We are writing as UCLA community members to express our disappointment in Chancellor Gene Block’s leadership of our campus during the recent violence. On Thursday, Block’s campuswide email demonstrated that he has learned the wrong lessons about how these protests have been managed.

We do not start from the position that either protestors or counter-protestors have more right on their side, but rather from the unarguable premises that:

• All members of our community must be able to teach, learn and access UCLA facilities without harassment or intimidation.
• Community members have the right to peacefully protest the United States’ involvement in the ongoing war in Gaza, and they also have the right to express their perception of how UCLA contributes to this war.

One does not need to take any side in the conflict to understand that the failure to protect students, staff and faculty in the Palestine solidarity encampment – and even student journalists – from violent assault should prompt both heart-searching and a forensic analysis of the systems in place to keep our community safe.

Block acknowledges that concerns about his management of this response have been large enough to trigger a UC investigation. However, his letter affirms that since the encampment “became a focal point for serious violence,” it needed to come to an end. This was then achieved by directing UCPD, LAPD and CHP to clear the encampment and arrest any protestors who refused to leave it. The logic for this action seems analogous to arresting the victim of a mugging, because, in Block’s words, “frankly, hostilities were only continuing to escalate.”

Campus leadership should not have passively watched while the protests and counter-protests grew in close proximity to each other and the campus climate soured, culminating in a catastrophic breakdown in campus safety on Tuesday night. The leadership of Brown University has shown that it is possible for leadership to safely affirm the values of a community, engage with different viewpoints and make space for faculty governance.

Our community needs to grapple with questions regarding why Jewish students feel unsafe and also questions about UCLA’s relationship to the ongoing war in Gaza. To do this, we must first be clear-sighted about instances where our students, staff and faculty have been grievously harmed due to leadership failures.

Yours,

Mike Hill, Inwon Kim, Raphael Rouquier and Marcus Roper

The authors are all professors of mathematics at UCLA.