We, the undersigned faculty members and academic staff at Princeton University, write this letter to condemn your repression and vilification of Princeton students and other community members currently protesting and engaging in civil disobedience in solidarity with Palestine.
For almost a week now, people of multiple faiths, genders, ages, and colors — belonging to the Princeton community and beyond — have participated in an entirely peaceful student-led sit-in on campus in pursuit of their demand that the University divest from Israel. In your communications with the campus community, you fail to mention the context preceding the students’ escalation of their protest which culminated in the occupation of Clio Hall on Monday, April 29: your refusal to consider the students’ demand for divestment from Israel for decades and your ignoring of their most recent efforts since the Fall of 2023 to reach you through the formal and procedural channels available at the University. You do not admit the complete refusal of the Princeton administration to respond to all the earlier requests to engage with students in serious, good-faith dialogue.
In the face of such deliberate indifference, escalating a student protest through the occupation of a university building is a measure with abundant precedent in the history of protest movements in this country and beyond—a history that the University itself lauds. If we may remind you, your assigned pre-read for this school year was “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” by Maria Ressa ’86.
Protest measures such as occupying academic buildings, encamping on university lawns, assembling and mobilizing people on campus premises have all long been part of US campus protests, including at Princeton. Such protest measures have been amply visible on US (and global) campuses during moments like protest against apartheid in South Africa, and the US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The current protest is no different. It is neither exceptional nor dangerous. Rather, it is your criminalization of this protest and of the student protestors who are leading it that is both exceptional and dangerous.
In her April 30 message to the campus community, Vice President W. Rochelle Calhoun falsely claimed, without providing any evidence, that student protesters who entered Clio Hall on April 29 were violent and threatened people inside the building. This is a lie negated by the eyewitness account of the faculty observer who entered the building with the student protestors. VP Calhoun builds a case for unsparing discipline upon the students on the grounds of the picture of yelling, abuse, and unsafety she paints. This attempt to scare student protestors through stereotyping and the threat of arrest and criminal punishment constitutes an authoritarian assault on democratic principles.
All Princeton students protesting for divestment from Israel have done so non-violently and their disruptions have been no different than those in earlier occupations on campus. The only student arrested for violent activity on April 29 was a counter-protestor who was charged with assault.
Your invocation of “time, place, and manner” restrictions to free speech appears arbitrary in this case and clearly shows your bias against the viewpoint espoused by the student protestors. Moreover, your use of force and power as we have witnessed in the last week sets a dangerous precedent that can swallow and circumvent all future expressions of student, faculty, or staff dissent and protest on subjectively interpreted grounds of maintaining “public order.”
If anything, your recourse to the contrived imperative of “maintaining public order” with the help of law enforcement agencies-a textbook colonial discourse and tactic still abundantly employed by authoritarian states-has only brought disorder and disturbance to an otherwise entirely organized and peaceful student led protest movement. For instance, to cite one among many cases of police heavy handedness that you unleashed on your own students, an arrested Black Muslim student had no choice but to pray while restrained with zip-ties, next to the Graduate School’s own Office of Access, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Let us be very clear and direct: your turn to authoritarian threats of violence against your own students peacefully protesting a just cause has little to do with an ostensible concern for public order and safety, and everything to do with the desire to quash a movement critical of a particular modern nation state and of the possible implication of Princeton University’s financial portfolio in a horrific genocide being currently conducted by that nation state. By casting student protestors as potential criminals, you also authorize the insidious and untenable assumption of equating raising one’s voice against the violence of a modern nation state with antisemitism. More than anyone else, such an implication is offensive towards our Jewish students who are playing a leading role in the organization and execution of these protests, at Princeton and across the country.
Along with our diverse student organizations, we reject the ensuing lockdown of Morrison Hall, which houses the Department of African American Studies and the Effron Center for the Study of America – where many students have come to engage with Latino Studies, Asian American Studies, American Studies, and Indigenous Studies. Four out of five arrested undergraduate students are pursuing degrees in African American Studies.
We affirm the democratic tradition which includes the historic role of civil disobedience. We affirm Princeton University’s commitment to serve humanity and we seek to pursue this value without discrimination among the peoples of the world.
We urge you to stop the criminalization, gross mischaracterization, and harassment of non-violent student protestors. We urge you to drop all charges against the arrested students, in recognition of their right to protest and their use of civil disobedience methods, and to grant them full amnesty. We demand that the University recognize that the students have tried all available procedural means to initiate dialogue on their demands with the administration and that you enter into dialogue with the students immediately. Finally, we demand the immediate resignation of VP Calhoun in whose leadership we have lost all faith following her untruthful and deliberately misleading representation of student protesters that has proven to be the real threat to the Princeton University community.
Signed,
