BY ASHA NADKARNI AND LAURA BRIGGS
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.
Like many campuses, the University of Massachusetts Amherst had sustained protests in the 2023–24 academic year calling for the university to divest its holdings from corporations that were supplying weapons for Israel’s war, with its siege of Gaza and apparent goal of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. UMass has the dubious distinction of being one of the universities with the highest numbers of campus arrests in the last year. For faculty who have been on this campus for a long time (unlike many of our current administrators), the brutal arrests of students, faculty, and community members engaged in nonviolent protests was particularly shocking because it felt so out of character with the university’s history.
It also seemed ironically out of step with the university’s credo, “Be Revolutionary.” Trading on regional and national mythologies of American independence, this has been the UMass brand logo since 2019. In a promotional video this revolutionary spirit is described as “not waiting for change, but creating it . . asking questions and questioning answers . . . Not to simply be different, but to actually make a difference.” Such canned and overblown sentiments are exactly what you would expect from a promotional video, but they nonetheless reference a truth: UMass has always been a very activist campus. The fact that we have one of the oldest women, gender, sexuality studies departments and one of the oldest African American studies departments—the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies—in the country speaks to the activist spirit of this campus, as these departments were created in response to student protests and demands. We’re familiar with encampments, too—from protests demanding divestment from South Africa (mentioned on the president’s website as an example of UMass global leadership) to demonstrations of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and, just a year earlier, an encampment protesting the housing precarity of students in the context of overenrollment.
The first major event to occur last year was an October 25 class walkout by students protesting the genocidal actions of Israel in the Gaza strip. Protesters attempted to occupy Whitmore (the main administrative building on this campus), which resulted in the arrest of fifty-seven people (fifty-five students and two staff members). Students were occupying the building to protest the university’s ties with Raytheon—a weapons manufacturer with close ties to the university—and to compel the university to disclose and divest. There is a long history of students occupying Whitmore (including actions the university now celebrates, like a week-long occupation in 2016 that successfully called on the five-campus UMass system to divest from fossil fuels). In this case, however, the police were called as soon as the business day ended. The arrested students were put on probation through the Student Code of Conduct process, an unnecessarily harsh sanction that prevented students from attending study abroad programs, impacted their ability to obtain housing, and could affect their applications to graduate school.
Protests, rallies, and actions continued throughout the year, including faculty participation in a New England professors’ letter in December calling for an end to US funding for Israel in the face of overwhelming evidence of human rights abuses and war crimes. In early April, Palestine Legal filed a complaint with the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, saying that the climate at UMass for Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students was deeply hostile, and the administration had done little in response. Eighteen students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.”
As at other universities, students expressed their opposition to the war and to the crackdowns by university administrators through two peaceful encampments in late April and early May demanding an end to the university’s financial connections to weapons makers supplying Israel. Students erected the encampments to amplify their requests that the university disclose and divest such connections. They also once again asked the chancellor to drop the university sanctions imposed upon the students and staff involved in the peaceful sit-in in October.
Timeline presented in the roundtable “’Be Revolutionary:’ Activism and Protest at UMass Amherst” with Sarah Ahmad, Kiran Asher, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Laura Briggs, Asha Nadkarni, Tatiana Rodriguez, and Sigrid Schmalzer at the 2024 Association of Postcolonial Thought symposium on “Desire and Collectivity.”
The first encampment was allowed to stand for just one night before police showed up to disband it at 6 a.m. in the morning. The student activists regrouped and built a second encampment that was brutally dismantled by a militarized police force (just to give a sense: 117 state and local police cars were counted on campus, at a cost of over $100,000 to taxpayers). This force was called while the chancellor was in a meeting with student activists about their divestment demands, which is pretty much the definition of bad faith negotiations. 134 students, staff, faculty, and community members were arrested.
As has been well documented, police used excessive force in making arrests and many students sustained injuries—including a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder, and many who were bruised. Those taken into custody were ushered to the Mullins Center—the campus sports arena—where they were forced to remain in tightly fastened zip ties for as long as ten hours and denied access to bathrooms, water, and medical care.
Two weeks later, the university began claiming that there had been an antisemitic incident at the second encampment that forced them to respond, but repeated requests by students and faculty for details of the incident or the complaint were met with silence.
The Undergraduate Student Government Association and the Graduate Student Union promptly took votes of no confidence in the chancellor, with the faculty and librarians following shortly thereafter. However, even in the wake of these votes university administration seems unrepentant. As the new academic year unfolds, it appears that the last thing they want is for students to “create change” and “make a difference” as the promotional video invites them to do. Broken bones and brutalized students taught us that if the question is free speech about Israel and Palestinians, a “progressive” campus directed behind the scenes by Democratic state leadership is no different than any other.
The authors teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Asha Nadkarni is professor of English and director of American studies and Laura Briggs is professor of women’s, gender, sexuality studies.
