Letter to the Chancellor: UCLA Faculty Fights for Students' Free Speech
Over 40 UCLA faculty members have signed a letter addressed to Chancellor Gene Block that pens concern about restraint of free speech. The letter criticizes Friday's arrests of 14 Occupy UCLA protestors and says the administration lacked valid reasoning for the measures taken to dismantle the protest.
Protestors set up camp in UCLA's Wilson Plaza on Thursday, ignoring the repeated warnings by administrators of a ban against temporary structures on campus grounds. About 30 tents occupied the plaza. Additionally, the campus enforces a curfew from midnight to 6am. University police encompassed the camp around 5am on Friday and arrested 13 students and one alumnus who refused to leave the grounds.
All 14 protestors were arrested on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse. Protestors were cited and released about six hours later.
The Daily Bruin posted a snippet of the letter in an article published earlier this morning. "Their crime, formally, was to violate a campus policy against camping," the letter stated. "But in reality they were arrested for engaging in political speech at a time and in a manner that did not please the campus administration."
Tobias Higbie, associate professor of history and one of the drafters of the letter, commented on the actions of police. "To say that they're going to remove them because they have tents seems a very narrow interpretation of campus policy."
Friday's arrests come on the heels of the anti-big banks protest on November 9, which shut down the intersection between Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards. The LAPD arrested 11 protesters, all of whom were charged with suspicion of failure to disperse and were UCLA undergrads or grads.
The recent violent events at both UC Berkeley and UC Davis are the exact incidents that the letter to Chancellor Block seeks to avoid. University of California President Mark Yudof said in a statement that he is "appalled" by the recent use of police force at UC Berkeley and UC Davis and plans to gather all 10 chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest."
The Daily Bruin said today that as of Sunday, the letter had not formally been sent to Block and that signees were awaiting a response from administrators.
