Despite repression, the campus movement for Palestine remains strong

 

Attacks on Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard at the University of California Irvine reflect the repression facing the Palestine campus movement across the country. But like other liberation movements before, activists remain strong and need our support.

his December and January, 50 protestors are facing arraignment for their May 15, 2024 arrests at a University of California Irvine (UCI) protest opposing the Gaza genocide. The hushed arraignments of student protestors and their supporters is just one node in the network of quiet repression spindling across university campuses this past fall, which includes banning students from campus and using punishments to chill student speech. 

One of those set to be arraigned is Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, who was arrested while supporting student protests, effectively nullifying her university-required de-escalation training by the violent force of her arrest. As a global studies scholar of comparative racializations in North America and South Africa, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is well-versed in the trajectories of liberatory movements. Known for her award-winning scholarship and beloved for her dedicated mentoring of junior scholars, Dr. Willoughby-Herard is one of several faculty members across the country who have been arrested or otherwise sanctioned while doing just what they were hired to do.

In the wake of her arrest, she has received support from the American Political Science Association, the American Studies Association as well as over 11,000 signatories of an open letter and petition calling on the OCDA to drop the charges against her. The people stand with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard because the people stand for the transformative power of education, both inside and outside of the formal classroom. As a professor of Global and International Studies and a longtime scholar of Political Science and Black Studies, Dr. Willoughby-Herard knows the importance of the university in fostering the kind of critical thinking that can lead to positive social change. As she reminds us, “Being afraid of a student-led teaching and learning experience like an encampment is like being afraid of the mission of the university itself.”

The arraignments follow up on charges of just some of the 3,200 students who were arrested during peaceful protests and encampments this past spring. The repressive tactics are nothing short of a concerted effort to aggressively disappear protests from university campuses. Their aim is to make us believe that the movement has died. This aim was also glaringly evident this past December when NYU professors who were arrested while supporting non-violent student protests were declared “personae non gratae” by the NYU administration – a move that revoked their access to their own offices and classrooms. But faculty – and, crucially, our support of the student movement – will not disappear. As the growing network of Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters confirms, we are still here, and we are not going anywhere. As scholars of liberation movements, we know that their trajectory is long.  (more...)

Despite repression, the campus movement for Palestine remains strong