After violent crackdown, UC Santa Cruz continues to trample student and faculty rights
/
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF MAY 31, HEAVILY ARMED POLICE IN RIOT GEAR SURROUNDED STUDENT PROTESTERS. (PHOTO: KYLE ALLEMAND VIA MONDOWEISS)
In a June 12 account in Mondoweiss, Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Santa Cruz detailed the brutal, nine-hour, multi-agency police assault against unarmed protesters on their campus.
Following up on this attack on their own students, staff, and faculty, the university issued campus bans barring dozens of students and workers from campus, cutting them off from classes, housing, and their livelihoods under the pretext that anyone who was arrested during the violent police raid on the peaceful campus encampment posed a threat to health and safety.
The only way students could request that this ban be lifted was to participate in a half-hour long proceeding that would also serve as their sole opportunity to contest pending student conduct charges. These meetings took place with little notice or opportunity to seek support or prepare a defense while students also faced criminal charges from their arrests.
The university relied on unauthorized tools--namely the publicly accessible scheduling website SignUpGenius--to facilitate this process, presumably because the university's existing tools could not handle the kangaroo court the university was attempting to implement. A monumental push by faculty, the union, and community members ensured that students did not face these meetings alone.
On June 10, Palestine Legal and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund wrote to UC Santa Cruz detailing the violations of students' civil and constitutional rights in this student conduct process and demanding that the charges be dropped. Despite the university's push to schedule these summary meetings with students without giving them time to adequately prepare, weeks later, many of the cases remain unresolved.