Teachers Against Occupation

Feature

 
To: Mark G. Yudof, UC President
 
Re: Arrest of the ‘Irvine 11′ and Statement of UC President Mark G. Yudof, the Chancellors of the ten UC campuses, and the Chair and Vice Chair of the University-wide Academic Senate, February 26, 2010
 
As university educators, we are writing to express our strong concern about the arrest and threatened expulsion of eleven University of California students who engaged in civil disobedience during the recent visit to the UC-Irvine campus of the Israeli Ambassador, Michael Oren. We are equally alarmed by the spurious connection drawn by UC administrators between these protests and overt acts of racism at UCSD, and ask that the UC administration clearly and publicly distinguish between the two. Protesting injustice is a time-honored tradition in the United States, and on U.S. campuses in particular. Whether or not one agrees with the tactics used by the ‘Irvine 11’, their protest was aimed at the representative of a government that has engaged in an illegal occupation for 43 years in contravention of numerous U.N. resolutions, and which has been charged with war crimes by the United Nation’s special investigator, Richard Goldstone, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Conflating protests against state-perpetrated, systemic injustice with acts of racism is dangerously irresponsible; it demonstrates, above all, a will to suppress legitimate political dissent on UC campuses.
 
The protests by the ‘Irvine 11’ raise serious issues that deserve careful consideration by administrators, faculty and students alike. But these issues are not limited to the tactics of civil disobedience used by student activists, their place on U.S. campuses, or the appropriate response to such tactics by campus authorities. A more fundamental question must be posed about unequal relations of power on U.S. campuses, whereby representatives of a state that willfully disregards U.N. resolutions and engages in the systematic violation of the most basic human rights of Palestinians are assured the right to speak, while students’ right to protest such speech is actively suppressed. This is an urgent matter that speaks to the nature of the public sphere on U.S. campuses today and to the democratic values that public universities claim to uphold. If the speech of only the powerful is protected, the question of justice is unlikely to be raised.
 
We call upon the UC administration to end its threats of draconian actions against the ‘Irvine 11’.
 
Professor Bruce Braun
Professor Simona Sawhney
Professor Ajay Skaria
Teachers-Against-Occupation – Minnesota (TAO-MN)
 
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More about the ‘Irving 11’: http://www.irvine11.com/