BY EILEEN BORIS
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.
In yet another assault on academic freedom, civil liberties, and peaceful protest, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, associate professor of global studies at the University of California, Irvine, is facing three misdemeanor charges for her effort to protect students when an excessive force of armed riot police (from twenty-one different units) assaulted the UCI Palestine solidarity encampment on May 15, 2024. She was tackled and thrown to the ground by fully equipped troopers, an incident captured on a video that went viral on social media. She not only sustained injuries but also experienced ongoing trauma from doxing and calls for her dismissal. She has experienced rape threats and death threats. A digital billboard truck roamed the campus on September 26, at the start of the new quarter, with her image displayed as one of “UC-Irvine’s Leading Antisemites,” as if support for the Palestinian people and against the Israeli war in Gaza made one an antisemite. For her compassion and concern, this prize-winning mentor and teacher received charges of “failure to disperse at the scene of a riot,” “resisting a peace officer with the threat of violence,” and “resisting arrest.” Others arrested are facing the first two charges but only Willoughby-Herard faces threatening an officer in the process, a clear discrimination.
Willoughby-Herard is a leading Black feminist political scientist and student of South African social movements, the author of the groundbreaking Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability and numerous other works on transnational racial regimes, feminism, decolonial theory, and the making of youth activists. She is the past president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and has held the appointment as professor extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. That she is a tall Black woman who stood out in the crowd is noteworthy, especially given anti-Black and other racially discriminatory incidents that have plagued her campus over the last decade.
The charges against her come at a time when the University of California has issued to the individual campuses chilling new policy directives regarding “free speech” that seriously curtail protest through permit systems, outright prohibitions, and a disproportionate concern for some members of our community over others, such as Zionist—as opposed to anti-Zionist—Jewish and other students protesting the war in Gaza. New systemwide provisions are particularly worrisome. One requires that personnel advancements be paused until the resolution of any uninvestigated allegation of misconduct against a faculty member, an action that can delay promotion and merit augmentation of salaries with potential impact on lifetime earnings if not resolved quickly.
This proposal undermines the presumption of innocence. Another provision responds to a new state law that calls for disclosure of misconduct charges in the past seven years for hires of faculty and staff members as well as university investigation through background checks even without any reported misconduct. What began as protections in relation to sexual harassment appears potent for other applications.
Opposing the whittling down of faculty rights and self-governance is the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, which filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the UC system for its treatment of students, staff, and faculty during the encampments. The complaint pointed out threats to faculty for teaching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for disciplinary proceedings against faculty and staff and striking academic workers last spring related to the encampments.
UC academic senates are beginning to consider these threats to self-governance. Meanwhile, more than 8,200 scholars around the world have signed an open letter to UCI Chancellor Howard Gillam and other administrators calling on them “to contact Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer to drop all charges against Dr. Willoughby-Herard and others arrested on May 15th, and to publicly recommit to protecting academic freedom and constitutionally protected speech at UC Irvine for all.”
Eileen Boris is Hull Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.
“failure to disperse at the scene of a riot,” “resisting a peace officer with the threat of violence,” and “resisting arrest.” And judging from the video she was guilty on all points, so this was in no way an attack on academic freedom. Academic freedom is getting redefined to mean anything and everything done by any academics in the name of supporting Palestine. This is discrediting academic freedom and will destroy it if it goes on.