Editor’s note: This letter remains in the condition in which it was sent.
Dear Editor:
On May 1 2024, a group of UB students and community members gathered on campus to demand that UB end any investments in direct or indirect support of the Gaza genocide. Rather than talking with them, UB President Satish K. Tripathi assembled a posse of heavily armed and armored officers from UB and several suburban police departments and directed them to end the protest.
These officers proceeded to curse and assault a Spectrum reporter: “Get the fuck out of here.” A comprehensive Spectrum video timeline shows that they drove protestors away, hurled them to the ground, and ground their heads into the dirt and concrete.
When one student saw a protestor immobile on the ground, she ran up crying in concern, begging police to check on him. They responded by grabbing her, throwing her on her face, squatting on her backside, cuffing her, and cursing her: “That’s enough out of you. You wanna keep talking your shit? Here’s your fucking shit.” They proceeded to tear off her hijab (8:25-10:08). She cried out in fear and indignation. This is the most horrible thing I have seen at UB in the third of a century I have been here. It makes me ashamed.
On September 17 2024, I attended a UB Faculty Senate meeting that addressed a proposed revision of UB’s Picketing and Assembling Policy. There was almost no mention of the assault. The suggestion almost seemed to be that any difficulties on Mayday were the result of imperfect wording.
But here’s the problem, which I pointed out to the Senate. After they removed a rudimentary encampment, the protestors were in full compliance with UB’s Picketing and Assembling Policy. (It has been improperly removed from the UB Policy Library, as a revision is under consideration. Here’s a saved version.)
The same is not true for President Tripathi. He clearly violated this policy. As a Spectrum letter from UB Law faculty members indicates, he also violated the SUNY Rules for the Maintenance of Public Order, which stipulate that, “No student . . . or authorized visitor shall be subject to any limitation or penalty for expressing his or her views or for assembling with others for such purpose” (Section I.E.l).
Why this special treatment for a protest against Israel’s attack on Gaza? Is this an example of “viewpoint discrimination”—what people have come to call “the Palestine exception to free speech”? I suspect so. But even if President Tripathi had directed a police assault against a pro-Netanyahu, pro-genocide demonstration—hard to imagine, I know—he would be wrong for precisely the same reasons, and I would be making precisely the same argument.
In any case, this is a matter that goes beyond a policy revision. President Tripathi and his posse have wounded UB, and he needs to do everything he can to make it whole. He may already have forgotten about the assault on the young woman student, but her cries suggest to me that she will remember it for the rest of her life.
And the UB Faculty and its Senate need to ask themselves a difficult question: does a faculty that allows its Administration to conduct an illegal assault on its students and their free-speech rights deserve the respect of those students? Are we hapless bystanders, or the stewards of a great university and its best traditions?
Jim Holstun
Professor of English
