Tents. TENTS!?
Images by Cal Cary, Daily Progress
UVA’s choice of calling in police to surround and arrest peaceful protestors last weekend is another instance where UVA had the opportunity to do the right thing, and chose not to. Other reactions were possible both from the administration and the police, and these alternatives are not without precedent. When George Washington University asked the DC police to intervene, they declined, and the gathering stayed peaceful. At Brown, the administrators negotiated with the students in good faith to come to a resolution. UVA has offered the excuse that students having tents was the cause for the call to police, seemingly changing the exact rules around tent policy that morning. Either way, focusing so heavily on tents and tent policy has gotten us lost in the forest, with UVA unable to see the trees. Who truly cares about tents?!
The actions and statements from the University were disappointing. UVA administrators have claimed they had no choice - there is always a choice. Updates written in passive voice displaced agency from those making the decisions. When the violence ended, the announcement came through that the situation was “stable,” eliding the fact that it had already been stable before any official police intervention. UVA administrators and the officers who decided to respond to UVA’s call don’t get to congratulate themselves for quelling violence that they started. UVA says that they have to apply their rules equally, no matter the protest or group of people that are going to be affected. If this is the result of enforcing that policy, then reconsider those rules.
Faculty members, student organizations, and individuals have condemned the actions of the school, which uses a slogan of “great and good” to describe their policies and community goals. That’s just a slogan until it is practiced. As the official statement from the University Guides says, “A university that strives to be ‘great and good’ should never welcome a militarized police force and intentionally put its students in physical danger and induce mass trauma.” It’s not an overstatement to say that this was intentional. You may say you are upset, frightened, or saddened by the turn of events, but you cannot be shocked. You cannot pretend to think this wasn’t going to happen. Crackdowns on student protests have always made the news, Saturday being the anniversary of the Kent State Massacre was not lost on me or many others. UVA’s own May Days protest from 1970 were specific inspiration for the timing of this particular group. And of course, more recently, the protests at Columbia and in Richmond turned violent once the police showed up. Everyone has a camera in their pocket, we can see images of what really happened, how peaceful the students were before UVA made the choice to enforce the arbitrary decision that, on a rainy day, tents were a threat.
These students need to be let back into their dorms, have their overblown charges dropped, and be allowed to finish up finals. They are members of our community, Charlottesville residents, and need to be protected and valued.
Another problem is that I have spent about 400 words here not even touching on the matter at hand, the escalating violence and war in Gaza. Local violence has an ancillary effect of distracting and obfuscating from the actual issue protesters are clamoring to discuss. It is not Islamophobic or anti-Palestinian to mourn the victims of the October attacks and condemn Hamas. It is not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish to wish that the right-wing Netanyahu government stops attacking Palestinian civilians. We cannot forget that a stop to THAT violence is what these students were calling for when their school and police harmed them instead of protected them.