POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

On October 26, the Executive Committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued the following public statement regarding the recent police raid on Penn undergraduate students:

We are alarmed by the Penn administration’s escalating use of police action against Penn students. So too are we alarmed by the University’s pattern—established last year and extended this year—of treating all protest by faculty, staff, and students against Israeli government policies and warmaking chiefly as a security concern, rather than an expression of students’ rights to assemble and engage in political activity, and faculty’s right to freedom in extramural speech.

On October 18, members of the University of Pennsylvania Police Department and Philadelphia Police Department raided the home of a group of Penn undergraduates in the middle of the night, reportedly wearing “full tactical gear, including riot helmets, and armed with assault rifles and handguns.” According to The Intercept, the police were executing a warrant investigating a victimless act of vandalism: on September 12, red paint had been poured on the Ben Franklin statue. According to the same reporting, “the police threatened to break down the door with a battering ram and pointed a gun at a neighbor before storming the residence.” They reportedly “trained guns” on students in the house and “refused to provide their names or badge numbers.”

No reasonable person can believe that a student suspected of pouring paint on a statue should be subject to this dangerous and traumatizing treatment. But the university administration has shown itself willing to threaten students with potentially deadly physical violence and terrorize them in their homes. Authorizing an armed police raid on students in these circumstances is abhorrent, and it gives the lie to the university administration’s pretension to be acting to protect students from harm. On October 18, based on what has been reported, the university administration and the police appear to have been the preeminent threats to safety in our community.

This escalation is part of a pattern. Just four days earlier, on October 14, the administration needlessly disrupted the intellectual life of the university by responding to a non-violent demonstration with draconian measures: barricading campus, inhibiting access to academic buildings, and broadcasting fear-inducing security alerts that mischaracterized political speech and peaceful assembly as threats to safety. As it has done repeatedly over the past year, the administration unjustly depicted Penn faculty, staff, and students who were grieving the deaths of Palestinians as outsiders to our community and threats to others. The administration’s actions, not the protest itself, were threatening to members of our community and disruptive to the research and teaching mission of the university. Moreover, they represent clear violations of Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which prohibit the administration from restricting demonstration on the basis of the substance of the views expressed.