UCWGA Statement of Solidarity with Students, Faculty, and Staff's Nonviolent Protest and Peaceful Collective Action

The United Campus Workers of Georgia stand in solidarity with the students, faculty and staff organizing and leading nonviolent protest and other peaceful forms of collective action. All members of college communities in Georgia and nationally possess the right to express their views forthrightly on campus, within the bounds of safety, inclusivity, peace, and mutual respect. No one on a college campus should be a victim of violence, harassment, and othering due to their race or ethnicity, faith community membership, or views on American foreign policy. College campuses must be places where views and individuals can coexist.

We call on the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, as well as the Presidents of all 26 colleges and universities within the system, to join us in upholding these First Amendment rights.

Whatever one’s views on the subject, it is indisputable that concerns surrounding Gaza and the involvement of US institutions in the violence there are a legitimate point of political contention. We must not conflate objections to U.S. foreign policies supporting Israel, criticisms of Israel’s prime minister, and policies of Israel’s governing majority coalition, with antisemitism. Free people in a free nation have a right to criticize their nation’s public policies, as well as those of foreign countries their nation supports.

We condemn the deployment of police against student protesters. Intervention of city or state police, or other militarized forces, against campus protesters is a drastic measure that must be reserved for occasions of grave peril. The profound unwisdom of ignoring this principle is familiar to us from history: in 1968 three students were killed on the campus of South Carolina State University by state police during civil rights protest, and in 1970, the military response to student protests at Kent State University and Jackson State University resulted in the needless deaths of six more students. In the present moment we hope that the authorities will turn back from this dark path.

The playbook agreed upon by university administrations in recent days has become all too clear: first cite speculative “concerns for safety”, then suspend the students, then arrest them for criminal trespass. In many cases, however, the facts that have emerged confirm that the main instigators of threats to the safety of individuals have been police, and not protesters. And as administrators have eagerly applied “the rules”, they themselves have repeatedly violated the norms of due process for the suspension of students.

These responses represent not leadership on the part of university administrators, but its absence. The essence of free speech is that it is free— that it may, at times of deep feeling, overflow the levees of rules and regulations. Rather than rely on an outmoded rulebook, now is the moment for university administrators to open their eyes, minds and hearts to act creatively to de-escalate and to promote engagement and dialogue, and– above all– never to be the ones to initiate violence.

We insist that the students engaging in nonviolent protest who have been suspended from UGA and other campuses for their political activities be immediately reinstated, and all criminal charges dropped. To return to our main point: we call on the University System of Georgia, and the leaders of all System institutions to emphatically affirm the special responsibility of universities to foster free expression at this perilous moment.