Drop All Charges and Disciplinary Proceedings Against Any Students, Staff, or Faculty in Connection with Protest Activity

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Dear Chancellor Frenk, EVCP Hunt, Vice Chancellor Monroe Gordon, Vice Chancellor Levine, Dean Jasmine Rush, Director Anthony Solana, and Director Michael Simidjian,

We write as faculty and staff at the University of California, Los Angeles, who are appalled by the school’s pursuit of hundreds of disciplinary charges against students, faculty, and staff in connection with their right to assemble, express beliefs and ideas, and speak out against genocide. About fifty student, faculty, and staff cases remain under active consideration, with some students still waiting on degrees that were to be conferred as long ago as nine months ago. Others are on probation, left with lingering uncertainty that chills both learning and speech.

The pursuit of these disciplinary processes is particularly galling as we watch the Trump administration frame protestors as “Hamas supporters,” and argue that they deserve incarceration “for years.” We are deeply concerned that UCLA’s disciplinary actions will make our students and faculty vulnerable to further politicized attacks. Indeed, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk’s announcement of an antisemitism task force based on reports which parrot this framing provides echoes of Trump’s playbook. This does not make anyone safer, including our Jewish community, and “is part of a larger assault on democracy in this country.”

The pursuit of cases against these students, faculty, and staff by UCLA administrators defies demands by a broad array of campus and community groups. The arrests in Spring 2024 were condemned by dozens of departments, research units, and faculty and staff organizations. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging their legality and labor groups representing graduate students, lecturers, and faculty filed unfair labor practice charges protesting the university’s failure to safeguard their  rights and bodies.

Instead, UCLA continues to follow a May 9, 2024 order from UC President Michael Drake, which asserts that all students, faculty, and staff arrested anywhere must be subject to discipline. The policy represents a waste of university resources, a stark change from UC policy, and a violation of a bedrock constitutional principle: the presumption of innocence. Moreover, discipline stemming from arrests reproduces the biases built into the American policing system documented by decades of research, including by UCLA faculty. Indeed, California Labor Code Section 432.7 bars employment decisions based on arrests.

The expansive disciplinary actions are even more chilling because they are accompanied by an increased willingness to use police to arrest protesters on the UCLA campus, the purchase and deployment of more military-grade weapons, and the enforcement of new restrictive time, place, and manner (TPM) rules. Through these actions targeting Palestine protesters, UCLA has created an inhospitable environment for all organizing and dissent on campus. 

As faculty representing a range of disciplines and multiple departments across campus, we understand our role is to teach our students to think critically, challenge injustice, and engage in civic life. As community members of an institution which claims the “creation, dissemination, preservation and application of knowledge for the betterment of our global society” as its mission, we find it reprehensible that we would punish students and faculty for embodying this mission. These community members are advocating against mass atrocities, and asking for local action in the form of disclosure of investments and divestment from weapons manufacturers.

Students have a right to protest on their own campus without the threat of police violence and disciplinary sanction. Faculty and staff have the right to both raise their voices and keep their students safe. Pursuing disciplinary charges for protest-related arrests and exercising rights protected by our state and federal constitutions is abhorrent. UCLA’s actions set a terrifying precedent, likely to be weaponized by the Trump administration, as they were last week at Columbia University.

We, the undersigned faculty who come from all walks of life and personal beliefs, demand as we did in the Spring that UCLA immediately drop all charges and disciplinary proceedings against any students, staff, or faculty in connection with protest activity. We ask that UCLA not share the names of arrestees with the Trump Administration. In this, we ask that UCLA honor the UC’s storied history of standing up to injustice by standing behind protestors who are currently upholding that legacy.