By Dusty Christensen. Reporting by Christensen, Shelby Lee, and Brian Zayatz.
This piece has been updated to add a more recent statement from University of Massachusetts Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes.
AMHERST — Pro-Palestinian students and other members of the University of Massachusetts Amherst community are criticizing Chancellor Javier Reyes, with the undergraduate Student Government Association officially voting “no confidence” in him on Wednesday night, after his administration called in police to break up a protest encampment on campus Tuesday, leading to the arrest of more than 130 people.
On Wednesday afternoon, demonstrators gathered in thunder and rain to decry the arrests many of them witnessed or experienced the night before, when police tackled protesters and pinned some to the ground. They wore face shields and flack vests, carrying bolt cutters, Tasers, mace, and zip ties. Student speakers said they had counted over 100 state police vehicles amassed on campus, and recounted injuries and inhumane conditions as police struggled to handle the number of incoming arrestees.
This all comes even as the university is under federal investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over alleged anti-Palestinian discrimination.
Activists have called for UMass Amherst to disclose partnerships or investments with weapons manufacturers, to divest from those companies, and to drop sanctions against 57 people arrested during a sit-in at the Whitmore administration building in October. The students’ “Popular University for Gaza Encampment” is part of a nationwide movement of similar pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses, protesting Israel’s continued invasion of Gaza, which has killed at least 35,000 — but likely far more.
The response from university administrators to call in police also mirrors a trend playing out nationwide. As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 2,700 people have been arrested during protests on campuses across the country, according to The New York Times. Data that the newspaper collected of confirmed arrests or detainments nationwide show that the suppression of the UMass Amherst demonstration resulted in the sixth-largest amount of arrests on any of those campuses.
Speaking at Wednesday’s rally in front of the Student Union, Tatiana Rodriguez, a fourth-year PhD student in Afro-American studies who was arrested Tuesday night, said that Reyes’ account of events in a campus-wide email “manufactured consent” for the brutalization of students that began while protest representatives were still in talks with administrators over their demands.
“Reyes’ statement insinuates that police were deployed on us as a last resort,” Rodriguez said. “But we know that is not true. Police were mobilizing while we were still in the [negotiating] room.”
Hadiya Ahmad, secretary of public relations for the undergraduate Student Government Association, told the crowd that the organization had moved for a vote of no confidence in Reyes, sending out a poll to all undergraduate students that had already garnered over 2,000 votes in under 24 hours. Of those responses, 90% were in favor of the motion, according to Ahmad, who said the ultimate goal is to get Reyes to meet with the entire undergraduate senate.
“This is our last play,” Ahmad said. “If he gives us nothing, then we have the no confidence vote.”
Others, however, sought to draw the focus of the movement back to divesting from weapons makers.
“Chancellor Reyes is just a symptom of an undemocratic, militarized system built to maintain profits without caring about its students,” the anti-militarism group UMass Dissenters, which was strongly represented at the encampment, said on social media Wednesday.
In a statement sent to the campus community Wednesday night, Reyes said he has called for the Student Government Association and Graduate Student Senate to hold a special meeting for administrators to answer questions about the “challenging episode.” He also said the Faculty Senate will meet with him in a special session next week and that he has asked the university’s Community, Democracy, and Dialogue initiative to “help chart a course forward through these contentions issues.”
“My greatest hope is to continue dialogue, even — and especially — with those who disagree with or question the university’s stances and actions,” he wrote.
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Tensions began to rise on Tuesday when pro-Palestinian protesters re-established their encampment, which organizers had dismantled last week after threats of arrest from the administration. By mid-afternoon, several hundred people staged a demonstration in front of the Student Union before marching to the encampment.
“Disclose, divest,” the demonstrators chanted. “We will not stop, we will not rest.”
After orders to disperse from the administration, activists met in a closed-door meeting with the chancellor — they had previously demanded a public meeting — to discuss those demands. In an email that evening to campus, Reyes said that he told the protesters he was reviewing discipline brought against the Whitmore protesters and that the school’s trustees had agreed to consider a petition for divesting from defense-related firms at their next meeting in June. He said his administration “provided many paths forward for a resolution.”
“Demonstrators rejected our offers for continued civil discourse to help bridge our differences and refused to dismantle their encampment,” Reyes wrote. “While we have told demonstrators that failure to remove the tents and barriers may result in arrests, this is not the outcome we had hoped for.”
But that’s not how protesters saw it. Faculty members said that the administration sent in the police while negotiations with students were underway.
“They said they would not cut ties with genocide profiteers,” UMass Dissenters and UMass Students for Justice in Palestine said in a social media post after the meeting. “The administration said they ‘are forced to’ call the police.”
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When officers arrived on the scene, including state police in tactical gear, they surrounded students and faculty at the encampment and created a dividing line on the sidewalk near the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, announcing that anyone present on the wrong side of that line would be arrested. That zero-tolerance policy explicitly included journalists and legal observers, too, who were pushed back away from the encampment.
After first arresting faculty members shortly before 8 p.m., police began grabbing students at the front of the lines who were recording the encampment, causing a rush as protesters backed up and tripped. Some of those looking to help fallen protesters were also threatened with arrest. Police grabbed and arrested some of those students who appeared to be complying and attempting to film the encampment. They brandished pepperball launchers, aiming at students with fingers on their triggers.
After pressing the crowd away from the arrests, police refused to let anyone — including identified press and legal observers — near the encampment. Officers tackled several students near the encampment, pinning them to the ground before handcuffing them. Other police brandished pepper spray at face level toward unarmed protesters, including one with the name Ting on his uniform and his rank displayed as captain. Gabriel Ting is the Amherst Police Department’s new chief, having previously served as a captain.
“It’s not a weapon, it’s defensive,” he told those who expressed concerns about the chemical spray.
Police used flash strobes throughout the arrests, disorienting students and obstructing recordings. Surveillance drones flew overhead.
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Reyes’ decision to evict the encampment by force has drawn the condemnation of groups of students, faculty and staff, including all five major labor unions on campus, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union. In a joint statement, the unions representing graduate workers, faculty members, librarians, and other staffers criticized Reyes for saying his action was justified because students didn’t obtain a land-use permit.
“There is no valid justification for using force against students simply because they pitched a few tents on the campus lawn, a crime that carries the same weight as jaywalking,” the unions said. “Unfortunately, the UMass administration’s report to the violent suppression of student protest is part of a larger pattern of disregard for its community that includes understaffing, overwork, low pay, bias in discipline, and the forced privatization of more than 100 state workers.”
(Disclosure: The author of this story, Dusty Christensen, is a part-time faculty member in the UMass Amherst Journalism Department and a member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, one of the unions that made the statement. He was not involved with the drafting of the statement or its release. The Shoestring’s newsroom operates independently.)
Hoang Phan, a professor at the university and a member of its Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter, said police used Tasers and pointed weapons at students.
“We came into this to support our students, and the student leaders – undergraduate and graduate student leaders – planned a very well organized, peaceful demonstration protesting our university’s direct complicity in a genocide,” he said, highlighting in particular the university’s ties to the weapons maker RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies Corporation. “This was a peaceful student protest. Peaceful, nonviolent, and his first resort was to call in police.”
Reyes has stood firm in his decision, however, saying that bringing armed state, local, and university police out to the lawn was “the absolute last resort.” A spokesperson for the university did not respond to a question from a reporter at New England Public Media about whether there was any specific security threat requiring removal of the tents.
Reyes has received “unwavering support” from the school’s Board of Trustees after that decision, according to Chairman Stephen Karam. “We have absolute confidence in his leadership, his integrity, and his commitment to our students,” Karam said in a statement.
Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement that police’s reported attempts “to shield their activity from press and legal observers raise additional concerns about press freedom and transparency, which are essential to accountability.”
“Last night in Amherst, and events on campuses across the country, make clear: When universities choose to involve police in nonviolent demonstrations, it escalates tensions and creates unacceptable safety risks for all students, faculty, and community members,” Rose said. “Campus administrators have an obligation to protect students’ safety on campus; at the same time, they must take all necessary measures to protect students’ right to protest. Calling heavily armed police on student political expression is an inherently dangerous choice.”
At Wednesday’s rally, Kevin Young, a history professor who was among the first arrested on Tuesday night, spoke at length about the closed-door negotiation session in which he took part between students and administrators on Tuesday evening. During the meeting, Young said, the negotiating team referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which the civil rights leader decries the white moderate as the biggest barrier to progress.
Addressing Reyes in absentia, Young proclaimed, “these students care more about justice than they do about order.”
“If we had a dollar for every time Reyes said ‘we have to respect the process,’ and ‘I don’t have any power,’” Young said, eliciting some laughs from the crowd, “we could have easily bailed out every protestor that was arrested last night.”
Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @dustyc123 or on Instagram @dustycreports.
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