated mentoring of junior scholars, Dr. Willoughby-Herard is one of several faculty members across the country who have been arrested or otherwise sanctioned while doing just what they were hired to do.
In the wake of her arrest, she has received support from the American Political Science Association, the American Studies Association as well as over 11,000 signatories of an open letter and petition calling on the OCDA to drop the charges against her. The people stand with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard because the people stand for the transformative power of education, both inside and outside of the formal classroom. As a professor of Global and International Studies and a longtime scholar of Political Science and Black Studies, Dr. Willoughby-Herard knows the importance of the university in fostering the kind of critical thinking that can lead to positive social change. As she reminds us, “Being afraid of a student-led teaching and learning experience like an encampment is like being afraid of the mission of the university itself.”
The arraignments follow up on charges of just some of the 3,200 students who were arrested during peaceful protests and encampments this past spring. The repressive tactics are nothing short of a concerted effort to aggressively disappear protests from university campuses. Their aim is to make us believe that the movement has died. This aim was also glaringly evident this past December when NYU professors who were arrested while supporting non-violent student protests were declared “personae non gratae” by the NYU administration – a move that revoked their access to their own offices and classrooms. But faculty – and, crucially, our support of the student movement – will not disappear. As the growing network of Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters confirms, we are still here, and we are not going anywhere. As scholars of liberation movements, we know that their trajectory is long.
Those of us who call for dropping the charges against Tiffany Willoughby-Herard are doing so for two very important reasons:
1.) Student protests exemplify the pedagogical aims of the university itself, and they build on a legacy of non-violent protest often lauded by the very institutions that now seek to actively repress them. 2.) We reject the premise that safety is delivered at the hands of a militarized, police presence on our campuses because we know that “safety” has been weaponized to repress our movements.
Student protests and the university
The student protest movement we are witnessing is taking place in the context of a live-streamed genocide in Gaza of “unprecedented scale and magnitude,” in which the staggering number of deaths – estimated to be well beyond 180,000 – remains uncounted. It is a context in which simply naming the genocide for what it is can be met with doxxing, repression, and criminalization despite determinations by the ICJ, the UN, and beyond that Israel’s actions are consistent with genocide and despite the catalog of genocidal intent openly declared by Israeli leadership. Their protests arise in a context in which all universities in Gaza have been destroyed by the brutal siege, and in the wake of the campus arrests, we have only seen more devastation – a genocide within the genocide in northern Gaza, the torture and murder of doctors, assassination of journalists, and apocalyptic blocking of aid, resulting in mass starvation.
It is within this context that university campuses have become a central node for protest, just as they did at Kent State, Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and countless others in the late 1960s. As one survivor of the Kent State shootings by the National Guard put it: “if not on college campuses, where else in our society, in this democracy” can we expect people to come together to “pay attention to the world … and come up with strategies” for opposing what they don’t agree with, in this case, U.S. complicity in a genocidal campaign through billions of dollars in military aid and equipment. Students have aptly argued that divestment is the only morally sound option in the face of the acute human suffering caused by the genocide in Gaza, particularly given university complicity with the military industry. This is not the first campaign against an apartheid regime led by student activists. In the 1980s, too, students and faculty at campuses around the world called for their institutions to divest from South African apartheid in protests that borrowed similar non-violent tactics of occupying space on campus to draw attention to the palpably urgent need to act.
While encampments have been broadly misrepresented as violent, faculty across the country have attested to the power of the encampments as spaces of popular education and mutual aid. They functioned as “community spaces for learning and care”; housing libraries, food kitchens, and hosting Jummah prayers and Shabbat dinners, they also functioned as places to oppose the epistemic violence of the Palestine exception. In a context in which our formal institutions chose policies upholding repression, and in which college administrators have seemed more emboldened to punish pro-Palestine protestors than ever before, encampments built space to collectively imagine justice, liberation, and freedom. They build on earlier traditions of protest now celebrated by many universities.
The non-violent tactic of occupying buildings builds on student strikes in the late 60s, which sought to hold their universities accountable for institutional racism and to protest the Vietnam War. Such was the case at a founding HBCU Tuskegee Institute, where students surrounded a building where the board of trustees was meeting just two days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder. Though they had been organized since the white vigilante killing of a Black student two years earlier, the timing of the 1968 action was apt given MLK’s own analysis of the connections between racism, poverty, and militarism.
Student protests of the 60s likewise demonstrated critical analysis of the links between institutionalized anti-blackness in the U.S. and imperialism abroad. Student protests connect struggles through time, as is the case at the University of Minnesota, where the administration has moved to suspend 7 students involved in occupying the renamed Halimy Hall to contest the university’s complicity in genocide; it was the same Hall that 70 Black students occupied in1969 to protest institutional racism. Student protests also connect struggles across space. At the University of Cape Town, student demands to bring down a Cecil Rhodes statue were fueled by “the fever of transformation” that recognized the way the apartheid past lived on through immense structural injustices. As students involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University – where students occupied the same Hall in 1968, 1985, and 2023 – and of Morrill Hall at the University of Minnesota explained, they are engaging in the same practices that universities “once repressed but now celebrated” as laudable moments in their institutional history. Importantly, student protests do live on, well past the actual events themselves, as is the case with Morgan State University, where a 1990 sit-in sowed the seeds for a $577 million settlement in 2021 to Maryland’s HBCU’s to compensate for decades of underfunding. Those who have pronounced the anti-genocide student protest movement dead should take note.
Weaponizing ‘Safety’ to repress movements
Dismantling student encampments and crushing campus protests is not about safety, as universities claim, it is about silencing speech about Palestine. It is a form of academic repression rampant on university campuses since well before October 7, 2023, as exemplified on the UCI campus itself in the 2011 “Irvine 11” case targeting student members of the Muslim Student Union, when the Orange County DA brought criminal charges against students for their peaceful protest, greatly chilling free speech and student activism on campus. The “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom, which describes the systematic efforts to punish Palestine advocacy that has intensified in the past decade, particularly weaponizes “false and inflammatory accusations of antisemitism and support for terrorism” to shut down student, faculty, and staff organizers.
The quiet repression this fall has included a range of punishments designed to curtail pro-Palestine organizing, including surprise raids of students’ homes, storming them ostensibly to look for evidence of vandalism that occurred on campus last semester. The measures target members of Students for Justice in Palestine, and anti-Zionist Jewish students, as demonstrated this fall when university administrators on nine campuses desecrated sukkah structures. Taken together, these actions effectively criminalize student protest, and – as in the case of Dr. Willoughby-Herard, they also include suspending and firing faculty who stand with students.
In many of the ongoing arraignments, the charges were drummed up over the summer, and they rely on alarming new strategies. In the case of UIUC, for instance, a group of students has been brought up on felony “mob action” charges after a summer investigation that deployed surveillance technologies, like license plate readers and social media surveillance. Such technologies have been used to criminalize protests against police brutality rooted in antiblackness throughout the past decade and, now, anti-genocide protests. They automate the problematic racial profiling of protestors, exacerbating a history of targeting Black and brown communities for arrest, details that provide important context for the fact that Dr. Willoughby-Herard faces the most extreme racially motivated charges of the 50 Irvine students and faculty who were arrested that day. Her case highlights the shameful legacy of casting protests as “riots” and of framing Black and brown protestors as inherently violent mobs and enemies of the state,
Such framing was on display at UCI this past spring, when a UCIPD campus-wide announcement disseminated the gross exaggeration that 200 students had occupied the Physical Science Lecture Hall, which led to the event being falsely labeled as a “violent protest.” Though subsequent campus-wide emails retracted the claims, the initial alerts had already served the purpose of calling in extra force. As Hamilton Nolan tweeted: “Having police violently break up protests and then calling them ‘violent protests’ is an old trick that succeeds only when the press takes the bait which is what’s happening now.” Despite a call from Irvine mayor Farrah Khan for the university to handle the situation without physical police force, the UCI campus police – whose budget has seen a 179% increase in the last decade alone – decided to seek “help from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Irvine police as well as other neighboring law enforcement agencies.” Help showed up in the form of hundreds of heavily-armed police clad in riot gear, drastically escalating the show of force, as also happened at Emory University, UCLA and many other campuses. Ultimately, the cost of policing the UCI encampment for just a few weeks – upwards of $420,000 in overtime, according to documents received from a PRA request – belies the much greater cost of violently repressing student movements grounded in the lessons of liberatory education.
While the university has sought to distance itself from the charges being brought against Professor Willoughby-Herard by specifying that it is the OC DA’s office that has brought charges, such a move obscures the so-called “mutual aid” relationships between university police and surrounding law enforcement agencies, contributing to alarmingly militarized campuses. These are longstanding tactics to justify using military-grade force to criminalize and punish protestors, as was the case at Kent State, for instance, where an FBI report on the shootings showed that National Guard troopers’ claims that they shot in self-defense seemed to have been “fabricated subsequent to the event.” Dr. Willoughby-Herard’s case, then, also demonstrates the failure of our universities to heed the historical lesson about the dangers of calling deadly force onto campus.
Ironically for universities, which have largely chosen repression, the widespread anti-genocide student protests are the paragon of the ideals universities commonly espouse: they both increase community engagement by fostering spaces of teaching and learning open to the community and strive to make global connections. Dr. Willoughby-Herard’s arrest went viral largely through her answer to a reporter’s question as to whether she feared losing her job. Her response – “What job do I have if the students don’t have a future?” – would be better directed to universities themselves, especially in the face of a manufactured culture war backlash: What purpose do universities serve if they do not defend the basic institutions of democracy, including free speech and the right to non-violent protest? That’s just what faculty support of the student movement aims to do.
Disclose. Divest. We will not stop, we will not rest!