During finals week, all UCI faculty received email blasts from administrators prescribing action steps in the case of “student disruptions” to exams, which included recommendations to call 911 or the UCIPD on student protestors, especially if the situation could not be resolved by completely canceling class. As our campus continues to be shaped by political and institutional contestations over the exercise of free speech and student activists’ calls for the university’s financial divestments from the US-backed Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the ongoing military siege and genocide in Gaza, a sub-set of faculty, including members of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP), question the conditions under which these emails are being sent, and refuse these recommendations to all UCI faculty.
Administrative language often erases power relations embedded in the normal functioning of the university. Such administrative emails reduce student activists — and to be more specific, a particular subset of the student body who have been peacefully exercising their rights to free speech, assembly and protest — as potential disruptors, who constitute a seeming problem to be managed. This framing risks contributing to a fearful campus environment wherein faculty are encouraged to view their students through a racialized lens of suspicion, criminality, and alarm. Recommendations for de-escalation and then returning to normalcy after a “disruption” also construct student activists as irrational beings prone to violence, from whom nothing is to be learned.
We are struck by the fact that — less than one month after hundreds of police were deployed onto campus in what could be described as the most significant disruption to classes and campus life in recent history, with many members of our community exposed and subjected to lethal weaponry — the police are nonetheless framed as the solution to campus and community safety and the seeming restoration of business as usual. Bringing police into classrooms not only guarantees completely ending the class session, but it also creates an unsafe environment — not just for the protestors in question, but for other students for whom the police are not a sign of safety. In fact, despite image-building campaigns that aim to construct UCPD as less violent than other police departments, research and the embodied knowledge of Black faculty, Black students and other racialized communities reveals that the now militarized UCPD can easily revert to escalatory tactics and endanger lives and well-being.
UCI is a majority minority campus, and many of our students come from communities that have been victimized and even torn apart by the US government’s domestic and international policies surrounding anti-terrorism, security, surveillance and other forms of political, religious and cultural repression. In fact, several of the student protestors are calling for the university’s divestment from the US military-industrial complex due to their embodied understanding of the human impacts of US-backed militarism and securitized policing, especially after 9/11 and the so-called “Global War on Terror”, now reconstituted through the geopolitics of Palestine-Israel. It is alarming to us that faculty are encouraged to rely on anti-terror, securitization and policing practices, when such policies and practices disproportionately target Black and Brown communities and criminalize student activists as potentially violent. The routine nature of these emails make clear the transnational connections between US militarism abroad and militarized policing at home and on UC campuses.
The dissemination of such emails is as alienating for some faculty as it is for students, as they contribute to a repressive and hostile environment for racialized faculty members. What for some faculty may seem routine emails about campus procedure, for others is received as a painful reminder that our, along with many of our students’, lived experiences of surveillance, suspicion and racialized policing are not taken seriously by this university. It is especially troublesome since some of these emails are even being circulated under offices set up to complement diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts on campus.
Furthermore, the UCIPD is involved in other kinds of violent acts against students, including the meting out so-called “interim suspensions” to student activists without due process and on the basis of student protest being constructed as an “imminent threat to safety.” Some faculty associated with FSJP, for example, have documented the ways that upper administration has largely misled others in campus leadership on the actual impacts of these suspensions on students, including students’ lack of access to housing and other vital campus resources, the inability to take final exams or even attend their graduation commencement ceremony.
At a time when nearly every campus unit and research programs are being asked to take on budget cuts and fundraise for themselves, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on policing, the deployment of private security guards and even metal detectors at graduation commencement. Whose safety and whose inclusion is being prioritized here?
The normalization of administrative and campus policing must end. Instead, we invite university administrators and our colleagues to embrace more imaginative ideas and pedagogies that avoid any reliance on the police to navigate power and politics on campus, including interactions with student activists, students’ expressions of distress in the classroom and faculty responses to such distress. Divesting in policing and reinvesting in resources that facilitate instructors’ learning about transformative pedagogies in the classroom, including leaning into the universal capacity for humanization, empathy, curiosity and care, is one possibility. “Student disruptions,” can become meaningful learning experiences for both students and faculty engaged with the history and present of activism in the UC system. Classes do not have to be canceled. Instead, faculty can employ creative work-arounds to support the completion of exams or other kinds of assignments that reflect on-campus life contextualized within a global society.
The rejection of policing on campus is just the beginning of meaningful accountability and repair after the campus police siege on May 15th. This rejection of policing builds on the long-standing work of Black activists and others involved in the UC-wide abolitionist Cops off Campus and BLM university and social movements, those who trace connections between the devastating impacts of militarized policing on Black, Palestinian and other communities of color transnationally and in the US. The rejection of policing resists the creeping neoliberal authoritarian repression that is increasingly becoming normalized and authorized by administrative ranks. Instead, we can envision another kind of university and an alternative politics of DEI that truly aligns with and makes real the stated missions of the UC Principles of Community and UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence. Together, we can envision more just futures on our campus, the UC system, US society and globally.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle, 2023-2024 Associate Professor of Anthropology and Aaron Bornstein, 2023-2024 Assistant Professor of Cognitive Sciences.
Edited by Annabelle Aguirre.