Statement of the UCI History Department, May 7, 2024
The UCI History Department calls upon Chancellor Gillman and the UCI administration to ensure the safety and defend the rights of our students to free speech and protest. We look with horror at recent attacks against students, faculty, and staff of the University of California, especially UCLA and UCSD, and across the country. These assaults are antithetical to the very fabric of the academic commons and have brought serious physical, psychological, and emotional harm upon the entire UC community. We are in solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff who were targeted, beaten, and arrested for exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly.
The use of force and violence to suppress peaceful protest has a long and dark history in this country, and we remind Chancellor Gillman that time – and historical scholarship – have often vindicated protestors, who were reviled by some in their day: abolitionists and opponents of Jim Crow, the civil rights and women’s movements, anti-Vietnam and anti-Apartheid movements, Queer Liberation and AIDS activists, and many others. Calling upon the police to forcibly attack and disband encampments by shooting, beating, and arresting students, staff, and faculty, must be repudiated. We write in the hope that UCI will not take this path of violence and harm and instead honor the students’ right to protest. Our goal must be to build and sustain a community predicated on the free exchange of ideas, including challenging and divisive ones, academic freedom and inquiry, and mutual respect.
The Department of History endorses the statements of April 30 and May 2 of the UCLA History Department, including their six core demands, and expresses our full solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff at UCLA. We make the following demands:
- We demand that UCI act to preserve and protect the physical safety of students at the encampment, including from outside attackers. We do not want a repeat of the mob attack of May 2nd and 3rd at UCLA, nor should the police be called in to “sweep” the encampment. Students, faculty, and community members–including members of our department–have spent day and night watching over UCI students and maintained open dialogue between the encampment, UCPD, and administrators. We applaud our department community members for protecting our students and ensuring that all who visit the encampment are treated with respect and empathy. Many of our students are working-class people of color and are thus particularly vulnerable to police violence. The safety of those in the encampment must be the university administration’s top priority.
- We demand that UCI affirm the fundamental right to protest and free speech, which are currently being celebrated in this “Year of Free Speech.” We, as historians, remind you that disruption is non-violent and an integral part of the act of communication in social movements, whether marches, sit-ins, or encampments. Again, disruption and discomfort are not violence.
- We demand that UCI engage in good-faith negotiations with the encampment student organizers and their faculty liaisons–one of whom is a historian from our department–with the goal of achieving a just resolution.
- We demand that UCI commit to refrain from taking any disciplinary or criminal action against any student, faculty, or staff involved in the encampment. We further demand a full amnesty across our sister campuses.
- We demand an independent investigation, led by faculty and including students, into the events of April 29, 2024, when multiple police forces as well as the Orange County Sheriff's Department were called to campus until Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan called for them to de-escalate and step down. The full facts of what happened that day, including the decision-making at the highest levels, should be established and transparently shared with our community. UCI, led by the Academic Senate, can then develop appropriate policies and procedures for approving any police intervention in cases involving issues of free speech and protest.
- We demand that UCI and UCOP fully disclose all their investments so that students, faculty, and staff across the UC may understand how the university prioritizes its finances. We call on UCI and UCOP to divest from all military weapons production companies and supporting systems. Such disclosure should also be accompanied by a larger process, involving students and faculty, of developing ethical investment protocols more suitable to the values and principles of peace and higher education.
Signed
The UCI Department of History
(Statement approved by department vote on May 7, 2024: 28 Yes, 2 No, 5 Abstain)