Editor’s note: This is an open letter in response to a private invitation from Darnell Hunt, the executive vice chancellor and provost, to speak with faculty members over lunch regarding recent campus events.

 

We, the 11 UCLA faculty whom you invited to meet with you to discuss “campus matters and the events from the past few weeks,” write to decline your invitation to speak privately. Instead, we extend our invitation to speak publicly with all relevant stakeholders.

In the past few weeks, we observed the UCLA administration’s refusal to bargain in good faith with several campus stakeholders, starting with the Palestine solidarity encampment. The group erected encampments to call attention to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, learn together about its antecedents and consequences, and demand an end to our institution’s complicity by divesting.

UCLA students and employees in the Palestine solidarity encampment issued clear demands and requested negotiations with campus leadership. Instead, you, Chancellor Gene Block, President Michael Drake and the UC Regents proceeded to take the following actions.

• Allowed and emboldened anti-Palestine agitators to repeatedly harass and physically attack UCLA students and employees. Dozens went to the hospital as a result.
• Called in riot cops armed with bean bag shotguns, tear gas, and rubber bullets on those same students and workers. More than 200 were arrested by agents of the university on May 2, and 43 in the following days.
• Contracted with several private security firms – some with alleged ties to anti-LGBTQ activists – as well as six law enforcement agencies to surveil the campus community.

These actions created an atmosphere of fear, particularly for students and workers belonging to protected classes. They inhibited open discourse, collective organizing and press access, creating a chilling effect on free speech and association rights on campus.

UAW 4811 and UC-AFT, unions representing more than 55,000 academic workers at the UC, highlight these conditions in their Unfair Labor Practice charges. Your actions harmed their members, threatened their academic freedom, and eroded their working conditions, in violation of state labor law and their collective bargaining agreements. Instead of meeting or bargaining with stakeholders to remedy these violations, you invited us to lunch.

We will not participate in a back channel meeting without the students or the union members collectively. This runs counter to the very principles of openness and disclosure that are central to the student demands, faculty governance and democracy. We condemn the lack of negotiation between administration and all UCLA students and workers, as well as the administration’s unwillingness to agree to reasonable preconditions that would ensure participant safety and enable good-faith negotiation.

Rather than a back channel, we propose a public meeting that includes the multiple stakeholders in this conversation, including the organizers of the Palestine solidarity encampment, UAW 4811, UC-AFT and the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism. We suggest this as individuals, not as representatives of any of these organizations, each of which has its own goals and demands. However, as outlined in a letter we signed along with over 650 other UCLA faculty and staff, we are united in believing that forward movement can take place only through discussions with these organizations and their representatives.

Open dialogue is impossible via back channels, and likewise impossible when participants are under the duress of mounting medical costs and the threat of disciplinary and legal action. A good-faith dialogue requires making whole those students and employees who suffered medical expenses resulting from the university’s actions. It requires a promise to drop all campus disciplinary action and to advocate for charges not to be filed against students, faculty and staff involved in on-campus protest actions from April 25 forward.

Dialogue requires an absence of threat, as well as equal footing.

Ultimately, while we appreciate your desire for dialogue, we must decline this invitation. We stand in solidarity with our students, contingent and ladder faculty and staff colleagues who – while engaged in peaceful protest of the ongoing genocide in Palestine – were met with violence and punishment from the very university that benefits even now from their labor, learning and leadership. We welcome an opportunity to be in dialogue with you alongside all stakeholders in a transparent, legal and ethical manner.

Like you, we care deeply about our institution and its future.

Sincerely,

Charlene Villaseñor Black, Professor and Chair, César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies; Professor, Art History

Michael Chwe, Professor of Political Science

Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies

Hannah Appel, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies; Associate Director, Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Graeme Blair, Associate Professor of Political Science

Bharat Jayram Venkat, Associate Professor, Institute for Society & Genetics, History, and Anthropology

Miloš Jovanović, Assistant Professor of History

Anna Markowitz, Assistant Professor of Education

John Branstetter, Continuing Lecturer, Political Science

Mia McIver, Continuing Lecturer, Writing Programs

Isaac Speer, Continuing Lecturer, Sociology